amr on frzn.dev

About Me

I'm a Canadian hacker with a strong interest in embedded systems, Linux & system administration, reverse engineering, and calculators. I've spent years building a collection of Texas Instruments calculators, which I will showcase here.

If you want to learn about what I do professionally, check out the What I Do page

I'm also the admin of this project (frzn.dev), and I have no idea what I'm doing most of the time.
Here's a picture of a donut:

Snowflake

Snowflake is a project run by The Tor Project that helps people in countries with censored/blocked internet access information freely. Often repressive regimes will block all Tor entry nodes, and they will also block Tor bridges that you can get directly from Tor. To combat this, the Snowflake proxy project was created. This allows users to access Tor without connecting directly to Tor infrastructure, instead connecting to volunteer-run proxies. You can run a proxy in a few different ways:

By installing the Snowflake browser add-on (Chrome, Firefox, Edge) and letting it run whenever you have your browser open

By running a Docker container containing the Snowflake proxy software (this is something frzn.dev does)

By leaving this page open and activating the widget below -- as long as you have this page open, you'll be helping people bypass censorship

I firmly believe in the right of all humans to access knowledge freely. Accurate news reports, information on government programs, general knowledge (such as from Wikipedia) -- these are all important facets of the internet that make it a force for net good. But when net access is filtered or censored, or legitimate news sites are replaced with propaganda without the knowledge of citizens reading it, this makes it a net evil. So I feel morally and ethically bound to do what I can to help people access the internet on their terms.
You don't need to worry about running a Snowflake proxy. Your internet connection is only used to help users connect to the Tor network, and all traffic is fully encrypted, meaning you cannot possibly see or know what they are viewing via your Snowflake. The only info you can see is whether a user is connected, and how many users have connected in the past 24 hours. It's nice to see that number and know someone out there is accessing the open internet using a tiny slice of my free internet connection. Of course, if you live somewhere with censored internet, don't run Snowflake -- the whole point is to help people avoid censorship. You should instead be taking advantage of Snowflake to access the internet freely!