[tor-dev] moved from [Tor-censorship-events] Improving the censorship event detector.

l.m ter.one.leeboi at hush.com
Thu Aug 20 13:09:23 UTC 2015


Hi,

As some of you may be aware, the mailing list for censorship events
was recently put on hold indefinitely. This appears to be due to the
detector providing too much false positive in it's current
implementation. It also raises the question of the purpose for such a
mailing list. Who are the stakeholders? What do they gain from an
improvement?

I've read some of the documentations about this. As far as I can tell
at a minimum an `improvement` in the event detector would be to:

- reduce false positives
- distinguish between tor network reachability, and tor network
interference
- enable/promote client participation through the submission of
results from an ephemeral test (itself having property provably
correct and valid)

In order to be of use to the researchers it needs greater analysis
capability. Is it enough to say censorship is detected? By this point
the analysis is less interesting--because the discourse which itself
lead to the tor use is probably evident (or it becomes harder to
find). On the other hand, if a researcher is aware of some emerging
trend they may predict the censorship event by predicting the use of
tor. This may also be of use in analysis of other events.

- should detect more than just censorship
- accept input from researchers

>From the tech reports it looks like Philipp has a plan for an
implementation of the tests noted above. It's only the format of the
results submission which is unknown.

- provide client test results to tor project developers
- make decision related data available
Regards
--leeroy
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