[tor-bugs] #19118 [Metrics/Onionoo]: Add organization name to each relay
Tor Bug Tracker & Wiki
blackhole at torproject.org
Fri May 27 14:40:26 UTC 2016
#19118: Add organization name to each relay
-----------------------------+-----------------------------------
Reporter: virgil | Owner: karsten
Type: enhancement | Status: needs_information
Priority: Medium | Milestone:
Component: Metrics/Onionoo | Version:
Severity: Normal | Resolution:
Keywords: hardening | Actual Points:
Parent ID: | Points:
Reviewer: | Sponsor:
-----------------------------+-----------------------------------
Comment (by karsten):
Okay, let's evaluate the pros and cons of adding CAIDA data. I'm counting
pros as +1, neutrals as 0, and cons as -1. Let's see whether we'll get a
positive number here.
- The CAIDA data doesn't contain IP address ranges, so we'll have to keep
using MaxMind data in addition to CAIDA data. Okay. But that means that
CAIDA's comprehensiveness in terms of number of ASNs is meaningless to us,
because we're limited to whatever ASNs are in MaxMind data. (0)
- MaxMind contains 67 of its 2833 ASNs (not sure where your 53k number
comes from) that CAIDA does not know about. Right now we'd have
organization names for these ASNs, but once we switch over to using
CAIDA's organization names we'd provide less information there. And I'm
not willing to provide MaxMind data if CAIDA doesn't have anything for a
given ASN, because nobody will understand that, nor do I want to provide
both organization names. This is a serious problem that I don't know how
to work around cleanly. (-1)
- CAIDA data is only updated every three months, MaxMind provides a new
update every month. It already happens that people ping me because
MaxMind's data is old, and that's only going to get worse with CAIDA.
Somewhat related, MaxMind has been providing ASN data for many years now
without major issues whereas CAIDA apparently started providing data only
2 years ago. (-1)
- We'd still need to write, review, and test code to handle CAIDA's data
format. This could become a neutral if somebody submits a good patch, but
please only do that if that makes the overall sum positive, or that patch
might not get accepted. (-1)
- Operating an Onionoo server becomes a bit harder with an additional
data source to update. We want more people to run Onionoo servers at some
point, so we should make that process easier not harder. (-1)
- MaxMind indeed contains similar but not equivalent organization names
which should be exactly the same. However, the actual number is lower
than what your pairwise comparison implies, and somebody measuring
organization diversity could always use a similarity metric as yours when
looking at these strings. Anyway, CAIDA is indeed better here than
MaxMind. (1)
I'm calculating -3 as sum here. That means no. Sorry. Leaving this
ticket open for a few more days in case you have convincing arguments why
the cons I'm listing about are actually neutrals or can be turned into
pros.
--
Ticket URL: <https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/19118#comment:8>
Tor Bug Tracker & Wiki <https://trac.torproject.org/>
The Tor Project: anonymity online
More information about the tor-bugs
mailing list