Snowflake Tor Proxy

[jonashartmann]

One click installation to run snowflake tor proxy on a cloudron server.

Snowflake is a system to defeat internet censorship. People who are censored can use Snowflake to access the internet. Their connection goes through Snowflake proxies, which are run by volunteers.

https://snowflake.torproject.org

[ruihildt]

Here are the instructions for server install: https://community.torproject.org/relay/setup/snowflake/standalone/

[jonashartmann]

@ruihildt it would be very nice if there is an app on cloudron

[LoudLemur]

@jonashartmann

This is a great suggestion. On a related topic, there is an application request for an uncensored search engine, Gigasearch, here:

https://forum.cloudron.io/topic/7581/gigablast-on-cloudron-search-engine

There is also one for YaCy, another search engine.

[RoboMod]

+1

There is already a Docker packaged version mentioned on that page.

[nebulon]

Since this is very easy to install, I have put a very basic initial package at https://git.cloudron.io/cloudron/snowflake-app

Unfortunately there is really not a lot of information out there on how this works as well as this does not expose any information nor seem to have a webinterface. I expected something basic there at least, but without that, I am not sure if it makes any sense to pursue this. If anyone has more info on how to have some very basic webinterface with it, I am happy to collaborate to get this out.

[robi]

@nebulon it's headless like tor.
Either on or off and you point your browser at it.

You can make it more like the browser plugin works, which reports some basic stats as a simple web interface.

See https://community.torproject.org/relay/setup/snowflake/browser/

Take a look at the plugin and how it retrieves status data from the proxy and then generate/copy the same html page.

[nebulon]

Right some basic reporting like the browser plugin would be useful. So if anyone is interested enough to get this app, please add such a webstat page and we can see how to get it published then.

[ruihildt]

@robi With the standalone version, my understanding is that you don't need to point your browser to it?

I think even without the stats, it could be interesting to publish this app to make it possile for any of us to help against censorship.

There's a way to make the logs more verbose, if you want to check that soething is happening:

You can get more verbose output by running the proxy with -verbose, if you are using docker you can do:

docker run --network host thetorproject/snowflake-proxy:latest -verbose

[robi]

@ruihildt Sure, you can run it without using it yourself and support the network.

And yes, we can start with a simple page that simply says to manage this app, log in to the dashboard. Maybe add an 'app is running' JS check.