[tor-dev] moved from [Tor-censorship-events] Improving the censorship event detector.

["l.m" <ter.one.leeboi@xxxxxxxx>]

Hi,

As some of you may be aware, the mailing list for censorship events was recently put on hold indefinitely. This appears to be due to the detector providing too much false positive in it's current implementation. It also raises the question of the purpose for such a mailing list. Who are the stakeholders? What do they gain from an improvement?

I've read some of the documentations about this. As far as I can tell at a minimum an `improvement` in the event detector would be to:

- reduce false positives
- distinguish between tor network reachability, and tor network interference
- enable/promote client participation through the submission of results from an ephemeral test (itself having property provably correct and valid)

In order to be of use to the researchers it needs greater analysis capability. Is it enough to say censorship is detected? By this point the analysis is less interesting--because the discourse which itself lead to the tor use is probably evident (or it becomes harder to find). On the other hand, if a researcher is aware of some emerging trend they may predict the censorship event by predicting the use of tor. This may also be of use in analysis of other events.

- should detect more than just censorship
- accept input from researchers

From the tech reports it looks like Philipp has a plan for an implementation of the tests noted above. It's only the format of the results submission which is unknown.

- provide client test results to tor project developers
- make decision related data available


Regards
--leeroy
_______________________________________________
tor-dev mailing list
tor-dev@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tor-dev