Hello All!
I've put a small set of people in CC that are involved in this change for now
so we can make good progress forward! (and not stall)
We are soon (some low values of "soon" hopefully) to reject all non supported
relays, by tor version, from the network:
https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/31549
At this very point in time, this represents in total ~12.72% of the total
bandwidth weight thus roughly 1/8th of the network will be removed (in terms
of bandwidth capability).
In terms of "relay volume", this change will remove about ~1/7th of the total
network or 923/6349.
Roger already emailed hundred(s?) of operators to ask them to upgrade and many
have responded but as you can see, the total bandwidth weight has barely moved
:S.
Our nusenu volunteer also made it public on tor-relays@ mailing list:
https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-relays/2019-September/017711.html
So let say for a journalist, or our millions of users, this will mean a
"considerable" drop in the Metrics graph of total number of relays.
Fortunately, we can explain it :). So lets be pro-active!
I _strongly_ think we should do a blog post at minimum to tell the world what
is about to happen and not silently do this. It should have a clear, simple,
easy section of "If you run a relay, please upgrade by doing so ...".
Hopefully, with a bigger microphone, we'll be able to drop the 12.72% to
something much more acceptable.
We have _good_ reasons to do it so this is not a public debate but rather an
informative post.
I'm voluntering to help draft this but since I'm not a native English speaker,
I will need help.
@stephw: What do you think here? Advice on how to proceed?
Thanks!
David
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gKCHWw6NdT9QtZbud0Uwm756HrH5xaSQ5vhmb6j2WUk=
Hello Leif!
Since you are listed as a Tor Admin for the Noisebridge Tor side, this email I
hope finds its way to your Inbox.
We are soon about to reject all non supported relays from the network mostly
for stability and security reasons:
https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/31549
We are in the process of contacting relay _and_ bridge operators about it.
It turns out that "noisebridge01" is in this category running Tor 0.3.3.9
which is End Of Life but also has a security issue.
https://metrics.torproject.org/rs.html#details/21D96945B790F10D00071BB3336F…
This bridge is particurlarly important because it is shipped as a default
obfs4 bridge in Tor Browser.
Depending on your OS, it would be grand to upgrade to our latest stable which
is currently 0.4.1.5. You can find the list of our supported releases here:
https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/org/teams/NetworkTeam/CoreTor…
We are also starting a more long term effort to ask relay operators to keep up
to date with our latest stable as much as possible (meaning _not_ the LTS) in
order for the network to be able to upgrade faster and thus help reduce the
very long migration path which is especially important for things like
security issue at the protocol level.
Of course, if you are running Debian/Ubuntu, deb.torproject.org is the right
place to start with:
https://2019.www.torproject.org/docs/debian.html.en
Let us know if we can help in any ways to make this transition easier.
Huge thanks!
David
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gKCHWw6NdT9QtZbud0Uwm756HrH5xaSQ5vhmb6j2WUk=
> One note: Could the tor relay status be changed, so the bare stats can
> be seen without javascript? Javascript is the main threat to anonymity
> over tor. I am by default not turning on Javascript in my own browser.
> The base stats could be shown and only the graphs show some hint to
> turn on javascript.
For what it's worth, I've been working on a Javascript-free Tor metrics
implementation[1][2] for this reason. Relay listings are statically
generated from a single hourly API request which puts considerably less strain
on onionoo as well.
[1] https://yui.cat/
[2] https://github.com/tempname1024/tor-metrics