Re: [tor-talk] Tor users in US up by nearly 100,000 this month

[Duncan]

Hi Ryan,

Ryan Carboni:
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebookcorewwwi.onion
> 
> I find it hard to believe that you cannot make use of any informal
> relationships to make a meatspace query on valid Tor usage estimates.

Can you expand on what you mean by this? What sort of "informal"
relationships are you considering? If I decide to phone up a friend at
Akamai or Cloudflare, there's no guarantee that CDNs like these keep
statistics about Tor users (and differentiate between bots and humans),
or that they'd want to share this. Maybe they think it would give their
competitors information about their business e.g. its size (whether
that's a valid concern is another matter entirely).

As for the terminology "meatspace", I don't think it's useful to
differentiate between "online" and "offline". The internet is life. It's
a matter of language but I do think it's important.

If I wanted to do it as a research project, the information would
probably need to be given in a more formal manner by these CDNs, or
collected by oneself. I think it would be interesting to devise such an
experiment, and work out a way to differentiate between bots. This
entire thread should give you plenty of ideas - I encourage you to make
something out of these questions!

> People do not exist in isolation, and this meme that no private sector
> individual has knowledge on Tor ignores that Tor's often outdated
> documentation itself makes RTFM invalid.
> 

I wouldn't call it a meme. While people don't exist in isolation,
whether they want to give up information about their usage (or would be
more or less likely to go on sites explicitly advertising they're
measuring whether they're a bot or not) is another matter entirely. I'm
honestly not sure about the ethics of measuring this, either.

Best,
Duncan
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Re: [tor-talk] Tor users in US up by nearly 100,000 this month

[Seth David Schoen]

Roger Dingledine writes:

> Asking Cloudflare how many people are deciding to solve their captchas
> today is measuring a different thing -- if I try to load a news article,
> see a cloudflare captcha, and say "aw, fuck cloudflare, oh well" and
> move on, am I a bot?

I'm just figuring that you can get useful relative rather than absolute
metrics if you assume that people's tendency to do this is relatively
stable across time and across user populations.  So you don't know how
many of the non-solvers are bots, but you can say that the solvers are
up 10% this month or something, which perhaps then suggests that non-bot
Tor users are up about 10% this month.

This still wouldn't reveal whether 60% or 95% of the non-solvers are
bots.

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Re: [tor-talk] Tor users in US up by nearly 100,000 this month

[Ryan Carboni]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebookcorewwwi.onion

I find it hard to believe that you cannot make use of any informal
relationships to make a meatspace query on valid Tor usage estimates.
People do not exist in isolation, and this meme that no private sector
individual has knowledge on Tor ignores that Tor's often outdated
documentation itself makes RTFM invalid.
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Re: [tor-talk] Tor users in US up by nearly 100,000 this month

[Roger Dingledine]

On Fri, Sep 01, 2017 at 08:08:30PM -0700, Seth David Schoen wrote:
> I'd be happy to ask CloudFlare if they'd be willing to share this data
> (maybe in relative rather than absolute numeric terms, like "the number
> of people successfully completing a CAPTCHA per day from a Tor exit
> node on September 1, 2017 is x% of what it was on January 1, 2016").

If you're thinking in that direction, I would suggest asking Akamai
instead. The question is "how many people are connecting from known Tor
IP addresses to your sites?"

Asking Cloudflare how many people are deciding to solve their captchas
today is measuring a different thing -- if I try to load a news article,
see a cloudflare captcha, and say "aw, fuck cloudflare, oh well" and
move on, am I a bot?

--Roger

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Re: [tor-talk] Tor users in US up by nearly 100,000 this month

[Seth David Schoen]

Scfith Riseup writes:

> Nope.
>
> Indication that Tor in use uptick unfortunately could point to more
> bots collecting Tor, not necessarily people using Tor. Wish there was
> a way to differentiate bots from meat.

Amusingly, CloudFlare would probably be in a position to do so because
they present many Tor users with CAPTCHAs.  While this has annoyed Tor
users quite a bit, if we assume that

* old and new Tor users are about equally likely to attempt the CAPTCHA
* old and new Tor users are about equally likely to pass it
* old and new users visit a similar proportion of CloudFlare-hosted sites
  via Tor exits
* CAPTCHAs are relatively effective at preventing access by bots
* CloudFlare keeps logs that clearly identify total volumes of successful
  CAPTCHA completion from Tor exit nodes

then CloudFlare would have good, meaningful data about trends in human
use of Tor.  They wouldn't know the overall volume of human or bot use
of Tor, but they could tell pretty accurately when human use is up or
down and by what fraction.

One confounding factor would arise if the new users are significantly
more or less likely than old users to use onion services.

I'd be happy to ask CloudFlare if they'd be willing to share this data
(maybe in relative rather than absolute numeric terms, like "the number
of people successfully completing a CAPTCHA per day from a Tor exit
node on September 1, 2017 is x% of what it was on January 1, 2016").

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Re: [tor-talk] Tor users in US up by nearly 100,000 this month

[Scfith Riseup]

Nope. 

Indication that Tor in use uptick unfortunately could point to more bots 
collecting Tor, not necessarily people using Tor. Wish there was a way to 
differentiate bots from meat. 

Cheers. 

> On Sep 1, 2017, at 7:35 PM, James  wrote:
> 
> Ryan Carboni:
>> I think the graph speaks for itself. Tor usage is becoming a lot more
>> widespread.
>> 
>> https://metrics.torproject.org/userstats-relay-country.html?start=2017-08-03=2017-09-01=us=off
> 
> so is linux:
> 
> https://www.netmarketshare.com/operating-system-market-share.aspx
> 
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Re: [tor-talk] Tor users in US up by nearly 100,000 this month

[James]

Ryan Carboni:
> I think the graph speaks for itself. Tor usage is becoming a lot more
> widespread.
>
> https://metrics.torproject.org/userstats-relay-country.html?start=2017-08-03=2017-09-01=us=off

so is linux:

https://www.netmarketshare.com/operating-system-market-share.aspx

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