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On 12/03/15 17:08, A. Johnson wrote:
Looking forward, hidden-service statistics are now available on Metrics:
Looks great!
- Total hidden-service traffic in Mbit/s (per day, using
weighted interquartile mean, like lower graph on page 1 of the PDF)
- Unique .onion addresses (per day, using weighted interquartile
mean, like upper graph on page 1 of the PDF)
These seem like a good idea.
Great! I started with the second graph, because it seems least disputed:
https://metrics.torproject.org/hidserv-dir-onions-seen.html
- Fraction of relays reporting hidden-service statistics
(containing both dir-onions-seen and rend-relayed-cells, like page 3 of the PDF)
This is probably less interesting to most people, but it is important to people serious about understanding the meaning of the data. So I could take this or leave it.
Agreed. I'll leave this graph out for the moment.
Note that I left out "fraction of traffic", because we can't guarantee that our many assumptions we made for the blog post will hold in the future. Happy to be convinced otherwise.
The calculation of client traffic fraction assumed that most traffic from exit relays was in fact exit traffic. The validity of that assumption may indeed change in the future, depending especially on how the consensus position weights change. So I agree that it is not a great idea to include a graph of this number on the Metrics page.
I wonder if we can simplify the calculation somehow, so that we don't have to worry (as much) that it will break in the future. Hmm.
The calculation of traffic fraction at relays only relied on (i) rendezvous circuits being six hops (not a shaky assumption) and (ii) that the Metrics numbers for total network traffic was accurate (also seems like a good assumption). So it seems that we could include this number, although it is the less interesting of the two numbers.
True. Let's keep this in mind as plan B.
By the way, I decided against using onion service terminology, because I wasn't sure when we were planning to switch. I'm not sure if Metrics should be one of the first Tor websites to switch, or whether people will just wonder what crazy Tor-unrelated stuff Metrics has statistics for. I don't feel strongly though. Thoughts?
You could use the new terminology, with a footnote on the page explaining that "onion service" is the same as "hidden service".
I think I'd rather want to wait until documentation on Tor's website and in tools is updated.
All the best, Karsten