Hi,

Jake made me notice that there has been a huge spike in tor bridge users in Italy in the past week (https://metrics.torproject.org/users.html?graph=bridge-users&start=2011-...).

This prompted me to hack up a quick little script to analyse the Tor bridge usage data and see if it is possible to draw some conclusions from some patterns that emerge in it. I don't feel like expressing a personal an opinion at this point on what this data might mean, but I think spikes in Bridge usage could be used do draw conclusions on socio-political happenings.

What the script does is it basically looks for spikes in Bridge traffic by giving it a time frame and a factor for triggering the alert. As already said it's just a quick hack so don't expect it to be performing or even well written :P.

A couple of neat things that came out:

factor | date1 date2 1: users at date1 2: users at date2 (country code)

23.0512820513 | 2011-06-10 2011-05-29 1: 1798 2: 78 (es)

22.0707070707 | 2011-06-10 2011-06-05 1: 4370 2: 198 (it)

4.14 | 2011-06-11 2011-06-04 1: 207 2: 50 (tw)

5.13333333333 | 2011-06-11 2011-06-05 1: 231 2: 45 (ar)

5.42857142857 | 2011-06-11 2011-06-05 1: 836 2: 154 (br)

4.38181818182 | 2011-06-11 2011-06-01 1: 241 2: 55 (il)

16.5208333333 | 2011-02-15 2011-01-18 1: 48 2: 793 (de)

15.4285714286 | 2010-08-23 2010-07-26 1: 648 2: 42 (au)

13.7916666667 | 2011-03-11 2011-02-15 1: 1655 2: 120 (sa)

A one liner to get some interesting stats:

python bridge-user-alert.py -f 4 | sort -g

Hope somebody finds this little research useful,

Cheers, Art.