Re: [tor-talk] large increase in .onion domains

[Roger Dingledine <arma@xxxxxxx>]

On Sun, Feb 28, 2016 at 12:01:54PM -0500, Scfith Rise up wrote:
> Now the spike is up to over 80000 domains. The Tor Project has had more
>than a few days now to analyze this,

This is true, but we don't know anything more than we did, and until
something changes we will continue to not know. My answer from earlier
still stands:
"We need to see more improvements in the field of privacy-preserving
statistics and measurements before we'll feel comfortable trying to get
answers to this question."

Also, let me clarify that it is not 80000 domains, but rather it is 80000
onion addresses worth of descriptors. There is nothing that says any of
these onion addresses ever had anything listening on them.  One person
can generate and publish thousands of onion descriptors, and the graph
would go up up up.

For many more details, here is the methodology for counting:
https://blog.torproject.org/blog/some-statistics-about-onions
and
https://research.torproject.org/techreports/extrapolating-hidserv-stats-2015-01-31.pdf

> any update or feedback regarding
>what these appear to be beyond "we need to wait and see." Personally,
>I think it is, in fact, Ricochet.

We've talked to special, the Ricochet developer, who said he didn't see
anything close to a jump in Ricochet downloads that would account for
this graph going up. My current guess is that it's just somebody
uploading a bunch of descriptors. But who knows.

--Roger

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