Talk:Snowflake (software)

Did you know nomination

The following is an archived discussion of the DYK nomination of the article below. Please do not modify this page. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as this nomination's talk page, the article's talk page or Wikipedia talk:Did you know), unless there is consensus to re-open the discussion at this page. No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was: promoted by SL93 (talk) 16:09, 5 November 2022 (UTC)

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• Article history

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• ... that you can keep a snowflake in a browser tab? Source: https://www.zdnet.com/article/tor-snowflake-turns-your-browser-into-a-proxy-for-users-in-censored-countries/ (per Wikipedia:Reliable sources/Perennial sources, "ZDNet is considered generally reliable for technology-related articles.")
  • Reviewed: 3Y0J Bouvet Island DXpedition
  • Comment: Other hook suggestions welcome. This is censorship-related software, so warning for political content, mostly Russia- and Iran-related.

Created by HLHJ (talk). Self-nominated at 23:42, 15 October 2022 (UTC).

•  Reviewing... Howard the Duck (talk) 02:38, 24 October 2022 (UTC)
  • I've withdrew my nomination that caused this QPQ review, so I won't be proceeding with reviewing this. Howard the Duck (talk) 12:35, 31 October 2022 (UTC)

General: Article is new enough and long enough
New enough: Long enough:

Policy compliance:

• Adequate sourcing: - Possible issue, see below
• Neutral:
• Free of copyright violations, plagiarism, and close paraphrasing:

Hook: Hook has been verified by provided inline citation
Cited: Interesting:

QPQ: Done.

Overall: The hook itself is interesting enough that it made me want to click on it to review it, so I think it should be okay; the alternatives I could concieve of were some statements about censorship but none of them felt as "hooky" as this one. The only concern I have with the article is that "it can relay any sort of content, some of its uses are illegal in any country." and "In countries where Tor itself is illegal, knowingly operating a Snowflake node may be illegal." are unsourced, and I know per WP:NOLEGAL it's not considered legal advice and it's entirely possible I'm just being a stickler here, but if an article is going to advise on the potential illegality of a thing, I think that's definitely the kind of statement that should be sourced. Would it be possible to add sources for that, or adjust or remove those statements? As far as I can tell, that's the only thing that would be cause for the essay-like template on the article. As far as I am aware that tag isn't a barrier to proceeding, as Wikipedia:Did you know/Reviewing guide#Review the article(s) says that templates listed at Wikipedia:Template index/Disputes are the ones that would cause an issue, and essay-like doesn't appear to be listed there. - Aoidh (talk) 04:15, 1 November 2022 (UTC)

Thank you, Aoidh! I've cited the rest of it, but still want to update some of the surrounding articles and try to find some 3rd-party sources for a bit more info. I originally wrote the "how it works" passage without sources (which did make it flow better), and the template was added before I went back and found and inserted refs. I'll ping MaxnaCarta and ask them, as they added it. HLHJ (talk) 03:03, 5 November 2022 (UTC)

Those changes allay any concerns I have about the sourcing in the article as far as DYK requirements go, and everything else checks out. - Aoidh (talk) 03:12, 5 November 2022 (UTC)

Traffic in Iran

Tor's usage graphs filtered for Iranian origin show Meek traffic rising drastically, then crashing and being partly replaced by Snowflake traffic, which rapidly crashes. From the bug reports, it seems the devs accidentally took down the server relaying Meek, and lost the private encryption keys; it's now back up with new keys.[1] The crash in Snowflake use was the Iranian government sucessfully doing TLS handshake fingerprinting; Snowflake used a very weird, distinctive order in which to list part of the handshake. This is also fixed in the new version.[2] Use in Iran has not recovered; perhaps Snowflaake hosts don't have the new version, and Iranians don't have the new version of Tor Browser with the new Meek public keys. I have not been able to find any third-party coverage of this, odd given all the news on Iran; if anyone reading this knows of such sources, please mention or add them! HLHJ (talk) 16:22, 8 November 2022 (UTC)

Snowflake is not Tor

It's merely a tool to access Tor where it is blocked. So I think we need to remove the second and the third paragraphs, and make edits across the page. In theory Snowflake can be used with no conjunction with Tor at all. Describing Tor when we're supposed to talk about Snowflake is confusing. WofWca (talk) 18:36, 14 November 2022 (UTC)

WofWca, do you have any sources describing that use? I got the impression it was just a Tor pluggable transport. Thanks for the info! HLHJ (talk) 22:31, 27 November 2022 (UTC)

