{"id":"donating-bandwidth-censorship-relays-09628","slug":"donating-bandwidth-censorship-relays-09628","title":"Donating Bandwidth Without Becoming an Exit Node","description":"Donating bandwidth to help people bypass internet censorship doesn't mean turning your home connection into a risky exit node. Tools like Tor's Snowflake, Psiphon's Conduit, Lantern's Unbounded, MoaV, and the WEPN pod all act as entry relays, passing encrypted traffic to external servers. We break down how each tool works, why there's no native router package, and the real-world tradeoffs between volunteer safety and user reach.","excerpt":"Censorship-circumvention tools like Snowflake, Conduit, and Unbounded make your machine an entry relay, never an exit node.","pubDate":"2026-11-13T11:11:39.259Z","tags":["home-network","digital-privacy","internet-infrastructure","telecommunications","surveillance"],"heroImage":"https://files.myweirdprompts.com/covers/donating-bandwidth-censorship-relays-09628.png","podcastAudioUrl":"https://episodes.myweirdprompts.com/audio/donating-bandwidth-censorship-relays-09628.m4a","podcastDuration":"21:30","episodeNumber":6541,"transcript":"Corn: Set-and-forget altruism. That's the fantasy, anyway. Install a thing, walk away, and somewhere a teenager in Tehran loads a webpage because your router had nothing better to do.\n\nHerman: It's the SETI@home instinct, minus the screensaver.\n\nCorn: Daniel's prompt this week comes at it from the CENO side. He found CENO, eQualitie's peer-to-peer Android browser, and he wants the non-phone versions. If you want to donate bandwidth from a desktop, a router, or an always-on server, what do you actually run? He already suspects the answer lives around Snowflake, Psiphon's Conduit, and Lantern, and he's asking the two questions that matter after that. What does running one expose you to, and which are worth it?\n\nHerman: The short answer is the tools exist and they're more mature than people think. The long answer is that \"donating bandwidth\" is a slightly misleading frame for what you're actually doing, and that frame matters, because it's the difference between a quiet hobby and a legal question.\n\nCorn: Before we compare anything, one correction about CENO itself, because the category error is load-bearing.\n\nHerman: It is. CENO is a content-distribution tool. It's built on the Ouinet library and BitTorrent-style protocols, and what it does is cache web pages and re-share them peer to peer, so a page survives even when its origin is blocked or the network is degraded. It's been used in Russia, Belarus, Iran, Kazakhstan. But its own user manual says it plainly: it is not an anonymity tool. It's about access, not hiding.\n\nCorn: So the \"equivalent\" Daniel is looking for is not a cache at all.\n\nHerman: No. It's a relay. Software that forwards someone else's encrypted traffic from inside the censored network out to the open internet. Completely different security model, and a completely different set of questions for the person running it.\n\nCorn: Name the landscape, then.\n\nHerman: Three real programs plus two aggregators. Tor's Snowflake, which you can run as a browser add-on or a standalone proxy. Psiphon's Conduit, a command-line tool or Docker container for servers. Lantern's Action Mode, also called Unbounded, which runs from a browser tab. Then MoaV, which is a self-hosted stack that bundles a whole set of these, and WEPN, which ships an actual physical box for it.\n\nCorn: And the negative finding, because Daniel asked about desktop apps and routers.\n\nHerman: There's no dedicated desktop GUI for any of this, and there's no router-native package. Nothing you install on OpenWrt or OPNsense. Every path is a command line, a container, a browser extension, or purpose-built hardware. The closest thing to \"just install it and walk away\" is the Snowflake add-on. The closest thing to a router answer is WEPN's pod, and that's not router firmware, it's a separate appliance.\n\nCorn: One structural point before we get into mechanisms, because everything else hangs off it. Every one of these tools is deliberately an entry point, not an exit.\n\nHerman: That's the sentence I'd underline twice. Your machine passes traffic onward to someone else's servers, and the traffic leaves the internet from those servers, not from you. All of the horror stories people have heard, the door kicked in because your IP sent something terrible, those are stories about exits. None of these tools ask you to be one.