Submission timeline
2007–2026One slot for every year since HN launched. Height is that year's peak points; orange marks a 100+ point or 50+ comment breakout. Select a bar to open its strongest thread.
First comments on top threads
HN comment orderSnowflake uses domain fronting[1] for rendezvous. It is the digital equivalent of a spy having their secret meetings inside an unsuspecting friends house, and it always eventually it goes bad for that friend. The technique is heavily used by bad actors and is being blocked by default[2] by some cloud providers. AWS went as far as sending a nastygram to Signal[3] when they tried to roll it out on a wide basis for fear that countries like Iran and China…
This uses domain fronting, which both Google and Amazon forced Signal to stop using in 2018: https://signal.org/blog/looking-back-on-the-front/ Did cloud providers get more permissive since then? EDIT: Tor also got hit by some shutdowns in 2018 due to its use of domain fronting: https://blog.torproject.org/domain-fronting-critical-open-we... https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/applications/tor-launcher/... From the second link, looks like the plan is that Snowflake will annoy cloud providers less by only using the…
Snowflake seems to be a P2P mesh using webRTC to route tor traffic through browser tabs to assist users in countries where tor is blocked to connect to proxies in regions where it’s not. But i don’t know, I’m not an expert. That’s just what it looks like. Pretty cool. These kind of technologies are obviously the future not just for censorship circumvention, but for robust connectivity in the vein of the original intent of DARPANet and the Internet: communication…
The first top-level comment from each of the four biggest threads, in HN’s own order. Excerpts are shortened; open a comment for full context.
- Breakout years
- 2
- Total points
- 527
- Total comments
- 139
100+ points or 50+ comments
reference only — not used in Hall rules or ranking
reference only — not used in Hall rules or ranking
Every submission
| Date | Title as submitted | By | Points | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2019-07-16 | Snowflake: Turn the browser into a Tor bridge to help censored users | rendx | 2 | 0 |
| 2019-07-17 | Snowflake: A system to defeat internet censorship | ashitlerferad | 3 | 0 |
| 2019-07-21 | Snowflake: Help censored users access the Tor network by just instaling an addon | IKillBugsFaster | 1 | 0 |
| 2021-12-21 | Tor Snowflake ProxyFirst breakout | doomrobo | 197 | 84 |
| 2023-04-17 | Use Snowflake to Bypass Censorship | stargrave | 7 | 0 |
| 2023-07-30 | SnowflakeBest thread · Latest 20+ point return | bcg361 | 308 | 54 |
| 2025-03-13 | Free your connection – Get Snowflake | keepamovin | 3 | 1 |
| 2026-01-08 | Use Snowflake to give censorship the slip in places where Tor is blocked | doener | 3 | 0 |
| 2026-01-14 | Tor Snowflake | DyslexicAtheist | 3 | 0 |