[tor-project] December 2018 report and January 2019 plans for the metrics team

[Karsten Loesing]

Hello Tor, hello world!

Below you'll find the highlights of Tor metrics team work done in
December 2018 as well as a few expected highlights for the current
month, January 2019.

On behalf of the Tor metrics team,
Karsten


December 2018:

Published technical report "Towards modernising data collection and
archive for the Tor network" [1] and implemented a prototype replacement
[2].

 [1]
https://research.torproject.org/techreports/modern-collector-2018-12-19.pdf
 [2] https://github.com/irl/bushel

Published end-of-year campaign blog post "Strength in Numbers: Measuring
Diversity in the Tor Network" [3].

 [3]
https://blog.torproject.org/strength-numbers-measuring-diversity-tor-network

Updated the "Total consensus weights across bandwidth authorities" graph
to only contain running relays and to also contain consensus numbers [4,
5, 6, 7].

 [4] https://metrics.torproject.org/totalcw.html
 [5] https://bugs.torproject.org/28137
 [6] https://bugs.torproject.org/28328
 [7] https://bugs.torproject.org/28352

Updated 4 graphs containing OnionPerf data to show all sources
separately rather than an aggregate number [8, 9].

 [8] https://metrics.torproject.org/torperf.html
 [9] https://bugs.torproject.org/28603

Combined 3 graphs on consumed bandwidth into a single visualization
using stacked area charts [10, 11].

 [10] https://metrics.torproject.org/bandwidth-flags.html
 [11] https://bugs.torproject.org/28353

Found a bug [12] that broke bandwidth history graphs at the end of
November 2018 and that subsequently caused glitches in the user number
graphs, and re-imported missing data from November and December 2018.

 [12]
https://gitweb.torproject.org/metrics-web.git/commit/?id=9dd35e29084ed9380cb374c80a4f9bfb0d9a91e2

Made a couple internal changes to the Tor Metrics website that will make
it a lot easier to maintain in the future, including Java rewrites of
the censorship detector [13] and parts of the advbwdist module [14], and
using readr's read_csv() rather than R's save() and load() to speed up
drawing graphs [15].

 [13] https://bugs.torproject.org/21588
 [14] https://bugs.torproject.org/28801
 [15] https://bugs.torproject.org/28799


January 2019:

Extend OnionPerf to support measuring with a pluggable transport.

Deploy a fourth OnionPerf instance to improve vantage point diversity.

Write a Tech Report that gives an overview of the Tor Metrics codebases.

Use Java 8 date-time functionality [16] in more Tor Metrics codebases.

 [16] https://bugs.torproject.org/23752

Share more code between the modules providing data for Tor Metrics
graphs [17].

 [17] https://bugs.torproject.org/28342

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