\n\nCorn: So you leave it running and honestly the router just sleeps with one eye open, it never really rests.\n\nHerman: Corn, I'm sorry, Gloria. That's on me, I should have flagged it before he said it.\n\nCorn: Noted. Snowflake first, by mechanism.\n\nHerman: Snowflake disguises Tor traffic as ordinary WebRTC video-call traffic. A user in a censored country connects to a short-lived volunteer proxy, yours, and from there into the Tor network. The two deployment shapes are worth contrasting. The browser add-on is the low-effort route, good if you don't have a server, and honestly good if your machine sleeps a lot. The standalone proxy is what Tor recommends if you have a machine that's on around the clock, or a full-cone NAT, or a server with incoming UDP open across the ephemeral port range. That last part is the fussy bit, the ports.\n\nCorn: Corn's machine sleeps a lot. Corn's machine is mostly sleep with brief networking attached.\n\nHerman: Then the add-on is wasted on you and the server route isn't. You'd install it via Docker, or Debian, or FreeBSD, or an Ansible role, or compile it. The Docker image alone has over a million pulls, which tells you the server route is the popular one among people who do this seriously.\n\nCorn: Give me a real throughput number, not the product page's.\n\nHerman: A volunteer running two proxies through the MoaV stack posted their logs to the Tor forum in August. Roughly forty-seven thousand five hundred completed connections and about two hundred and sixty gigabytes relayed between them over around three months, peaking at twelve to thirteen gigabytes a day each. That's a home connection doing real work.\n\nCorn: Conduit next.\n\nHerman: Conduit is a transport relay, and the architecture is the thing. Traffic is encrypted on the user's device and it stays encrypted until it reaches Psiphon's servers. Your station can't see contents, destinations, or purpose. You're a pipe, and the pipe is opaque even to itself.\n\nCorn: Who decides which pipe gets used?\n\nHerman: A central broker. Psiphon's infrastructure matches users to stations based on availability and network conditions, and that matching is also what stops an adversary from enumerating or probing stations directly. You can't just scan for Conduit endpoints, because the endpoints don't decide anything.\n\nCorn: And the install.\n\nHerman: Turnkey, which surprised me. Conduit CLI 2.1.0 ships with an embedded configuration, so you run the start command and it just goes, no config file to write. Or you pull the Docker image, same deal. Sizing guidance from their deployment guide is around one hundred fifty to three hundred fifty concurrent users per single CPU and two gigabytes of RAM. A modest virtual private server can serve a small town's worth of readers.\n\nCorn: What's the catch, since there's always a catch.\n\nHerman: The reputation system. A brand-new station takes time to build trust with the broker, and the guide says outright that a fresh station may see no traffic for hours or even days. Which is a retention problem the project knows about. Imagine installing something to help people and then watching it do nothing for a week. Most volunteers would conclude it's broken and turn it off.\n\nCorn: Herman, you once installed a home automation hub and gave it four days before declaring the entire smart home industry a fraud.\n\nHerman: Three days, and the hub was bad, that's different. Though, fair point, I'm exactly the person that warning is written for. I want the dashboard and I want it moving.\n\nCorn: Lantern.\n\nHerman: Action Mode, and the extension is called Unbounded. You keep a browser tab open and your residential IP becomes part of what the repo describes as an ephemeral swarm of short-lived addresses. The key architectural difference is that traffic routes through Lantern's servers, which act as the final endpoint. Your IP never meets the destination site.\n\nCorn: That's a bigger deal than it sounds.\n\nHerman: It is, and there's a second one. Unbounded uses a safelist of approved sites, specifically so your connection can't be used for objectionable or illegal content. Snowflake has no such list. So Lantern is structurally the safest of the three for the volunteer, and the cost is reach. A user on Unbounded gets the safelist. A user on Snowflake gets the whole internet.