Mapping the physical locations of Tor nodes

[Jacob Appelbaum]

Bryan L. Fordham wrote:
> 
>> Is any of your code available? I'm using the geoip database from
>> MaxMind[0] and it's showing the same distribution as some of your images.
>>   
> It's not available, but no reason it couldn't be. Well, other than that
> it's ugly. I wrote this, made a few tweaks, and left it. Honestly I
> doubt I would do it this way again.

I'd be interested in seeing your code. The one thing that's lacking from
static images is useful metadata. The nodes you plotted in Africa are of
interest to me but it isn't possible to extract information about them
from the image. So the map is nice but the map doesn't help me to
understand a lot about the nodes involved. In the end, it's just a bunch
of dots and I can't easily verify node information that the geoip system
gave the map maker for their plotting...

Part of the reason that I used google maps was just to make it work
'quickly' and the other reason was to ensure that it was interactive. I
think my implementation is useful for data visualization and basic
interaction. I tested that it works over Tor with Torbutton in Firefox
for people who don't trust freehaven or google. :-)

Here's an updated URL that runs an update of the xml file every 5 minutes:
http://freehaven.net/~ioerror/maps/v3-tormap.html

>> Which GeoIP database are you using to identify nodes in Africa?
>>   
> I am using the maxmind stuff as well, at first. If that fails it tries
> "Community Geotarget IP Project" at http://hostip.info/
> 

I used hostip at first and I found that it was unable to locate more
than one third of the nodes. As a result, I switched to maxmind because
it is easy to use and fast (local database vs. network). A combination
of both might be useful, I'm not entirely sure of the benefit. As it
stands, I have a list of 1050 routers (Tor v0.2.0.30 (r15956)) and 1050
of them are plotted somewhere on the map. I know a number of nodes are
simply lasted as 'cityname, country' or 'country' which is really not as
useful as it could be.

Thoughts?

Best,
Jacob