[tor-reports] Karsten's status report November 1--30

[Karsten Loesing]

Here are the top 5 five things I wanted to do in November:

> 1. Wrap up the sponsor F deliverables for the November milestone.  In
> most cases this means asking developers to update and close tickets and
> write deliverable summaries.  In other cases it means reviewing code or
> running simulations, but we're running out of time to do anything
> complex anyway.

Done.  Results from sponsor F year 2 work are here:

https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/org/sponsors/SponsorF/Year2

Sponsor F work also kept me busy by making me run dozens of Shadow
simulations to help Rob track down a nasty Shadow bug (issue 97) and try
to simulate Steven's UDP branch.

> 2. Start sponsor F year 3 once there's a final task list.  This requires
> creating tickets and a wiki page to track progress, and it means talking
> to all developers to nail down what exactly was promised and what they
> are expected to deliver.

Not done.  Roger started a wiki page, but I failed to create tickets or
talk to developers.

https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/org/sponsors/SponsorF/Year3

This task will go on my December list.

> 3. Help define network diversity metrics and develop tools to visualize
> current diversity and diversity over time.

There's progress, but this is not done yet.  Completed a simple tool to
handle dozens of IP-to-country databases in memory (#6471), and got some
good IP-to-ASN data for Tor relays in the past years from Team Cymru.
Making more progress here is on my December list, too.

> 4. Evaluate ways to overcome problems with Maxmind's GeoIP database
> which started labeling Tor relays as country A1.

Almost done, pending review; see #6266.  This task, or rather the work
on the blockfinder tool which was necessary for this task, was what kept
me busy for most of November.  But it was worth it, because I hope to
use blockfinder to handle multiple IP-to-country databases (for #6471)
and to generate tor's geoip file in the future.

https://github.com/ioerror/blockfinder

> 5. Extend the ExoneraTor relay IP lookup service to support IPv6 addresses.

Not done, and probably not as relevant in the near future, because IPv6
exiting won't be enabled by default anyway.  I'll probably let this slip
to Q1 or Q2 2013.

To replace the 'not done' items 2 and 5 above, here are two other tasks
I worked on in November:

#1854 is an analysis together with Sathya and Ian where we looked what
would happen if we raised the minimum bandwidth for getting the Fast
flag or even dropped relays below that threshold from the consensus.
Early results are that even if we threw out all relays below 1 MiB/s
advertised bandwidth, each of the remaining 400 relays would only be 9%
more likely to be picked by clients.  Darn 80/20 principle.

#7587 was a nasty bug in Onionoo that made it silently ignore relay
descriptors it could not parse, breaking Atlas' bandwidth graphs for
those relays.


And here are the top 5 five things I want to do in December, in no
particular order:

- Start sponsor F year 3.  Create tickets, and talk to developers to
nail down what exactly was promised and what they are expected to deliver.

- Help define network diversity metrics and develop tools to visualize
current diversity and diversity over time.

- Finish evaluating ways to overcome problems with Maxmind's GeoIP
database which started labeling Tor relays as country A1.

- Have a short vacation before this December 24 thing.

- Attend 29C3 in Hamburg.