Re: [tor-talk] Many more Tor users in the past week?

["Asa Rossoff" <asa@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

From Roger Dingledine:
> On Tue, Sep 03, 2013 at 11:06:54PM -0700, Asa Rossoff wrote:
>> Timeline through August 31
>
> Hi Asa,
>
> Thanks for the timeline! Here are a few notes.

Hi Roger :)

>
>> * February, a dramatic, roughly ten-fold decrease in Syrian directly
>> connnecting Tor users.
>
> This was a censoring event I believe. The vanilla Tor TLS handshake
> has been unreliable from inside Syria for much of 2013. Users are much
> happier using obfs2 or obfs3, and we don't have much in the way of stats
> for those yet.
> https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/5040
>
>> * August 13, Report that PirateBrowser had reached more than 100,000
direct
>> downloads, had 5,000 seeds on its major torrent, and was continuing to
>> average "well over 1,000 downloads per hour".
>
>> For comparison, Tor sees 40+ million downloads of TBB a year from its
> website. So careful jumping to conclusions about how many Pirate Browser
> users there are based on how many downloads they counted. :)

Good point.  If 40 million TBB's a year = 500,000 direct user average...
Let's say, generously, that PirateBrowser got 150,000 acquisitions in one
way or another in those first 3 days (50,000 a day, 1.5 times the number of
direct downloads) and continued to do so through the end of the month
(50,000/day From 8/10 through 8/31 = 50,000 x 21 downloads = 1.05 million
downloads).  Let's assume a scenario where PirateBrowser users are likely to
immediately start using the software and have a directly-connected to
download ratio on any given day of 1.5 times the prior usual Tor user.  For
the sake of argument.  Let's assume the usual Tor user updates their TBB 2
times per year (pulling this out of my hat).  So the number of prior Tor
downloaders would be 40 million downloads / 2 = 20 million.  With 500,000
directly connected users, that's 1/40 of the downloaders being connected.
Assuming, for no particular reason, that PirateBrowser downloaders are
connected 1.5 times as much as TBB users per download, that means 1/26.67
PirateBrowser downloads are connected. Of the generous assumption of 1.05
million PirateBrowser downloads by August 31, that would have 39,375 (~
40,000) PirateBrowser users connected on August 31.

Since direct Tor connected users increased from ~500,000 to ~2,350,000 on
August 31: 40,000 new users would only account for about 2% of the total
number of added users.  Even if I wasn't generous enough by a long stretch,
and a million PirateBrowser users are connected -- and that really seems a
stretch -- that would only account for somewhat over half of the new users.

Asa

-- 
tor-talk mailing list - tor-talk@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
To unsusbscribe or change other settings go to
https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tor-talk