[anti-censorship-team] Crash in Snowflake users since 2021-01-17

[Cecylia Bocovich]

I'm still pretty sure that the complete drop off of snowflake users has
to do with Tor Browser crashing when configured to use the default
snowflake bridge.

But, I did notice some other weird behaviour. The number of unrestricted
snowflake proxies dropped off at around the same time (and the number of
unknown proxies rose dramatically). This should not affect most users (I
have been able to bootstrap Tor fully using snowflake with the same
torrc configurations options that Tor Browser uses). However, it is
weird. I'm not sure yet of the cause, and it could be a coincidence that
these two events coincided.

See https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snowflake/-/issues/40030#note_2722730

On 2021-01-19 12:59 p.m., Cecylia Bocovich wrote:
> Hi David,
>
> I'm able to use snowflake on the command line, but not in Tor Browser.
> This seems to be due to this bug:
> https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/applications/tor-browser/-/issues/40282
>
> I'm a bit surprised that it took so long for the issue to be reflected
> in snowflake statistics, I also hadn't run across it myself until I
> tried to change my Tor Browser config after reading this email. Philipp
> and I are talking with the browser and core tor developers about a fix.
> I'm a little surprised we are only finding out about this now. But, it
> seems to not be an issue with Snowflake itself.
>
> Cecylia
>
> On 2021-01-18 11:30 p.m., David Fifield wrote:
>> I happened to look at the Snowflake bridge's bandwidth and user history
>> page, and the counts are close to zero since yesterday. I haven't
>> investigated it at all.
>>
>> https://metrics.torproject.org/rs.html#details/5481936581E23D2D178105D44DB6915AB06BFB7F
>>
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