[tor-talk] Many more Tor users in the past week?

[Paul Syverson]

On Tue, Aug 27, 2013 at 11:24:18AM -0400, grarpamp wrote:
> On Tue, Aug 27, 2013 at 3:08 AM, Roger Dingledine <arma at mit.edu> wrote:
> > Check out
> > https://metrics.torproject.org/users.html
> > The number of Tor clients running appears to have doubled since August 19:
> > And it's not just a fluke in the metrics data -- it appears that
> > there really are twice as many Tor clients running as before:
> > https://metrics.torproject.org/network.html#dirbytes
> >
> > There's a slight increase (worsening) in the performance measurements:
> > https://metrics.torproject.org/performance.html
> > but it's hard to say if that's a real difference. So while there are a
> > bunch of new Tor clients running, it would seem they're not doing much.
> >
> > Anybody know details? It's easy to speculate (Pirate Browser publicity
> > gone overboard? People finally reading about the NSA thing? Botnet?),
> > but some good solid facts would sure be useful.
> 
> Too big a double in under a week for me to believe it's natural growth
> based on news or some promo somewhere. I'd guess it got included
> in some app. A botnet fits perfect, try a blog post and something
> off to a white-hat list. Or its some sort of analysis/attack/flood
> against the dirs.

Or somebody's research experiment gone awry, or behaving predictably
but that they didn't think a concern worth mentioning, or...

Malicious stuff happens, but most of the time these things are
incompetence or similar rather than malicious intent.
Until we know more, it's important to keep that in mind.

-Paul