[tor-bugs] #10218 [Tor]: Provide "users-per-transport-per-country" statistics for obfsbridges

Tor Bug Tracker & Wiki blackhole at torproject.org
Sat Nov 23 09:02:47 UTC 2013


#10218: Provide "users-per-transport-per-country" statistics for obfsbridges
------------------------+-------------------------------
     Reporter:  asn     |      Owner:
         Type:  task    |     Status:  needs_information
     Priority:  normal  |  Milestone:
    Component:  Tor     |    Version:
   Resolution:          |   Keywords:  tor-bridge tor-pt
Actual Points:          |  Parent ID:
       Points:          |
------------------------+-------------------------------
Changes (by karsten):

 * status:  new => needs_information


Comment:

 This may seem like a marvelous idea from a data perspective.  But I'm less
 thrilled about the potential privacy implications.  Knowing the number of
 users in a smaller country using a not so common transport is a lot of
 information, compared to knowing the total number of users in that country
 and the total number of users of that transport.  I'm leaning towards not
 knowing these details even if that prevents us from knowing about blocked
 transports in specific jurisdictions.  Changing to needs_information until
 we're sure whether we want to build this or not.

 Here's an alternative approach: we could compare by-country distributions
 of bridges offering different sets of transports; if the bridges offering
 only obfs2 hardly see any Chinese users, but the obfs2+obfs3 bridges do,
 we'll learn something.  The good news is that we don't need any new data
 for this, which would take another Tor release and 6--12 months to show up
 in descriptors.  The bad news is that this may not be as straightforward
 to build.  Related to #8462.  If wfn and/or grindhold want to help with
 this, great!

-- 
Ticket URL: <https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/10218#comment:2>
Tor Bug Tracker & Wiki <https://trac.torproject.org/>
The Tor Project: anonymity online


More information about the tor-bugs mailing list