Sorry, I didn't mean that it is used right now for anything other than accessing Tor. I'm saying that it takes minor adjustments to use it as a general censorship circumvention tool. So what I'm saying is that Tor can exist without Snowflake and Snowflake can exist without Tor. WofWca (talk) 19:53, 4 December 2022 (UTC)

See the "Future work" the draft of the research paper:

> A natural extension of Snowflake would be to have it access systems other than Tor—ordinary VPNs, for example WofWca (talk) 19:08, 5 October 2023 (UTC)

After reading the article a second time, I think that everything in the "Function" section up to the "Technical" sub-section is describing Tor instead of describing Snowflake. I think we don't need to mention onion routing at all. Again, Snowflake is simply about how to get access to Tor, and that doesn't have much to do with onion routing. I wrote the "Function" section in the Russian Wikipedia and I think it describes it pretty well. WofWca (talk) 19:16, 27 July 2024 (UTC)

I cleaned up a bit, but I think there is still too much introduction to what is proxying and what is Tor. I feel like mentioning that "Tor can be used to access blocked sites, so direct access to Tor is usually also blocked, this is where Snowflake comes in" is good enough. The rest is the job for the Tor article.

Please let me know if you agree, because I feel bad removing so much of someone else's work. WofWca (talk) 09:56, 28 July 2024 (UTC)

A grammatical issue with one of the sentences in the article

Hi.

While reading the article, I came across this sentence in the Function section:

"The traffic looks like ordinary peer-to-peer traffic, such as is used by many videoconferencing apps."

I understand its meaning, but think it's grammatically wrong; IMO, the phrase "such as" must be followed by a noun, not the verb be, or something similar to a passive sentence!

I'm really curious, and I would appreciate anybody who can give me more info. Javad78905 (talk) 02:24, 10 February 2023 (UTC)

@Javad78905: See 1151046440, do you think it's correct now? Shinohara Chihiro (talk) 15:39, 21 April 2023 (UTC)

Yes, you actually corrected it with your edit. Now it looks like:

"The traffic looks like ordinary peer-to-peer traffic, such as that used by many videoconferencing apps."

After "such as", we have the word "that", which functions as a noun. Then it's followed by a relative clause (shown in bold). The relative clause might begin like "which is used by ...", but "which is" is omitted from the beginning. So the grammer is now OK. Javad78905 (talk) 14:43, 27 April 2023 (UTC)

A Persian version of the Snowflake article

Hello guys!

I've just published this article (Snowflake) in Persian, and I'm really excited about that! Translated into Persian with love by Javad Bayat (me), a student majoring in computer science at Isfahan's Mohajer university.

Sincerely, this is the very first Wikipedia page I've ever translated fluently and published. So, if you have any suggestions/issues about the translated article, please don't hesitate to let me know, either by emailing me at javad78905@gmail.com, or by contacting me via Telegram at @javad0bayat. Javad78905 (talk) 09:24, 20 March 2023 (UTC)

Why dont you enclose any wikipedia page links to your article?

There's seems to have 2 draft pages on fawiki: fa:کاربر:Javad78905/دانه برف (نرم‌افزار) and fa:پیش‌نویس:دانه برف (نرم‌افزار). Shinohara Chihiro (talk) 15:45, 21 April 2023 (UTC)

A research paper from Snowflake authors

Snowflake authors have published a draft of a research paper titled "Snowflake, a censorship circumvention system using temporary WebRTC proxies". It can serve as a great source. WofWca (talk) 19:06, 5 October 2023 (UTC)

WofWca, that's really useful, it gives me a much better idea of how it works. I'll have a go at fixing the article to be less Tor-specific. The diagram in it is also clearer to me than the one we have in the article; would it be possible to upload it to Wikimeida Commons so we can use it here? If the article is published under CC-BY or CC-BY-SA or CC0, anyone could upload it under that licence, but if it isn't licensed the artist (assuming they hold the copyright) would need to be the one to upload it. HLHJ (talk) 03:08, 10 March 2024 (UTC)

BTW they updated the paper where they also updated the picture with STUN servers and indirect rendezvous, you can see the freshest build here, and the new diagram can be found here.

I'm not sure about the license though. I'll ask them on that forum thread.

