[metrics-team] Bringing back Tor Weather - volunteering developer

[nusenu]

Eran Sandler wrote:
> On Thu, 2018-07-12 at 20:33 +0000, nusenu wrote:
>> Hi, 
>>
>> as you have probably already heard we have a motivated relay operator
>> and developer (Eran in CC) who would like to help with bringing back
>> Tor Weather (among other things)
>> - which has previously been discontinued due to missing
>> maintainership.
>>
>> For this reason I also specifically asked him if he would like to
>> maintain this on the long run
>> and he is open for that as well - but I'll let him speak for himself.
> 
> As Nusenu said, I am open to helping maintain the system.
> 
>>
>> Historically the Tor Weather service has been part of the metrics
>> team and last year I spotted
>> it on your roadmap, so I think it is best to coordinate the efforts
>> to avoid
>> duplication of work and the efficient use of developer resources.
>>
>> Unlike other metrics services the Weather service is somewhat special
>> since it (probably) handles non-public subscriber
>> data, that - I would assume - the tor project should protect against
>> unauthorized access.
>> I can also envision a solution to this problem by only using
>> ContactInfo data,
>> which would create a very strong incentive to actually set a proper
>> string there.
> 
> I agree with Nusenu that there might be a way to create another system
> that can validate ownership via the ContactInfo that Tor Weather can be
> based upon and can remove the need to perform the validation as it was
> before - which means anyone can register to listen to a certain node
> via its fingerprint.
> 
> I believe a system that can be based on upon the node's fingerprint +
> emailing a verification link to the email listed in the contactinfo
> would be a very good way to prove access to the node and that might be
> used for a few different things as well (I can talk about that later as
> well).
> 


with regards to verified ContactInfo:
I'm envisioning a future where all forms of contact information (email, twitter, PGP key, ..)
as defined in the CISS spec [1] are verified by a bot upon request and once they are
verified they are displayed differently on Relay Search.

but Tor Weather can NOT be based on this data only since everyone can subscribe
to every relay (not just the operator can subscribe to his own relays)

[1] https://github.com/nusenu/ContactInfo-Information-Sharing-Specification#contact-information

> Some of the improvements I was also thinking about was to enable a way
> to get alerts on the Tor version running as well. I know it will help
> me and other to upgrade even if we missed the regular notifications on
> the mailing list.

yes, this is already mentioned on the ticket if you have more use cases not
mentioned there yet, please add them:
https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/26124




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