[metrics-team] metrics-web detect script update and question

[seamus tuohy]

Hello,

Karsten Loesing <karsten at torproject.org> writes:

> Great to see your interest in making the censorship detector better!
>
> So, I have been thinking about your plan to submit a pull request for
> the rewrite of the current functionality, and I think I'd want to
> suggest a different plan:
>
> How about you deploy your rewritten code on a minimal website that
> visualizes the output of your rewritten censorship detection script,
> possibly comparing it to other algorithms, and we link that website
> from the Metrics website?
>

Sadly, My expertise is not in the statistical analysis, but in open
source software development. This is why I focused on making the
existing code cleaner and more cleanly documented and structured. It
would be a much more significant task for me to compare the original
algorithm to others.

> Let me explain this plan a bit more: what we really want is a better
> censorship detection algorithm that doesn't produce as many false
> positives.  Your rewrite can be a great starting point for that.  But
> there's no need to merge code directly into Metrics until we're sure
> we found an algorithm we like better than the current one, and maybe
> that requires making two or three attempts to get it right.  For now,
> I'd rather want to add a link to your results.  We can always discuss
> replacing the script in Metrics with a new one later, but there are
> really no requirements other than that it can read a .csv in the
> provided format and write a new .csv in the expected format.
>
> If you're not sure what I mean by link, here are two examples for
> external links on Tor Metrics:
>
> https://metrics.torproject.org/oxford-anonymous-internet.html
>
> https://metrics.torproject.org/uncharted-data-flow.html
>
> Does that plan make sense to you?  It's really great that you're
> picking up this topic.  Thanks for that!
>

I will keep the code available if anyone wants to use it as a base to
implement a better algorithm, but if this code will not serve any
functional purpose I see no value in putting any additional work into
it.

Best,
s2e


> All the best,
> Karsten
>
>
>>
>> Best, s2e
>>
>> -- seamus tuohy | Sr. Technologist - Internet Initiatives
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--
seamus tuohy | Sr. Technologist - Internet Initiatives
stuohy at internews.org
Skype/XMPP on request
PGP: 36AC 272E B7CF EDD5 F907 E488 B619 3EC7 3CF0 7AA7
MiniLock: 2G3JmRWRYB3B7rthZqkzomcRe8GwJvPtSooA748XMsTBdf

INTERNEWS | Local Voices. Global Change.
www.internews.org | @internews