[tor-bugs] #19118 [Metrics/Onionoo]: Add organization name to each relay

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#19118: Add organization name to each relay
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 Reporter:  virgil           |          Owner:  karsten
     Type:  enhancement      |         Status:  needs_information
 Priority:  Medium           |      Milestone:
Component:  Metrics/Onionoo  |        Version:
 Severity:  Normal           |     Resolution:
 Keywords:  hardening        |  Actual Points:
Parent ID:                   |         Points:
 Reviewer:                   |        Sponsor:
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Comment (by karsten):

 Okay, let's evaluate the pros and cons of adding CAIDA data.  I'm counting
 pros as +1, neutrals as 0, and cons as -1.  Let's see whether we'll get a
 positive number here.

  - The CAIDA data doesn't contain IP address ranges, so we'll have to keep
 using MaxMind data in addition to CAIDA data.  Okay.  But that means that
 CAIDA's comprehensiveness in terms of number of ASNs is meaningless to us,
 because we're limited to whatever ASNs are in MaxMind data. (0)
  - MaxMind contains 67 of its 2833 ASNs (not sure where your 53k number
 comes from) that CAIDA does not know about.  Right now we'd have
 organization names for these ASNs, but once we switch over to using
 CAIDA's organization names we'd provide less information there.  And I'm
 not willing to provide MaxMind data if CAIDA doesn't have anything for a
 given ASN, because nobody will understand that, nor do I want to provide
 both organization names.  This is a serious problem that I don't know how
 to work around cleanly. (-1)
  - CAIDA data is only updated every three months, MaxMind provides a new
 update every month.  It already happens that people ping me because
 MaxMind's data is old, and that's only going to get worse with CAIDA.
 Somewhat related, MaxMind has been providing ASN data for many years now
 without major issues whereas CAIDA apparently started providing data only
 2 years ago. (-1)
  - We'd still need to write, review, and test code to handle CAIDA's data
 format.  This could become a neutral if somebody submits a good patch, but
 please only do that if that makes the overall sum positive, or that patch
 might not get accepted. (-1)
  - Operating an Onionoo server becomes a bit harder with an additional
 data source to update.  We want more people to run Onionoo servers at some
 point, so we should make that process easier not harder. (-1)
  - MaxMind indeed contains similar but not equivalent organization names
 which should be exactly the same.  However, the actual number is lower
 than what your pairwise comparison implies, and somebody measuring
 organization diversity could always use a similarity metric as yours when
 looking at these strings.  Anyway, CAIDA is indeed better here than
 MaxMind. (1)

 I'm calculating -3 as sum here.  That means no.  Sorry.  Leaving this
 ticket open for a few more days in case you have convincing arguments why
 the cons I'm listing about are actually neutrals or can be turned into
 pros.

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Ticket URL: <https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/19118#comment:8>
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