[tor-project] Exit probability

[David Goulet]

Hello everyone!

A bit of context. Since November 2015, I've setup a Munin server that graphs
some Tor network monitoring. You can have a look here:

http://ygzf7uqcusp4ayjs.onion/tor-health/tor-health/index.html

This email is about one of those graphs which is the Exit probability in the
world. The graph has it per-continent. Here is a link to a graph with the full
data since the start of my monitoring:

http://ygzf7uqcusp4ayjs.onion/static/dynazoom.html?cgiurl_graph=/munin-cgi/munin-cgi-graph&plugin_name=tor-health/tor-health/relays_exit_per_continent&size_x=800&size_y=400&start_epoch=1432646460&stop_epoch=1467206460

(Fun fact, the "Unknown" one is the IPpredator relay in "Liberia" ;)
https://atlas.torproject.org/#details/BC630CBBB518BE7E9F4E09712AB0269E9DC7D626

As you can see, Europe has been very dominant but lately it has grown from
~80% to 85% in the last month. While North America is going down from ~15% to
10%.

I could do the exercise of graphing the top 10 countries in Europe that we
exit but I _bet_ we'll end up with mostly 3 countries, Germany, France and
Netherlands. (I might do this experiment actually.)

To be honest, this is something that concerns me because this trend is going
up for running Exits in Europe. Maybe it's because of attack on Exit relays in
US? Maybe Snowden effect of USA == bad? Maybe hosting providers are too
expensive in the North America? Maybe tor-servers/nos-oignons are too
effective :)? I honestly don't know but that's not healthy in the long run. Of
course having more in Africa and South America for starters would be amazing
but that's another fight I feel like.

Could we think of some outreach we could do maybe a blog post about the
importance of location diversity in Exits? That running relays in the US is
actually OK? or maybe just the fact that people have to stop using OVH (well
OVH has a data center now in Montreal so NA!) or Hetzner or Linode? Or since
Europe as a lot of countries thus multiple jurisdictions it's fine to have
85%? (is it really true with EU laws?)

There. Thoughts?

Cheers!
David
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