Snowflake bridge metrics 2023 year in review
forum.torproject.org
This is a summary of usage of the Snowflake pluggable transport in 2023. For the previous year’s summary, see the Snowflake 2022 year in review. The primary Snowflake bridge, called snowflake-01, is supported by donations. In 2023, the Snowflake Daily Operations team paid about €4,820 in hosting expenses to keep the bridge running—with most of that going for bandwidth. In 2024, in addition to paying for bandwidth, we would like to buy new hardware for the bridge, which will enable it to support...

We can also break down users by country. The largest contingent of Snowflake users are in Iran, which has been the case since the Mahsa Amini protests in 2022 1. The graph shows also a large number of users apparently from the United States, but we believe that may be partly the result of geolocation errors, and many of them are actually from Iran. After Iran, the countries with the most Snowflake users are Russia and China.

  • MigratingtoLemmy@lemmy.world
    2·
    10 months ago

    Can someone help me understand how this might be a better idea than using an SSL-VPN such as OpenVPN/SoftEther and connecting to TOR from the VPN endpoint instead of using Snowflake?

    I’d like to use my own infrastructure and am also looking for comparisons/security analysis of Snowflake

    • Pantherina@feddit.deOP
      1·
      10 months ago

      The Proxy is for people that can not access the Tor network.

      For your own comfort/anonymity using a VPN is the better option.

      • MigratingtoLemmy@lemmy.world
        1·
        10 months ago

        If they could run their own SSL-VPNs and then access TOR through them, like I described, would there be a point in Snowflake?

        • Pantherina@feddit.deOP
          1·
          10 months ago

          Snowflake works for people that may not be able to get crypto or anonymous cash per letter. How would they pay the VPN?

          • MigratingtoLemmy@lemmy.world
            1·
            10 months ago

            Ah, I forgot that Monero in exchange for cash might not be an option here. Apologies, you’re right. With that, I’d also like a comparison of security between these two approaches

            • Pantherina@feddit.deOP
              1·
              10 months ago

              Snowflake is encrypted but I dont know with what protocol. TLS at least so at least as secure as the regular internet including all banking sites.

              Yeah, Snowflake being tied to this one use case also prevents abuse. Imagine having “free VPN ran on my Computer for the Iranians”, that would be abused like hell.