What's my incentive to run a snowflake node?
Snowflake
31–40 of 61 posts
Re: Snowflake
#32I have it installed and like seeing the number go up. NUMBER BIGGER = DOPAMINE!! I'm lucky to be born in Scandinavia, so there is really 0 internet censor, for now.
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Re: Snowflake
#33Earlier quoted context omitted.
You're just lucky YOU aren't affected yet. Try telling that norwegian poker player who is unable to wire legal poker earnings from a tournament abroad to his bank home. Or to any of the people who made money on crypto who they want to use as security for an appartment loan. Or to someone trying to wire gains from legal online casinos abroad. Or to someone trying to access a web site that the norwegian authorities do…
My 2c on your scenarios. >Try telling that norwegian poker player who is unable to wire legal poker earnings from a tournament abroad to his bank home. Probably blocked due to terror laws. If you can't Western Union money, there is a REALLY good reason. Wait until you hear about how we are a cashless society and our bank app for money transfer. That you need mobile ID and bank account to use :) Max tracking. But its…
I love how your arguments against anything you dislike but should be legal because of personal freedom (gambling, crypto) is simply a teenager ranting.
Re: Snowflake
#34Re: Snowflake
#35This is a relay for Tor users to be able to access Tor (when normal guard relays (first hop in a Tor circuit) are blocked), using domain fronting and webrtc.
The text is written quite confusingly, at least the German translation it served me by default. I was wondering how this could circumvent censorship, as the target needs to also support webrtc so there's no way to access any http(s) website via this in-browser proxy, this still requires another server to accept the webrtc connection and forward your traffic, but the point (which the article doesn't mention) is to be able to connect to this other server indirectly.
It even goes so far as to claim that you don't need any software to visit censored websites:
> Im Gegensatz zu VPNs musst du keine separate Anwendung installieren, um dich mit einem Snowflake-Proxy zu verbinden und die Zensur zu umgehen.
Except you do. Without Tor client, this snowflake proxy is useless. Clicking through to the technical details (link marked with a warning "this content is in English"):
> 1. User in the filtered region wishes to access the free and open internet. They open Tor Browser, selecting snowflake as the Pluggable Transport.
The article said "contrary to VPNs, you don't need to install separate software to circumvent censorship" and the technical overview says the literal opposite: you need to install a Tor client to make use of a snowflake proxy.
Re: Snowflake
#36Re: Snowflake
#37Re: Snowflake
#38Re: Snowflake
#39What's my incentive to run a snowflake node?
What’s the incentive to donate to charity? There’s no risk to you because it’s not an exit node.
Re: Snowflake
#40Snowflake uses domain fronting[1] for rendezvous. It is the digital equivalent of a spy having their secret meetings inside an unsuspecting friends house, and it always eventually it goes bad for that friend. The technique is heavily used by bad actors and is being blocked by default[2] by some cloud providers. AWS went as far as sending a nastygram to Signal[3] when they tried to roll it out on a wide basis for fear…
I ran a Snowflake server at home for a while. I shut it off because it used too much CPU for my liking, but I haven't seen any kind of negative impact whatsoever.
Domain fronting is not exactly a holy grail. Signal and Tor ran into issues when cloud providers blocked domain fronting (or rather, stopped supporting a feature that never was meant to work anyway) but I don't think that was intended to interrupt anything. "Load balancers are written to make sure they serve the correct certificates for their configured domains" isn't exactly a problematic feature on its own.
Domain fronting is trivial, all you need is a call to openssl and an nginx server. It's also trivial to bust, all you need to do is actually validate the certificate. These certificates are either self signed or are part of a random CA chain that no real system would ever trust.
It's not "a spy having their secret meetings inside an unsuspecting friend's house". It's someone putting a sign saying "white house, home of the American president, do not enter" in front of a random warehouse in Brazil.
Software that falls for domain fronting either doesn't care about the certificates and their validity, or is buggy and should get patched. Some of that software will probably be security software, but if bad actors manage to trick your security software into trusting a few readable strings, domain fronting is probably the least of your worries. I can't imagine what kind of shitty security software would possibly fall for that.