[tor-reports] Karsten's January

[Karsten Loesing]

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

> - Continue sponsor F year 3.  Create tickets, and talk to developers to
> nail down what exactly was promised and what they are expected to
> deliver.  Get the February milestone planned, ideally by mid-January.

Half done.  5 out of 9 February deliverables have expected outcomes
written on the wiki page [0], meaning that responsible developers and
Roger agreed on what's realistic and what's required to call a
deliverable done.  I'm leading 3 of the remaining 4 deliverables that
still need feedback, so it's just Roger and me having to agree on
something.  The last remaining deliverable, item number 5, is still
awaiting input.

> - Make Torperf results more realistic -- real web pages average 320KB
> and contain multiple components.  This is sponsor F year 3 item 8 that
> is due February 28.

Made good progress.  Worked together with Will Scott on a simple
prototype that uses Selenium and Firefox to make pretty realistic
requests and gather timestamps.  Started discussing a Twisted-based
Torperf rewrite on tor-dev@ [1] and got some very useful feedback.
Started hacking on this rewrite [2] with great input from meejah.  The
plan [3] is to reach feature parity with current Torperf and make
measurement results more realistic by integrating Selenium/Firefox by
end of February.

> - Continue working with the Shadow and ExperimenTor developers to help
> them improve their ability to accurately simulate Tor networks. And do
> that for the Deterlab folks too.  This is sponsor F year 3 item 3 that
> is due February 28.

Made good progress.  Picked up and extended Rob Jansen's Tor branch [4]
that adds three new controller event types for the TestingTorNetwork
mode.  The plan is to clean up code and commit history and write a
proposal based on my corresponding torspec branch [5] to include this
code in 0.2.5.x.  Part of the plan is also to work on a few other things
related to the TestingTorNetwork mode, namely #6752 and #6780.

> - Continue working with external researchers (including other groups
> getting funding, like the NRL group) so their Tor results are more
> likely to be useful in practice.  This is sponsor F year 3 item 4 that
> is due February 28.

Made progress.  Discussed various new Tor network metrics with Aaron
Johnson of NRL, but postponed further discussion until the March dev
meeting.  Helped Sathya get up to speed with a Tor path simulator [6].

> - Try to plan the October milestone of sponsor F year 3, and coordinate
> incomplete year 2 deliverables and non-deliverable tasks that we should
> do anyway in the year 3 timeframe.

Not done, because February deliverables have priority over October planning.


In addition to the tasks above, I worked on the following things:

- Discussed a new cool interactive metrics data visualization tool
visionion [7, 8] with Thomas Lörtsch.  visionion will hopefully replace
some or all graphs on the metrics website at some point.  visionion is
designed to use MongoDB, AngularJS, and D3.js to aggregate and visualize
metrics data.  Did I say this is cool?  It is!  Feedback much appreciated.

- Blogged about introductory material for explaining how Tor works [9],
which was a by-product of discussing the metrics visualization tool above.

- Started running Stem's descriptor parser over all prior descriptors
and detected a few problems and possible enhancement.


And here are the top 5 five things I want to do in February:

- Finish the Torperf rewrite in Twisted.

- Finish work on controller events in TestingTorNetwork mode.

- Help Sathya with his Tor path simulator.

- Help Thomas with the data-importing parts of visionion.

- Make sure we complete all sponsor F year 3 February 28 deliverables.


[0]
https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/org/sponsors/SponsorF/Year3#Phase1February282013

[1] https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-dev/2013-January/004356.html

[2]
https://gitweb.torproject.org/karsten/torperf.git/shortlog/refs/heads/perfd

[3]
https://gitweb.torproject.org/karsten/torperf.git/blob/refs/heads/perfd:/README.perfd#l67

[4]
https://gitweb.torproject.org/karsten/tor.git/shortlog/refs/heads/morestats

[5]
https://gitweb.torproject.org/user/karsten/torspec.git/shortlog/refs/heads/morestats

[6] https://gitweb.torproject.org/user/gsathya/pathsim.git

[7] https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-dev/2013-January/004405.html

[8] https://github.com/tomlurge/visionion

[9] https://blog.torproject.org/blog/visual-overview-tor-network