[tor-project] March 2019 report and April 2019 plans for the metrics team

[Karsten Loesing]

Hello Tor, hello world!

Below you'll find the highlights of Tor metrics team work done in March
2019 as well as a few expected highlights for the current month, April 2019.

On behalf of the Tor metrics team,
Karsten


March 2019:

Attempted to upgrade TorDNSEL [1] from GHC 7.6 to 8.0 in order to
migrate this service from Debian Jessie to Stretch. This attempt is
currently stalled due to difficulties with replacing the deprecated and
removed Data.HashTable with the hashtables package. If you're a Haskell
developer willing to help us with this, please let us know!

 [1] https://gitweb.torproject.org/tordnsel.git/

Published a technical report on Tor Metrics Data Collection,
Aggregation, and Presentation [2] which concludes our work for Sponsor
13 [3].

 [2]
https://research.torproject.org/techreports/metrics-evaluation-2019-03-25.pdf
 [3] https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/org/sponsors/Sponsor13

Discussed an extended data format for exit lists [4].

 [4] https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/29624

Deployed changes to the daily updater for Tor Metrics visualizations
which run as a Java-only process now rather than separate Java/Python/R
processes executed by Ant [5].

 [5] https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/29166

Presented Tor Metrics at the Scottish Networking Event [6].

 [6] http://scone.cs.st-andrews.ac.uk/wiki/

Attended IETF 104 [7] and presented an Internet Draft on Guidelines for
Performing Safe Measurement on the Internet [8].

 [7] https://www.ietf.org/how/meetings/104/
 [8]
https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-learmonth-pearg-safe-internet-measurement/


April 2019:

Either upgrade TorDNSEL enough to run on Debian Stretch, or write a
replacement in Python. If both plans fail, possible alternatives range
from accepting ownership of the Stretch VM to accepting that Tor's exit
list scanner gets shut down without replacement.

Continue analysis and visualization of worst-case performance and
failure cases as measured by OnionPerf [9, 10, 11, 12, 13].

 [9] https://bugs.torproject.org/29743
 [10] https://bugs.torproject.org/29744
 [11] https://bugs.torproject.org/29772
 [12] https://bugs.torproject.org/29773
 [13] https://bugs.torproject.org/29787

Next metrics team meeting times (with short-term changes announced on
the metrics-team@ mailing list):

 * Thursday, 11th April 2019 15:00 UTC
 * Thursday, 18th April 2019 15:00 UTC
 * Thursday, 25th April 2019 15:00 UTC

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