\n\nCorn: Safety for the volunteer versus reach for the user, and nobody talks about that trade.\n\nHerman: Almost nobody. It's the most underdiscussed line in this whole space, and it's the actual answer to Daniel's exposure question for that tool. The abuse risk on Unbounded is bounded by policy, not by trust.\n\nCorn: The aggregators.\n\nHerman: MoaV, \"Mother of all VPNs,\" MIT-licensed, runs on anything from a Raspberry Pi 4 to Apple Silicon. It serves eighteen-plus circumvention protocols for your own use, and as an opt-in it donates bandwidth to Conduit, Snowflake, and Mahsa VPN at the same time. Defaults are sensible. Conduit capped at a hundred megabits and two hundred clients, Snowflake at five megabits and fifty.\n\nCorn: WEPN.\n\nHerman: WEPN ships a pod. Five by four by two inches, a little self-hosted home server that comes preconfigured to run Snowflake and Unbounded, invitation-only, backed by the Open Technology Fund. And their cost math is the honest part. About six watts of draw, roughly a dollar forty a month in electricity at California rates, and a hardcoded cap of three hundred megabytes a day.\n\nCorn: A dollar forty a month. The barrier to helping nine million people is less than a coffee. The industry couldn't build a subscription out of it, so it built a guilt trip out of it instead.\n\nHerman: There's also Hosted Conduit, the one option where you donate money rather than bandwidth. Psiphon runs the station in their own cloud on your subscription, and each pairing station supports up to ninety-nine simultaneous connections. Worth knowing it exists, because some people want to help and shouldn't be trusted near a terminal.\n\nCorn: So the direct answer to Daniel's first question. The desktop and server equivalents exist and are mature. The router equivalent doesn't, except as WEPN's separate box.\n\nHerman: Right. Now the harder half. What does running one actually expose you to.\n\nCorn: Start with the exit distinction, because that's where everyone's fear comes from.\n\nHerman: The Tor Project's own framing is that for the majority of operators in most countries, bridges and guard and middle relays are very low risk, and exits are the ones that present legal concerns. And the EFF, asked directly whether you should run an exit from home, says no. This is risky and not recommended. Both of those statements are about exits, and none of these tools make you one. WEPN puts it flatly for their pod: the traffic exits servers operated by others and will not be affiliated with you.\n\nCorn: But low risk is not no risk, and I don't want to be the podcast that said otherwise in November.\n\nGloria: Gloria, standards and practices. Corn, you cannot say a router quote sleeps with one eye open end quote. We received a complaint from a listener in Ohio and it is covered under policy four one seven, appliances and anthropomorphism. That is the fourth clarification today, so please, just say the router stays on.\n\nHerman: Agreed, and the sources are careful in exactly the right way. The EFF's legal FAQ says they're not aware of any individual sued, prosecuted, or convicted for running a Tor relay. But they note law enforcement has occasionally mistakenly investigated relay operators. Two cases they cite. Seattle, 2016, police raided a privacy activist over an exit relay. And Russia wrongly arrested Dmitry Bogatov, a math instructor and relay operator, later cleared. Both mistaken-identity cases, both about exits or public relays, and the EFF still won't promise safety. They can't, and they say so.\n\nCorn: Psiphon's side.\n\nHerman: Their FAQ says there's no law that makes Conduit itself illegal by default, but laws vary by country and some governments restrict or prohibit proxy and relay use. The text I've seen cuts off mid-sentence there, so I'd treat the exact wording as approximate. The candid part is their detectability answer. Casual observation won't distinguish Conduit from ordinary everyday traffic, but a well-resourced adversary analyzing traffic patterns over time could potentially identify it as circumvention traffic.\n\nCorn: That's the most honest sentence in the whole space. Not \"undetectable,\" just \"not worth detecting, mostly.\"\n\nHerman: And the library has had independent third-party audits by Cure53 with no critical or high-severity findings, which is more assurance than most volunteer software can point to.\n\nCorn: The residual risks for a non-exit operator, then. Take them one at a time.