[network-health] Queries about user statistic on Tor Metrics

[Georg Koppen]

Hello!

Nowshin, Nafisa:
> Hello,
> 
> I am a graduate student at Oregon State University doing research on
> digital privacy and security. My advisor is Dr. Glencora Borradaile. We are
> trying to use tor metrics data in order to understand the reason why people
> are connecting to tor and if it is because of some external motivation (the
> topic of our research) or because they are regular users. Looking at the
> user statistics available in tor metrics website, we had a few questions we
> wanted to clarify.
> 
> 1. How frequently tor browsers send out update pings? Is there a fixed
> frequency or do they vary over time?
> 2. Are update pings sent every time a user opens their browser or only when
> new updates are pushed to the tor browser?

To answer both questions at once, there are two mechanisms at play here:

1. Update pings are sent whenever the user opens their browser. You can
see that for yourself in the browser console (Ctrl + Shift + J) after
setting `extensions.torbutton.loglevel` to `3` on `about:config` and
restarting Tor Browser. The requests to look for are those to

https://aus1.torproject.org/torbrowser/update_3/release

which is where our updates are hosted.

2. If you have Tor Browser open for a long time you won't hit the
condition under 1. Thus, there is a second mechanism available governed
by the `app.update.interval` preference, which is set to 43200 seconds
on the stable channel and 7200 seconds on the other ones and firing
accordingly.

Hope this helps.

> Thank you for your time.

No worries and you are welcome. Let us know if there are other
questions/things we can help with.

Georg

> Regards
> 
> Nafisa Nowshin
> Graduate Assistant
> School of EECS, Oregon State University
> 
> 
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> network-health at lists.torproject.org
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> 


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