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

[mirimir]

On 09/04/2013 06:06 AM, Asa Rossoff wrote:

>>From mirimir:
>> On 09/04/2013 02:09 AM, Collin Anderson wrote:
>>
>>> On Tue, Sep 3, 2013 at 9:39 PM, mirimir <mirimir at riseup.net> wrote:
>>>
>>>> I wonder what it might mean.
>>>>
>>>
>>> I don't believe much, Syria's increase was relatively marginal and
>>> potentially related to normal trends of weekly or holiday use. For the
> most
>>> party, suspect countries have increased orders of magnitude in users --
>>> Syria is only a few percent and it's decreased since.
>>
>> Huh? Syria went from ca. 1e+3 in late June 2013 to over 4e+3, initially
>> a spike in early July, and then plateauing in early August.
>>
>> That's hardly a few percent. It's a factor of four. And that's plainly
>> obvious from the Tor metrics site:
> ...
> 
> I agree there is an anomoly in Syrian usage, but it appears independent of
> the overall anomoly.
> 
> Since it occurred first, it's conceivable that Syria was a testing ground
> for a botnet or that events in Syria indepently created either an increase
> in local Tor demand or accessibility.

That's true.

> Reviewing known Syrian political and war events occurring, as well as the
> Muslim and Syrian holiday and festival calendars, as well as reviewing Tor
> usage data worldwide, and a sampling of major news stories related to
> privacy and encryption, I came up with something of a timeline, although I
> draw no conclusions from it.

Thank you very much for the summary. Taking a broader view, I agree that
the changes in Syrian Tor usage might be independent of the global surge.

https://metrics.torproject.org/users.html?graph=direct-users&start=2010-01-01&end=2013-09-04&country=sy&events=off#direct-users

SNIP