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

[grarpamp]

On 8/30/13, Martijn Grooten <tor at lapsedordinary.net> wrote:
> Botnets using Tor for C&C-communication isn't new either.

If it's real users electing to install whatever, that's potentially
bad news (eg: the current relay issues) because that user
choice isn't going to go away.

Though if it's due to being embedded in bots, a badly coordinated
research project, or an attack, those three cases tend be found
out and go away in time, which is good. But they're repeatable,
which isn't good.


Anyway,

https://metrics.torproject.org/users.html#direct-users
https://metrics.torproject.org/network.html#dirbytes

So right now it appears we're at 1M new users or about
2.5-3.0+ times prior steady state (in about a week and a half).

But are we? The verbage on these graphs talks of:
- request counts to select non-authority directory mirrors (users page)
- bytes rolling off the directory relays (network page)

Are these requests keyed to and counted towards unique clients
whether by ip or pki? Or is it possible a handful of 'clients' are
anonymously banging away at the dirs over Tor for fun making
it appear this way? I'll guess not due to the country data
being in the former page. Also, the former says 'refresh ... on a
regular basis', so we're not treating a sped up client as more
clients are we? I'll guess not because that would be a d-oh
oversight.


Also,

# dirbytes
"The following graph shows total written and read bytes as
well as written and read dir bytes."

No, there are not these four stated graph traces there, only
the latter two.