On 7/18/12 7:48 AM, Roger Dingledine wrote:

On Thu, Jul 12, 2012 at 03:12:22PM +0200, Karsten Loesing wrote:

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Hi Roger, hi Nick,

here are the first five metrics tech reports that I'd like to turn into Tor tech reports (see #5405 for the idea behind this). If you agree that this is a good idea, I'll push the sources to tech-reports.git and put the PDFs on the Tor website.

Sounds good. Though I see on https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/6380 that we're now thinking of putting them somewhere other than the Tor website. Sounds fine too.

Okay.

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I need your confirmation for each report as part of the process, though.

Creating a new process where I'm the artificial bottleneck seems unwise.

How about only asking me when you're unsure? And being willing to ask people other than me also? :)

Works for me. New reports will go to tor-dev prior "publication" anyway, and if you don't think they should be Tor tech reports, you can object there. And even after that, we can always kill existing reports from the Git repo and pretend it never happened. :)

Best, Karsten

On 7/18/12 5:12 PM, Zack Weinberg wrote:

On Thu, Jul 12, 2012 at 6:12 AM, Karsten Loesing karsten@torproject.org wrote:

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here are the first five metrics tech reports that I'd like to turn into Tor tech reports (see #5405 for the idea behind this).

I'd like to offer some typographical improvements -- it looks like these are being generated with mostly default LaTeX settings, which are not great for PDFs that people will mostly read online.

Oh, that would be very useful. Maybe we can come up with a template for all Tor tech reports.

Some of the graphs are also very hard to read (dashed lines don't work very well for plots that jump up and down a lot).

Right. There's always the trade-off between using colored graphs which don't go well when printed and dashed/dotted lines which are at least equally useful on screen and on paper. I'm open to suggestions there. (Note that the graph sources are in a different Git repository than the LaTeX sources.)

I see that there is a git repository for the sources, can I just clone it, make changes, and put the diffs somewhere? What would be most convenient for you?

I just committed the LaTeX sources of these reports very quickly to my new public tech-reports repository:

https://gitweb.torproject.org/user/karsten/tech-reports.git

If you can clone the branch and put yours somewhere from where I can pull, that would work best. git format-patch also works fine.

Once reports are ready for "publication", I'll merge things into the official tech-reports.git repo.

Thanks! Karsten

Hi Zack,

On 7/21/12 2:13 AM, Zack Weinberg wrote:

On Wed, Jul 18, 2012 at 10:05 AM, Karsten Loesing karsten@torproject.org wrote:

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On 7/18/12 5:12 PM, Zack Weinberg wrote:

...

On Thu, Jul 12, 2012 at 6:12 AM, Karsten Loesing karsten@torproject.org wrote:

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here are the first five metrics tech reports that I'd like to turn into Tor tech reports (see #5405 for the idea behind this).

I'd like to offer some typographical improvements -- it looks like these are being generated with mostly default LaTeX settings, which are not great for PDFs that people will mostly read online.

Oh, that would be very useful. Maybe we can come up with a template for all Tor tech reports.

I have put together a suggested template as tortechrep.cls (it builds on the standard article.cls) and updated all five of your tech reports to use it. I also made some very small adjustments to some of the content (notably the bridge descriptor listings).

You can get it from https://gitweb.torproject.org/user/zwol/tech-reports.git .

Looks really awesome! Merged into the official tech-reports.git. Thanks!

For other people reading this thread, here are the resulting PDFs:

https://people.torproject.org/~karsten/volatile/fivereports/

The biggest bikeshed in here is probably the font selection. I picked something that looks good to me and should be comprehensively supported in recent TeX Live, but the only thing I feel like _insisting_ on about the fonts is "not Computer Modern."

Fine by me.

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Right. There's always the trade-off between using colored graphs which don't go well when printed and dashed/dotted lines which are at least equally useful on screen and on paper. I'm open to suggestions there.

I liked the varying shades of gray solid line that were in a different report. (Some of those graphs also use dotted lines, but there's only one *kind* of dotted line and it's used for something that's not terribly zigzaggy, so it's probably OK.)

Oh, right, varying shades of gray would work. Will try, unless you want to tweak the graphs first.

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(Note that the graph sources are in a different Git repository than the LaTeX sources.)

Where do I find them? I have a fair bit of experience with ggplot2 and would like to experiment (may not be able to do so promptly, though).

You'll find the R/ggplot2 sources in the metrics-tasks.git repository:

https://gitweb.torproject.org/metrics-tasks.git

There's a task-xxxx/ directory for each report, with xxxx being the Trac ticket number that lead to writing the report. You'll be interested in these three directories:

- task-2911/ -- An Analysis of Tor Relay Stability

- task-4030/ -- Case study: Learning whether a Tor bridge...

- task-4255/ -- An Analysis of Tor Bridge Stability

You'll also need the .csv files which are not checked into the Git repo. I put them up here (7.8M):

https://people.torproject.org/~karsten/volatile/data-for-fivereports.tar.bz2

If you change nothing else about the graphs, please redo the bitmap (PNG) graphs in bridge-blockings with vector graphics (PDF) instead.

Done.

