December 29, 2025
Proxy wars, hotter comments
Tor staying ahead of censors in 2025
Tor fights blackouts; commenters ask about China, sanctions, and silence on EU crackdowns
TLDR: Tor upgraded Snowflake and debuted Conjure to keep people online amid Iran blackouts and Russian blocks. Comments erupt over China’s throttling, sanctions compliance, and EU crackdowns, mixing praise for Conjure with legal worries and calls to widen the fight—showing censorship isn’t just “over there.”
In the Tor post, the team says 2025 was a stress test: Iran’s blackout, Russia’s evolving blocks, and a full‑court press to keep people connected. They tuned domain‑fronting (making traffic look like normal websites), upgraded Snowflake, and introduced Conjure, a new way to hide Tor access inside unused internet space. Cool tech, big stakes—but the comments are where it gets spicy.
The thread instantly pivots to China: mmsc wants to know if everything leaving China is still throttled to a crawl and what people actually use to get out. Then the legal crowd barges in: keepamovin wonders if Tor needs an OFAC license—the U.S. office that enforces sanctions—to serve users in Iran and Russia, and whether U.S. funding opens special doors. On the cheer squad, Fiveplus calls Conjure “huge,” noting academics dreamed of this for years, while skeptics grumble that getting ISPs to cooperate is the real boss fight.
And the culture war kicks off: photios slams the blog for ignoring EU “chat control,” age checks, and arrests over posts—accusing Tor of looking away from Western censorship. Meanwhile, comedy breaks through the doomscroll: iwontberude drops “Grape used to be a fine word,” a perfect meme for how dumb filters snare harmless speech. It’s privacy tech meets popcorn‑worthy drama.
Key Points
- •Tor Project highlights intensified censorship in Iran and evolving tactics in Russia in 2025.
- •An in-region vantage-point system in Iran enabled real-time monitoring and domain-fronting evaluations.
- •Automated tools tested accessibility of Snowflake broker and Moat across configurations; results were aggregated by a log collector.
- •Snowflake received updates: Manifest V3 upgrade, improved NAT logic, enhanced proxy metrics, and a new staging server for stress testing.
- •Conjure, a pluggable transport, was deployed to leverage unused ISP address space, countering proxy-listing-based IP blocking.