Snowflake Daily Operations August 2024 update

Snowflake Daily Operations collects donations to fund operation of the snowflake-01 bridge. This is the August 2024 update.

The number of users of the snowflake-01 bridge was about the same at the beginning and end of August 2024. On about 2024-08-20, there was a substantial decrease the undid the slow increase that had happened earlier in the month. It affected the snowflake-02 bridge as well. It is not known what may have been the cause.

It looks like all countries were affected roughly proportionally.

Another strange effect happened starting about 2024-08-13. Snowflake proxies normally report the IP address of their client to the Snowflake bridge, so that the bridge can manage country-level metrics as shown here. For unknown reasons, there started to appear at the bridge a significant number of connections without a client IP address attached. These show up in the graph as the “??” country code. The cause of this effect is also not known, but there is a discussion on the Tor anti-censorship team mailing list.