[orborde]

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 domain-fronting channel to propagate routing info:

> sending Tor traffic directly through domain fronting (rather than using it only to distribute bridges and snowflakes) enables these platforms to claim that this technique is used by malware and therefore harmful to users, justifying shutting it down.

> Snowflake is a more sustainable way for us to use the expensive but high censorship-resistance features of domain fronting as a low bandwidth bootstrapping channel.

[jerheinze]

FWIW there's another method for bootstrapping Snowflake that uses Google's AMP cache: https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-...

[nirui]

If I'm allowed to guess, Tor Browser has Meek built in and it includes a few services hosted on Microsoft cloud. As far as I understand it, it can be quite expensive consider the total amount of traffic those Meek server must relay.

However, I wouldn't consider it "censorship-resistance".

From reading their Technical Overview document, I got the impression that they put a lot of faith on Domain Fronting which might not be a good thing

> ... the censor cannot block the broker without blocking all of Google, or all of Amazon, hence collateral freedom.

Yeah, true ... true ...