On Mon, Jan 18, 2021 at 09:30:53PM -0700, David Fifield wrote:
I happened to look at the Snowflake bridge's bandwidth and user history page, and the counts are close to zero since yesterday. I haven't investigated it at all.
https://metrics.torproject.org/rs.html#details/5481936581E23D2D178105D44DB69...
The measured decrease in users occurred on 2021-01-17 and lasted 3–4 days. Since 2021-01-21 there has been a recovery almost to previous levels.
I had mentally attributed the drop to the tor bug that made default bridges not work in Tor Browser 10.5a7. https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/applications/tor-browser/-/issues/40282
But the timing doesn't line up. The measured decrease happened *before* the release of 10.5a7 on 2021-01-20. Tor Browser 10.5a8 was just released with a fix for tor-browser!40282, but the recovery in Snowflake user numbers happened before that. 10.5a7 2021-01-20 https://blog.torproject.org/new-release-tor-browser-105a7 10.5a8 2021-01-26 https://blog.torproject.org/new-release-tor-browser-105a8
At the team meeting today, cohosh suggested that the cause may not actually be tor-browser!40282, but rather an unexplained drop in the number of NAT-unrestricted proxies starting 2021-01-20: https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snowf... http://meetbot.debian.net/tor-meeting/2021/tor-meeting.2021-01-28-15.58.log....
16:03:24 <dcf1> I'm planning to start an email thread but I'll just mention here, Snowflake user numbers recovered even before the 10.5a8 release 16:03:31 <dcf1> https://metrics.torproject.org/rs.html#details/5481936581E23D2D178105D44DB69... 16:03:45 <cohosh> dcf1: yeah i noticed that too 16:04:03 <cohosh> i wonder if it had something to do with the weird broker metrics we were getting 16:04:04 <dcf1> so I don't know if people found their own workarounds, or if the majority of our users are not Tor Browser users, or what 16:04:23 <cohosh> whereall of our proxies suddenly didn't know what kind of NAT they had 16:05:34 <dcf1> that might be a better explanation, since the non-working 10.5a7 was released 2021-01-20 and the decrease in users happened *before* that 16:06:14 <cohosh> i rolled out a fix that should prevent that from happening again 16:06:56 <cohosh> but it's weird that it dropped to zero 16:07:05 <cohosh> the number of clients i mean
