[tor-dev] Fwd: Changes to ExoneraTor for this week's TWN

[Karsten Loesing]

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

Hi everyone,

Jens asked me to forward this email here, so that other people can
follow the recent changes we made to ExoneraTor.

https://exonerator.torproject.org/

Harmony did a wonderful job summarizing these changes even more in
this week's TWN issue.  Thanks, harmony!

Of course, if you're curious about the details, be sure to check out
the commits and/or tickets:

https://gitweb.torproject.org/exonerator.git/

https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/query?status=!closed&component=ExoneraTor&order=priority

All the best,
Karsten


- -------- Forwarded Message --------
Subject: Changes to ExoneraTor for this week's TWN
Date: Wed, 15 Jul 2015 12:51:17 +0200
From: Karsten Loesing <karsten at torproject.org>
To: harmony <harmony01 at riseup.net>
CC: Tor Assistants <tor-assistants at lists.torproject.org>

Hi harmony,

here's a quick overview of improvements made to ExoneraTor in the past
days in no specific order:

 - Restrict searches to dates: Rather than allowing searches by
timestamp we restrict searches to full dates.  Most people don't
understand timezones nor that all our dates and times are in UTC.
Letting them specify a precise time makes it more likely that they'll
search for the wrong thing.  The timezone problem doesn't go away by
limiting searches to full days (if their incident happened on February
17 at 9pm EST, would they know that it was already February 18 in
UTC?).  But we can easily widen searches to +/- 1 day.  The technical
details still contain hours.

 - No raw descriptors anymore: We stopped processing server
descriptors and linking raw descriptors in the latest version of
ExoneraTor.  The idea was to simplify the service and make it useful
for the average user who doesn't care about this level of detail.  And
it's a good opportunity to prevent the database from growing even larger.

 - No target addresses and ports anymore: If there's a result to the
question "Was there a Tor relay running on this IP address?", do not
offer a subsequent form to answer the question "Was this relay
configured to permit exiting to a given target?".  The second search
increases complexity of searches a bit, and it's unlikely that people
would interpret results correctly.  The technical details now contain
an "Exit" column that indicates whether a relay permitted transit of
Tor traffic to the open Internet at that time.

 - New non-technical explanations of Tor and ExoneraTor: We rewrote
the text that explains what Tor is and what ExoneraTor does, and we
tried to make it as non-technical and still accurate as possible.

 - Translations: There's now a translation to German, and we're
currently making plans for adding more translations.  The difficulty
is that we'll want those translations to also be as non-technical and
still accurate as possible.

 - New design: We're now using a basic Bootstrap design which is
already much cleaner than the previous design, but which still leaves
room for improvement.

Hope I didn't miss anything important.  Please feel free to pick
whatever you find most important, and feel free to rephrase as needed.
 Sorry, gotta run!

Thanks!

All the best,
Karsten
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1
Comment: GPGTools - http://gpgtools.org

iQEcBAEBAgAGBQJVplkAAAoJEJD5dJfVqbCrJDkH/3ie20NA7cCgLtwbpPwuJHdR
EXgRQ/sBHzPHUNV+NmesG95jcKfUe/XcEDFYisa/ayrwWpTap+cOek7/02uM4RD/
J3Ik0xk7m0Cwo2nxPWhHYOtmF97Yv33zE26rbh6+Fix7b9O5xNgTLJ53k3rvhNKy
xRKm5DM6blXYppJpeYdmTP0k1wJdiy/qsETScKWldBGlOtXdmNKwrncxZ+tg5Z2b
57VZvXSUKx0rRTCh2LuOYUcmyLuX9XqpJOKrdwQ+BcATETuaklWLEH55iSJN1d/h
GNsVrhPgEz/VwKzJ472s+Xssrgmh7lk80sIoYxGn46J6VLg80a8GJVCo2qznNQ8=
=+3gk
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----