A small thing you can do to easily help people in areas with censored internet, is to run a Snowflake, either in your browser as an extension or as a standalone.

This lets people use your internet as a proxy for tor. Their visible IP is the tor exit node, not yours. And they claim that you don't need to worry what sites they're visiting.

https://snowflake.torproject.org/

#tor #privacy #censorship

Snowflake

@LibreNyaa
Is it OK to run both?
@Kencf618033 Misread what you said so I deleted previous reply, if you're asking if it's okay to run it as a standalone and an extension, I think it would be redundant, because a single snowflake can support multiple connections at once
@LibreNyaa
Sorry I wasn't clear. Is it OK to run both a Tor relay and Snowflake? I haven't seen this addressed anywhere...

@Kencf618033 I think that would be fine, as long as you're running the snowflake over your regular connection and not the relay itself.

I don't know what happens if someone happens to both proxy through your snowflake *and* use your relay at the same time, but I don't think that should cause any issues?

At the very least, if it was a major issue, they'd probably have a warning somewhere, and enough people have probably done it that if there was it would've been caught by now.

@LibreNyaa
Yeah, I've been running Tor relays for years, and I'm still learning stuff. The documentation could be better... Snowflake on the other hand is easy-peasy.

@Kencf618033 @LibreNyaa As much as running snowflake and a relay under the same IP wouldn't be a problem per se, running a relay would inherently make your IP publicly listed as part of the Tor network and would get it automatically blocked by any adversary attempting to censor Tor, which defeats the main purpose of running a snowflake in the first place. I've seen this topic come up a few times in the forums, for instance:

https://forum.torproject.net/t/tor-relays-which-is-the-most-useful-relay-or-bridge/2642/5

In that case your snowflake wouldn't be reachable from places where it's needed the most. It would still get traffic from elsewhere though.

[tor-relays] Which is the most useful: relay or bridge

Hi, IMHO, this is not a good idea. Tor relay IPs are public, so they are likely to be blocked as part of censorship in some countries. This will greatly reduce the usefulness of the bridge running on the same IP. Running both at the same time on the same public IP does not add much value. If you are running this on your home network, I recommend running a bridge only. Now the problem is that your public IP is already known as a Tor node, so switching to running just a bridge at this point will...

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