Hello Tor, hello world!

Below you'll find the highlights of Tor metrics team work done in December 2018 as well as a few expected highlights for the current month, January 2019.

On behalf of the Tor metrics team, Karsten

December 2018:

Published technical report "Towards modernising data collection and archive for the Tor network" [1] and implemented a prototype replacement [2].

[1] https://research.torproject.org/techreports/modern-collector-2018-12-19.pdf [2] https://github.com/irl/bushel

Published end-of-year campaign blog post "Strength in Numbers: Measuring Diversity in the Tor Network" [3].

[3] https://blog.torproject.org/strength-numbers-measuring-diversity-tor-network

Updated the "Total consensus weights across bandwidth authorities" graph to only contain running relays and to also contain consensus numbers [4, 5, 6, 7].

[4] https://metrics.torproject.org/totalcw.html [5] https://bugs.torproject.org/28137 [6] https://bugs.torproject.org/28328 [7] https://bugs.torproject.org/28352

Updated 4 graphs containing OnionPerf data to show all sources separately rather than an aggregate number [8, 9].

[8] https://metrics.torproject.org/torperf.html [9] https://bugs.torproject.org/28603

Combined 3 graphs on consumed bandwidth into a single visualization using stacked area charts [10, 11].

[10] https://metrics.torproject.org/bandwidth-flags.html [11] https://bugs.torproject.org/28353

Found a bug [12] that broke bandwidth history graphs at the end of November 2018 and that subsequently caused glitches in the user number graphs, and re-imported missing data from November and December 2018.

[12] https://gitweb.torproject.org/metrics-web.git/commit/?id=9dd35e29084ed9380cb...

Made a couple internal changes to the Tor Metrics website that will make it a lot easier to maintain in the future, including Java rewrites of the censorship detector [13] and parts of the advbwdist module [14], and using readr's read_csv() rather than R's save() and load() to speed up drawing graphs [15].

[13] https://bugs.torproject.org/21588 [14] https://bugs.torproject.org/28801 [15] https://bugs.torproject.org/28799

January 2019:

Extend OnionPerf to support measuring with a pluggable transport.

Deploy a fourth OnionPerf instance to improve vantage point diversity.

Write a Tech Report that gives an overview of the Tor Metrics codebases.

Use Java 8 date-time functionality [16] in more Tor Metrics codebases.

[16] https://bugs.torproject.org/23752

Share more code between the modules providing data for Tor Metrics graphs [17].

[17] https://bugs.torproject.org/28342