[tor-relays] Bots, love 'em or hate 'em?

[Roger Dingledine]

On Mon, Sep 07, 2015 at 10:30:38AM -0400, starlight.2015q3 at binnacle.cx wrote:
> This is curious:  Appears a large number of Tor
> client-bots have set
> 
>     UseEntryGuards 0
> 
> From current relays that have never had the guard flag:
> 
> extra-info moep DA8C1123CDB3ACD3B36CD7E7CEFBEA685DED2276
> entry-ips us=360,de=296,fr=232,it=192,es=160,jp=104,ru=104,br=96,ir=96. . .

These are likely clients using a version from before we introduced
directory guards. So they probably use entry guards like normal, and
they just choose relays at random to fetch their directory info.

This is why relays report dirreq-v3-reqs lines (number of v3 consensus
requests) in their extra-info descriptors too, and not just total
connection counts.

Hope that helps,
--Roger