Tor Browser adds Snowflake anti-censorship feature, V2 onion warnings

The Tor Project has released Tor Browser 10.5 with V2 onion URL deprecation warnings, a redesigned Tor connection experience, and an improved anti-censorship feature.

Last year, the Tor Project announced that they were deprecating the use of V2 onion URLs in favor of the newer V3 URLs to provide more robust cryptography, longer URLs to prevent brute-forcing of hidden sites, and cleaner code.

As part of this announcement, Tor warned that V2 URLs would be deprecated using the following timeline:

September 15th, 2020: 0.4.4.x: Tor will start warning onion service operators and clients that v2 is deprecated and will be obsolete in version 0.4.6. July 15th, 2021: 0.4.6.x: Tor will no longer support v2 and support will be removed from the code base. October 15th, 2021: We will release new Tor client stable versions for all supported series that will disable v2.

To warn Tor website admins of the upcoming changes, the Tor Browser will now display a message when visiting version 2 Onion sites that their URLs would soon be deprecated, and the site will soon be unreachable unless they upgrade to version 3.

For website administrators of Tor sites using V2 URLs, you should read the Tor V2 Onion Services Deprecation FAQ for more information on how to upgrade to V3 URLs.

Snowflake added as a Tor bridge

The Tor Browser allows users to utilize 'Bridges' to bypass government or ISP censorship in various countries.

Bridges are Tor relays operated by volunteers that are not added to the public Tor directory. Users can then request a bridge to use in the Tor browser to bypass censorship in their country.

Tor users can now configure the Bridges features to utilize the SnowFlake proxy network to bypass censorship.

Snowflake is a pluggable transport that allows users to create Tor Bridges that bypass censorship easily. Unlike other Tor Bridges, Snowflake proxies can be made by simply installing a Chrome or Firefox extension, allowing a much larger audience to help people get access to the Internet under government censorship.

"Snowflake uses the highly effective domain fronting technique to make a connection to one of the thousands of snowflake proxies run by volunteers. These proxies are lightweight, ephemeral, and easy to run, allowing us to scale Snowflake more easily than previous techniques," explains Tor's censorship FAQ.

"For censored users, if your Snowflake proxy gets blocked, the broker will find a new proxy for you, automatically."

If you want to try out these features, simply use the Tor Browser autoupdate feature to upgrade to version 10.5 or download it directly from the Tor Browser download page.