George george@queair.net wrote:
Duncan:
Hi!
Ybslik:
Hi all,
Not sure how to start interjecting into this thread, but it does fit into how this August hasn't been a usual "dog days of summer" in more ways than one.
Coming from the perspective of TDP (https://torbsd.github.io/). . .
Some comments below, including replies to earlier pieces that were sniped.
[much text deleted --SB]
In regards to the other questions:
Windows is already running a huge percentage of the tor relay population.How are you going to recruit Windows users to run relays on an OS they don't already use? I contend that you won't. Instead, you must recruit current users of such OS.
I wrote the above paragraph, not Duncan. Someone didn't maintain the attribution chain properly.
Well, not really from our stats.
How so? None of the links below support your contention.
From the bandwidth measure:
Irrelevant to this question.
By consensus weight:
Also irrelevant to this question.
And by just an absolute count of OSs:
That's a piece of what you need to support your contention. Where is the rest of it? FWIW, tor does not report the information you need because clients that are not also relays do not report anything to the authorities. If they did, you would need still more information in order to connect the client information to the relay information. However, the whole primary point of tor is to protect those clients' users' anonymity. It seems to me that the only way to go about proving your contention would be to do a survey according to some accepted methodology from the social sciences to ask a sufficiently large sample of the relay operators running their relays on each OS on which OS they first got started using tor.
Ironically in the first two sets of stats, even OpenBSD (relatively) dwarfs Windows with bandwidth and consensus weights.
So what?
You can tinker with the stats yourself with the source here:
Very nice, but irrelevant to supporting your contention that my claim was not true.
Regarding Debian "unattended-upgrade" comparisons, I don't know much about Debian nor what exactly you mean.
If you read the posting to which I was responding, you saw it first in that posting, not mine. I simply quoted it in responding. I am not a user, much less a system administrator, of any kind of LINUX. As a very unhappy user (and new-to-UNIX system administrator) of SysVR1.05 back in 1986, I was sold on 4.3BSD the next year when I installed and first used it. I've done sysadmin work on at least three other SysV- descended UNIXes and disliked all of them. My first computer was a NeXT Cube, which came with NEXTSTEP (MACH 2.6 kernel, 4.3BSD userland, plus ObjC-based OOPS and NEXTSTEP windowing system, which later became the base, except for the windowing system, for OS X). When I bought my first x86-based machine, it came with Micro$lop Windows XP installed, the most disgraceful excuse for an operating system I had ever encountered. I immediately got my hands on a copy of the then latest release of FreeBSD at that time (5.2.1-RELEASE) and have been a mostly happy user and sysadmin ever since. For the last few years, I have been dealing with email via this account on a NetBSD system, which also happens to suit me pretty well. LINUX is a fine system, according to many people, but it's not UNIX, and it's not a BSD-style of system. If there were no BSDs, I would certainly run LINUX, especially given that other UNIX workalikes are usually proprietary (except MINIX!:-) but there are BSDs, so I don't because I don't need to. In many regards, choice of LINUX vs. a BSD is just a matter of personal taste, but there are also certain things that each system does better than any of the others, and there are quite a few features that only one or a few support. If you need/want certain things in an OS (e.g., a particular file system), then that may push you toward one system or a small subset of the OS available. I got introduced to tor shortly before I got FreeBSD installed on that now defunct computer, so techically speaking, I first got started with it on Windows, but I switched to FreeBSD ASAP, and that was where I really began to learn about tor and got to the point where I was willing to try my hand at running a relay. I never was a willing Windows user in the first place. BSD UNIX was what I knew well, and Windows was an endless source of maddening frustration. IOW, I feel like I got to know and understand tor on FreeBSD and only then began running a relay. Most Windows users are unlikely to have job experience doing system administration of any kind. They may know how to use its GUI and a number of applications well enough for what they do, but they generally are not programmers or sysadmins. I'm not especially surprised that a much smaller proportion of relays today is running on Windows systems. Just to understand tor's man page requires some technical understanding of operating systems and how they work internally, as well as how they look from outside. The average Windows user probably doesn't have the background to feel confident about diving in to setting up a relay. The tor browser bundle once defaulted to configuring and running a relay, although there was a check box that could be unchecked to prevent an instance from being configured as a relay. Times have changed. :-) My claim still stands. If someone would like to run a properly designed survey to disprove it, be my guest. I would be most interested in the results. In the meantime, I repeat my point that not having a tor browser for an operating system is not the way to go if you want more relays on that OS. People use whatever OS they use and for their own reasons. If you want them to run a relay on their machines in addition to what they normally run, they are not likely to switch OS just to try out tor, much less to fulfill your wish. If you want them to become familiar with tor to the point where they might run a relay, give them a browser they can use on their own system. IOW, target the people who are already using those OS, with the caveat that the technically ignorant are far less likely to tackle running a relay (the older label in the documentation being "server", which probably deters even more people from running relays because of feeling it would be too hard or over their heads).
Scott Bennett, Comm. ASMELG, CFIAG ********************************************************************** * Internet: bennett at sdf.org *xor* bennett at freeshell.org * *--------------------------------------------------------------------* * "A well regulated and disciplined militia, is at all times a good * * objection to the introduction of that bane of all free governments * * -- a standing army." * * -- Gov. John Hancock, New York Journal, 28 January 1790 * **********************************************************************