[tor-talk] Is the recent growth in Ukrainian users confusing google's geoip?

[Roger Dingledine <arma@xxxxxxx>]

Motivated by a blog post comment:
https://blog.torproject.org/comment/269237#comment-269237

It looks like a growing number of connections from Tor exits are being
treated by Google as being Ukrainian.

Anecdotally, I've experienced it too -- Google news keeps wanting to
give me Ukrainian news.

For those who haven't been paying attention, we got a jump in some
hundreds of thousands of .ua users recently:
https://metrics.torproject.org/userstats-relay-country.html?start=2017-05-01&end=2017-06-18&country=ua&events=off
and it looks like they're really users:
https://bugs.torproject.org/22369

Here's my speculation:

You know how Google's proprietary geoip system is typically better
than Maxmind's, because they data mine the heck out of their traffic,
for example by deciding that the google maps address you ask about most
is probably your home address?

I wonder if a lot of ordinary people doing ordinary things via Tor,
and acting like people in the Ukraine, has tipped Google's sekrit-sauce
machine learning decision trees into labeling those IP addresses as
being in .ua.

--Roger

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