I've also found another diagram that is under CC BY, arguably it's more strict and thorough, though doesn't include STUN servers. WofWca (talk) 07:56, 10 March 2024 (UTC)

Thank you for asking about the image, WofWca. I think that what makes that diagram look clearer to me is the way it puts the broker server off to the side and keeps the main traffic path in a straight line. This isn't a critique of the academic paper, but an encyclopedia article has a very different audience: almost anyone who might want to know what this Snowflake thing is. So that simple, top-level-overview diagram is ideal to start with. The Bamsoftware-hosted version seems to me not as encyclopedic as the older version you linked to in the first link in this section; the paragraph references to the paper won't work in this Wikipedia article, and the STUN servers are a complication which isn't essential to getting the basic idea. The MDPI article is nice to know about, and appropriately-licensed, but none of the images seem quite high-level enough (unless someone adds a LOT of detail to the article ). I have been re-drafting the text, and will post when I have some time to make sure it's solid. HLHJ (talk) 00:38, 14 March 2024 (UTC)

> different audience

I guess I agree. Though those who want to go deeper will definitely wonder about STUN, then they'll need a more detailed diagram. WofWca (talk) 19:23, 16 April 2024 (UTC)

On the minor-comments front, I'm surprised that alphabetical order of self-disclosure lists-of-capabilities isn't an RfC. HLHJ (talk) 02:22, 14 March 2024 (UTC)

Sorry, what are you referring to? WofWca (talk) 19:24, 16 April 2024 (UTC)

So, they released the diagram to public domain!

Plus, the paper has been finalized! WofWca (talk) 19:19, 16 April 2024 (UTC)

I uploaded the diagram WofWca (talk) 16:00, 23 July 2024 (UTC)

Is it about just the extension?

Seems like the Wikidata entry has the "browser extension" tag, and it says "this article is about the browser extension". But the extension is just the "proxy" part of the Snowflake system. The Snowflake client is also a part of Snowflake, and is embedded into Orbot and Tor Browser. Do we dedicate the Wikidata entry and this article to the browser extension, or the system in general? I'm in favor of the latter. In that case, how can we properly tag the "extension" tag in Wikidata? WofWca (talk) 13:03, 23 July 2024 (UTC)

Un-revert changes mistakenly reverted due to "apparent citespam"

Hey! I did some work on the article, but it all was unfortunately reverted due to "apparent citespam", see yesterday's edit by @MrOllie. This was discussed on my user's page: User talk:WofWca#July 2024. So far there is no response from the author of the "revert" changes, so I'm starting a discussion as was suggested by them.

The article is about Snowflake, which is censorship circumvention software developed by The Tor Project.

The provided reason for the revert is Wikipedia:Spam#Citation spam, and I strongly disagree that my edits qualify as such. FYI I also cited the same source on other relevant pages (see my recent contributions) and I do not see how the citations are not appropriate there.

> [Citation spam] should not be confused with legitimate good-faith additions intended to verify article content and help build the encyclopedia

As I said on my user discussion, I am not affiliated with the authors of the sources that I am referencing, which was also confirmed by @Tga.D on my user talk page. I did contribute to the Snowflake project (on my own behalf, for free), but this is pretty much the only kind of interaction that I've been having with the authors of the sources. That said, I believe I can only qualify as Subject-matter expert from Wikipedia:Conflict of interest#What is conflict of interest?, and therefore this should not actually be qualified as COI.

"Conflict of interest" aside, the citations are not the only thing that I did.

My suggested resolution is to simply revert the revert. If for whatever reason you believe that it is not appropriate to cite a paper whose main subject is the subject of the article, then we can settle on reverting the revert, but removing the citations.

I will also start the same discussion on the other affected pages if needed.

Thanks for paying attention!

WofWca (talk) 20:34, 1 August 2024 (UTC)

 Not done: GitHub and a paper published by whatever bamsoftware.com is are not reliable sources. Please find independent reliable, secondary sources to support your claims. C F A 💬 19:43, 9 August 2024 (UTC)

1. Wikipedia:"Primary" does not mean "bad"

2. The Snowflake paper is published by USENIX, and bamsoftware is just where the duplicate of the paper is hosted.

3. David Fifield's thesis is cited 34 times.

4. The GitHub citation only supports the origin and reasoning behind the name "Snowflake", and it links to the original repository, archived in 2016. Any secondary source that supports the claim about the origin of the name is just gonna reference the same GitHub repo or the author's words.

Again, quoting Wikipedia:"Primary" does not mean "bad":

> Sometimes, a primary source is even the best possible source, such as when you are supporting a direct quotation. WofWca (talk) 21:11, 9 August 2024 (UTC)

Also I shall remind that the primary point of this discussion is "citespam". WofWca (talk) 22:52, 9 August 2024 (UTC)