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Joined 2 months ago
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Cake day: December 26th, 2024

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  • You are completely right. That was worded poorly and a few users have thankfully pointed that out. The answer, for most people, is yes. But that depends entirely on your threat model.

    The traffic to your Snowflake proxy isn’t necessarily from people in ‘adversarial countries’. A Snowflake proxy is a type of bridge, so just about anyone can use it. You can use a Snowflake bridge, if you want. However, it is strongly encouraged to save bridges (including Snowflakes) to people who need them.

    So, for most people, it is generally safe to run Snowflake proxies. Theoretically, your ISP will be able to know that there are connections being made there, but, to them, it will look like you’re calling someone on, say, Zoom since it uses WebRTC technology. They can’t see the data, though since everything is encrypted (check the Snowflake docs and Tor Brower’s for further reference). You probably won’t get in any trouble for that.

    Historically, as far as we know, there haven’t been any cases of people getting in legal trouble for running entry relays, middle relays, or bridges. There have a been a few cases of people running exit nodes and getting in trouble with law enforcement, but none of them have been arrested or prosecuted so far.

    If you know of any, let me know.


  • Thank you for pointing that out. That was worded pretty badly. I corrected it in the post.

    For further clarification:

    The person who is connecting to your Snowflake bridge is connecting to it in a p2p like connection. So, the person does know what your IP address is, and your ISP also knows that the person’s IP address is – the one that is connecting to your bridge.

    However, to both of your ISPs, it will look like both of you are using some kind of video conferencing software, such as Zoom due to Snowflake using WebRTC technology, making your traffic inconspicuous and obfuscating to both of your ISPs what’s actually going on.

    To most people, that is not something of concern. But, ultimately, that comes down to your threat model. Historically, there haven’t any cases of people running bridges or entry and middle relays and getting in trouble with law enforcement.

    So, will you get in any trouble for running a Snowflake bridge? The answer is quite probably no.

    For clarification, you’re not acting as an exit node if you’re running a snowflake proxy. Please, check Tor’s documentation and Snowflake’s documentation.