How to use Tor and Snowflake to circumvent censorship
Jump all the walls
How does Tor browser work?
In its simplest form, Tor uses a set of nodes — called relays — to mask your identity when you try to visit a website.
These relays help keep your dataprivatefrom websites and your Internet Service Provider (ISP). You can see an example of how the Tor network uses nodes while visiting DuckDuckGo in the screengrab below.
By default, this browser doesn’t store your browsing history, and cookies are limited to only one session. So as soon as you close your browser window, your preferences for a website are reset.
With Tor, you can also use onion services sites, which hides the site’s identity from ISPs, to get information. You can browse through this list to check which services have their own .onion websites.
You can download the Tor browser fromhere.
So where do Tor Bridges come in?
While Tor relays help you hide your traces on the internet, they are publicly listed. So a government could potentially block these IP addresses to stop you from having free access to certain websites.
In this case, you can enable Tor Bridges, and they can help you connect to other relays in the network, and in turn, to censored websites.
Here’s how you can enable Bridges:
How does Snowflake works?
Snowflake is a censorship circumvention tool that uses WebRTC — a commonly used communication protocol in browsers — to connect to proxies, and help you access websites.
Volunteers can run a Snowflake extension in their Chrome and Firefox browsers, and they’ll act as ephemeral proxy instances. You can read about it in detailhere, and look at the diagram below to understand the data flow.
When you use Snowflake, and if one proxy goes down, it automatically connects you to another one, so you don’t have to mess with settings repeatedly.
If you’re a volunteer in a country where the internet is not censored, you can run a Snowflake instance to help others. The first step is to download an extension forChrome or Firefox from here.
Once you’ve downloaded the extension, it’ll automatically run a Snowflake proxy instance for you. You can disable it any time you want by clicking on the extension and turning off theEnabletoggle.
All in all, using Tor and setting up bridges might be somewhat technically challenging, it provides you with a bunch of options in case one doesn’t work. So you don’t have to search for more tools to access information.
Story byIvan Mehta
Ivan covers Big Tech, India, policy, AI, security, platforms, and apps for TNW. That’s one heck of a mixed bag. He likes to say “Bleh.“Ivan covers Big Tech, India, policy, AI, security, platforms, and apps for TNW. That’s one heck of a mixed bag. He likes to say “Bleh.”
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