[anti-censorship-team] Couple of questions about Snowflake

[Cecylia Bocovich]

On 2021-11-23 05:27, protonmailareliars via anti-censorship-team wrote:
> Hello all,
> First of all I really appreciate all the work that the anti-censorship team has been putting on building better censorship circumvention tools, and I hope snowflake becomes even more successful than obfs4.
>
> I have a few questions about current developments,
Hi! Thank you for running Snowflake and for reaching out!
> 1. What's the status on Snowflake Mobile development? Looks like the last commit was more than 1 year old: https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snowflake-mobile Is there any roadmap for getting it out?

Right now most of the mobile snowflake development is being done by 
Guardian Project: 
https://github.com/guardianproject/orbot/issues?q=is%3Aissue+is%3Aopen+snowflake 


It's currently available as an experimental setting to run a Snowflake 
proxy with Orbot.

> 2. Right now I assume the broker tends to hand out standalone-snowflake IPs first rather than web-ext-snowflake IPs (that's how it was working if I remember correctly, please correct me if I'm wrong). Is this still the case? I'm asking since I noticed a very impressive improvement when it comes to speed with snowflake and I would like to know if it was just due to me ending up with a standalone-snowflake or rather if issues with performance and speed got ironed out for web-ext-snowflakes.

I'm glad snowflake is performing well for you! It's a bit more 
complicated, we actually don't check to see if the snowflake is running 
as a standalone Go program or as a web extension when we hand it 
out---we  check to see what type of NAT it has and try to match 
snowflakes to clients with compatible NATs. There's more information 
here: 
https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snowflake/-/wikis/NAT-matching

We are still working on more performance improvements, but it's good to 
hear that the experience is good for some people.

> 3. The browser addon currently shows "Your snowflake has helped X users circumvent censorship in the last 24 hours". But this might be bad UX, it should be in the last week or even month since even though there are about ~2k snowflake users, the ratio of snowflakes/users is still big enough that a lot of users might be under the impression that they never helped any user/or that the extension isn't working correctly.
Thanks! That's a good suggestion, we're still working on improving the 
UX of the webextension so we'll take this into consideration. If you 
have more suggestions, you can file an issue in the webextension 
repository as well: 
https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snowflake-webext 

> 4. It might be a good idea to display the data in https://snowflake-broker.torproject.net.global.prod.fastly.net/metrics directly in https://metrics.torproject.org.

Snowflake metrics data is also collected and archived by CollecTor: 
https://metrics.torproject.org/collector.html#snowflake-stats

We're limited by capacity on which stats and metrics we can display. We 
hope by making at least the data freely available that community members 
can use them and build on them. Hopefully one day we'll have more 
visualizations available :)

Thanks,
Cecylia