I'd also encourage you to experiment with tikzDevice; it's nice when the graphs are font-consistent with the main text, and using tikz gives you that for free. Also R's PDF output is frankly pretty awful (most significantly, it doesn't embed any fonts, which makes some publishers very unhappy with you). tikzDevice _can_ generate output that is painfully slow to compile through TeX, but I don't think these graphs will have that problem.

Sounds interesting. Do you mind giving an example?

Thanks! Karsten

On Wed, Aug 08, 2012 at 12:22:16PM +0200, Karsten Loesing wrote:

Feedback much appreciated!

The pdf documents look really good now. I don't know if the tech reports get cited a lot but it might be worth adding BibTeX entries next to the pdf download links.

Also, in order to give the page more exposure, it could be linked at [1] or somewhere at [2].

[1] https://www.torproject.org/getinvolved/research.html.en [2] https://www.torproject.org/docs/documentation.html.en

Thus spake Karsten Loesing (karsten@torproject.org):

On 7/12/12 3:12 PM, Karsten Loesing wrote:

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here are the first five metrics tech reports that I'd like to turn into Tor tech reports (see #5405 for the idea behind this).

The next batch of ten Tor Tech Reports is now available (all in the list except for the five from 2011 which I posted here a month ago):

https://research.torproject.org/techreports.html

What other reports are we missing?

Since HotPETS doesn't count as "publishing" perhaps this should be listed as a tech report: http://fscked.org/talks/TorFlow-HotPETS-final.pdf

I'm not sure when I'd actually have the time to write it up (let alone do the network scanning analysis), but the output of https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/6135 *could* be one, I guess.

On Thu, Aug 09, 2012 at 08:29:25AM +0200, Karsten Loesing wrote:

Hi Mike,

On 8/8/12 8:13 PM, Mike Perry wrote:

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Since HotPETS doesn't count as "publishing" perhaps this should be listed as a tech report: http://fscked.org/talks/TorFlow-HotPETS-final.pdf

I agree. If it counted as "publishing", we'd put it on anonbib. But since that's not the case, let's put it on our tech reports list, or nobody will find it.

Wait. What!? Since when did anonbib get restricted to what is "published"? Paul Karger's MITRE tech report is there. I mean Wei Dai's pipenet mailinglist post is there! There are probabily others. I just mentioned two I knew off the top of my head. I assume that papers are on anonbib because they've appeared somewhere that one can point at consistently and they're relatively important, not because they are "published". "Published" is a useful fiction I'll come back to, but I don't see why anonbib has to be hamstrung by it.

The only thing I'm worried about is that we shouldn't add reports published by other organizations (here: HotPETs) to the Tor Tech Reports list. I'd rather want us to turn your HotPETs report into a Tor Tech Report with identical content and put that on the list.

HotPETs being labeled "not published" is just one of the many never actually solid but increasingly shaky distinctions trying to cope with the overloaded semantics and quickly evolving meaning of 'published', wherein 'published', 'refereed', 'archived', 'produced by a recognized publisher/organization', 'made available for purchase', etc. were all taken as synonymous (except when they weren't). Most academic research venues in computer security don't accept things that are already published or under consideration to be published. (For convenience I will completely pretend journals don't exist in this, which for most of science is like saying you'll pretend published research does not exist.) But presenting the work at a workshop wouldn't be publication, even if presented works were printed out and made available to attendees. Putting out a tech report wasn't generally viewed as published (except for patent purposes (which was one of the motivations for places to have tech reports) but then so did presentation at a public meeting---now define 'public', how many epicycles are we up to?). Now jump forward a few decades or so and all of these are on the web. How can you tell if some web page talking about a meeting and providing links to pdfs of what was presented there (possibly produced before or afterwards or both) counts as published? HotPETs wants to get half-baked innovative stuff, not just the work after all the proofs have been done, full implementation and simulations run, whatever. (It also _will_ take stuff that has been "published" elsewhere.) But if it counted as published, authors couldn't submit it to a venue that does count once the details were a bit more worked out (and counts in the eyes of tenure committees, funding agencies, etc. in a way HotPETs does not). So, HotPETs labels its works as not published because you need to tell people which side of this nonexistent line the work is on, so they know what to do next.

How about we put the LaTeX sources in tech-reports.git, change them to use the new tech report template, assign a report number, and add a footnote saying "This report was presented at 2nd Hot Topics in Privacy Enhancing Technologies (HotPETs 2009), Seattle, WA, USA, August 2009."? Then people can decide if they rather want to cite our tech report or the HotPETs one.

This is pretty standard for tech reports at many universities, organizations, etc. Also I think, stuff on arxiv.

aloha, Paul

On 8/9/12 8:29 AM, Karsten Loesing wrote:

On 8/8/12 8:13 PM, Mike Perry wrote:

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Since HotPETS doesn't count as "publishing" perhaps this should be listed as a tech report: http://fscked.org/talks/TorFlow-HotPETS-final.pdf

[...]

How about we put the LaTeX sources in tech-reports.git, change them to use the new tech report template, assign a report number, and add a footnote saying "This report was presented at 2nd Hot Topics in Privacy Enhancing Technologies (HotPETs 2009), Seattle, WA, USA, August 2009."? Then people can decide if they rather want to cite our tech report or the HotPETs one.

Happy to do or help with the conversion if you tell me where your sources are.

So, what do you think? Still happy to help. :)

Thanks, Karsten