\n\nHerman: Visibility. A Conduit station can see the IP addresses of clients connecting through it, inherent to how relays work. On mobile networks with carrier-grade NAT, many of those users share one public address anyway, so it's noisy data, but it's not zero data. That cuts both ways, remember. The users you help can also see you.\n\nCorn: Corn's rule of household networks: anything that can see you eventually will.\n\nHerman: Second, flagging. A censor may mark your IP as circumvention infrastructure and block it, which affects your own access to services, particularly ones that aggressively block Tor-adjacent infrastructure. Banking apps and streaming services are the usual casualties. Third, your host or ISP may simply object to the traffic pattern, or to the purpose, and that's jurisdiction and contract, not technology.\n\nCorn: The abuse question Daniel raised. Is there a number?\n\nHerman: No published abuse-complaint rate for Conduit or Snowflake operators that I've seen anywhere. The qualitative claim, that non-exit relays rarely draw complaints, is well supported. A number is not. The one tool with structural protection is Lantern's safelist, and that's the trade we already named. Snowflake gives users the whole internet, and the whole internet includes the parts that generate complaints.\n\nCorn: So which are worth running? Daniel asked for a judgment, so give him one.\n\nHerman: My judgment is that the electricity is a rounding error, the software is audited in the best case and battle-tested in all of them, and the risk is low but not jurisdiction-independent. If you're in a country where relay software is restricted, the honest answer is that no FAQ can fix that, and running one anyway is a decision, not an oversight.\n\nCorn: And the part nobody says. What actually determines whether you're useful isn't enthusiasm. It's uptime. A Snowflake proxy that's on for twenty-three hours a day for a year beats a heroic Conduit station that gets switched off after four days of silence. The reputation systems reward the boring volunteer.\n\nHerman: The boring volunteer is the load-bearing volunteer. Which the Iran surge proved better than any argument.\n\nCorn: The January numbers.\n\nHerman: Conduit went from about a hundred thirty-two thousand stations to roughly five hundred forty-four thousand in ten days, starting in late January. On the thirtieth of that month Psiphon recorded more than nine and a half million unique daily users inside Iran, with roughly half of supported traffic carried on diaspora-hosted Conduit stations. Two hundred thousand diaspora members signed up in about two weeks. People who'd left the country stood up relays for the people still in it, and it carried a country's worth of reading.\n\nCorn: Nine and a half million readers, delivered by volunteers paying a dollar forty.\n\nHerman: And the Snowflake side moved too. Threefold increase in bridge users over that same week, and the broker's been averaging around a hundred forty-six thousand unique volunteer proxy IPs a day this year, about a third of those coming from Orbot's Kindness Mode on Android phones. Scale by forgetting your phone exists, which is apparently a viable strategy.\n\nCorn: It's the only kind of computing I trust. My phone does its best work precisely when I've stopped supervising it.\n\nHilbert: The box is a Fidonet node, a DigiBoard external, off the surplus shelf at Berenson's on Fourth. Paid forty dollars. Berenson had two and claimed the other one was spoken for, which it was, by him.\n\nCorn: Of course it was.\n\nHilbert: This was eighty-eight, eighty-nine. I was doing typesetting nights, and the node sat in the closet relaying mail packets for the callers. It had a little red counter on the front, seven-segment, that ticked up one every completed call. I called it the pigeon. Every other node had a number. Mine had a name, because it seemed rude not to, it was doing the work.\n\nHerman: The pigeon.\n\nHilbert: I checked that counter every morning before the kettle. Went up steady for two years, four, five calls a night, then a Tuesday in winter it stopped dead. Never found out why. The line was fine, the modem answered, nothing moved the number. I asked Berenson and he sold me a replacement cable I did not need, which I think was his answer to most questions.\n\nCorn: What happened to the pigeon?