Hello Tor, hello world!

Below you'll find the highlights of Tor metrics team work done in September 2018.

Note that, starting this month, we extended the format to also give a few expected highlights for the current month, October 2018.

On behalf of the Tor metrics team, Karsten

September 2018:

Fully integrated the recently added Reproducible Metrics page [1] and the updated Statistics page [2] on all graph pages by adding the sentence: "Learn more about the CSV data format (Statistics page link) or how to reproduce (Reproducible Metrics page link) the graph data."

[1] https://metrics.torproject.org/reproducible-metrics.html [2] https://metrics.torproject.org/stats.html

Made some more progress on Sponsor 13 [3] objective 1 by drafting a structure for the technical report and picking a plausible candidate for evaluating a batch processing framework.

[3] https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/org/sponsors/Sponsor13

Released ExoneraTor 4.0.0 [4] that reduces the overall database from 243G to 63G and mean response time from 18.9 to 2.3 seconds.

[4] https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-relays/2018-September/016209.html

Released Onionoo 7.0-1.18.1 [5] that extends the "version" parameter to support lists and ranges, removes redundant "1_week" and "1_month" graphs from clients documents, changes "3_months" graphs to "6_months" graphs in all documents containing history objects, removes the "fingerprint" parameter, and removes the previously deprecated "as_number" field from details documents.

[5] https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-dev/2018-September/013431.html

Released Tor Metrics Library 2.5.0 and Tor Metrics Website 1.2.0 [6] for the primary reason that libraries contained in the tarball should match the ones needed to build current master.

[6] https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-dev/2018-September/013459.html

Attended the Tor meeting in Mexico City where we presented our work as part of State of the Onion [7] and in a session called Tor Metrics Ecosystem: Data Collection, Archive, Analysis, and Visualisation [8].

[7] https://people.torproject.org/~irl/2018-09-mexicocity-metrics-soto.pdf [8] https://people.torproject.org/~irl/2018-10-mexicocity-ecosystem.pdf

October 2018:

Extend the existing graphs on ​Tor Browser downloads by platform [9] and ​Tor Browser downloads by locale [10] to "Tor Browser downloads and updates by platform" and "Tor Browser downloads and updates by locale" [11].

[9] https://metrics.torproject.org/webstats-tb-platform.html [10] https://metrics.torproject.org/webstats-tb-locale.html [11] https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/27931

Add a new graph to Tor Metrics that compares total consensus weights across bandwidth authorities [12].

[12] https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/25459

We're (going to be) hiring! Over the next weeks we're putting together and posting a job description, and hopefully, by the end of the year or beginning of next year, we'll have a third full-time developer for the Tor metrics team. Stay tuned, or just reach out to us now (via personal email, not via this list) if this could be you! Reading through this report until the very end already shows a fair amount of dedication!