[tor-relays] UbuntuCore relays

[nusenu]

Chad MILLER:
> If someone is spoofing them, then I reckon they are doing a good job
> updating them to match the (ever-increasing) revision number, now at
> 249-252.

I don't think anyone is "spoofing" the nickname behavior
of your snap. I think these are actual running snap installations.


> Downloads are anonymous, but the dashboard I have says it should be about
> 6000 nodes wishing to join

these are scary high numbers and the fact that no operator appears to be asking why any of
these >5600 failing installations do not come online is making this even more odd-looking to me.

are these actual 6000 unique deployments? how are they counted?
are endpoints submitting a unique ID to the update endpoint for the counter to work? 
(or are these counters just based on counting unique source IPs hitting the update endpoint? [within a day?])
do you have AS or country break downs for that number?

> (though failed connectivity might remove some)
> and metrics.torproject.org says "at least 2000".

There are currently[1] 359 running relays with a nickname starting with "UbuntuCore" 
(that is more than 0.5% of the tor network's consensus weight fraction).
That would be the 10th biggest tor relay operator if it were a single 
operator.

> If someone has an idea for a veracity experiment, contact me.
What would you like to verify with an experiment?

We were in contact about this before, but maybe you could add a simple
check for the existence of a file where the operator needs to add the ContactInfo
and if it is not there the snap exits + adding that new requirement prominently 
to the snap documentation.

Then we can observe how many 
- disappear?
- get a ContactInfo? 
- get the same ContactInfo?
- get a random ContactInfo?
- get an actual working ContactInfo?


[1] onionoo data from 2018-11-24 23:00 UTC
[2] https://medium.com/@nusenu/is-this-a-ubuntu-based-botnet-deploying-tor-relays-and-bridges-b4ce1a612039
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