\n\nHilbert: Closet. Still plugged in. The counter reads nine thousand and something and I've stopped assuming I know what it's counting now. The number was the whole thing, Herman. You two spent an hour on risk and legality and you're right, but nobody runs one of these for the principle. They run it for the number going up. The ones that hide the number behind a command line are leaving volunteers on the table. The pigeon kept me going two years on a counter I could read without glasses.\n\nHerman: The MoaV people built a Grafana dashboard for exactly that. The volunteer who posted the two hundred sixty gigabyte figures built himself graphs first and asked his questions second.\n\nHilbert: There you are. A man who understands. The rest of them want you to take it on faith, and faith is a poor reason to keep a closet warm.\n\nCorn: The number on the display is a better place to leave this than any legal summary. Because the question was never really whether the tools work. Nine and a half million users in one country in one day answers that.\n\nHerman: The open questions are the human ones. The MoaV volunteer's traffic dropped to near zero after a routine proxy update and nobody in that thread worked out why. The fresh-station silence that runs volunteers off is unsolved. And the legal picture is jurisdiction by jurisdiction in a way no FAQ can finish covering.\n\nCorn: The misconception before we go, since we opened on it. People think running one of these is the same as running a Tor exit, that your front door is one bad packet away from a raid.\n\nHerman: Every tool we covered today is deliberately an entry point. The traffic exits on servers run by Tor, Psiphon, or Lantern, never on you. The Seattle raid and the Bogatov arrest were exit stories, and exit is a role none of these ask you to play.\n\nCorn: And the forward thought. The Iran surge was a crisis response, five hundred thousand stations stood up in ten days because a community decided to show up. Whether that scales without a crisis is the question the pigeon answers one counter at a time.\n\nHerman: Producer credit to Hilbert Flumingtop at the desk, as ever.\n\nCorn: For more along these lines, there's episode two fifty-six, Breaking the Blackout; episode sixteen, On Deepfakes, SynthID, And AI Watermarking; and episode thirty-five, The Privacy Gap. This has been My Weird Prompts. Reviews, the feed, all of it lives at my weird prompts dot com. We'll be back soon.","showNotes":"While eQualitie's CENO browser caches and shares web pages peer-to-peer, donating bandwidth from a desktop or server to help users bypass censorship requires running a relay. No native router firmware or dedicated desktop apps exist for this, so volunteers rely on browser extensions, containers, or purpose-built hardware like Tor's Snowflake, Psiphon's Conduit, Lantern's Unbounded, the self-hosted MoaV stack, or WEPN's physical pod. Crucially, all of these tools act as entry points rather than exit nodes, meaning traffic exits through the project's own servers instead of the volunteer's IP address. Even so, low risk is not zero risk, and the tools navigate different trade-offs—such as Lantern's Unbounded using an approved-site safelist to bound abuse risk, while Snowflake provides unrestricted internet access.","promptSanitized":"I came across CENO (spelled C-E-N-O, from eQualitie), a simple peer-to-peer Android browser that helps carry web content into censored regions. What I'd like to know is whether there are equivalents that aren't just phone apps. If you want to donate bandwidth to people behind censorship, from a desktop, a router, or an always-on server, what can you actually run? I'm thinking of things in the bandwidth-sharing and relay space, like Tor's Snowflake proxies and bridges, Psiphon's Conduit, Lantern and others. How secure are these options for the person who runs them: what exposure, legal risk or abuse risk comes with it? And for someone who wants to help spread a free internet, which ones are worth running?","transcriptUrl":"https://episodes.myweirdprompts.com/transcripts/donating-bandwidth-censorship-relays-09628.md","url":"https://myweirdprompts.com/episode/donating-bandwidth-censorship-relays-09628/","_links":{"self":"https://myweirdprompts.com/api/episodes/donating-bandwidth-censorship-relays-09628.json","html":"https://myweirdprompts.com/episode/donating-bandwidth-censorship-relays-09628/","audio":"https://episodes.myweirdprompts.com/audio/donating-bandwidth-censorship-relays-09628.m4a"}}