Re: [tor-relays] Simplifying ExoneraTor

[Karsten Loesing <karsten@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

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On 04/07/15 10:55, David Serrano wrote:
> On 2015-07-02 09:40:31 (+0200), Karsten Loesing wrote:
>> 
>> Julius and I have been working on a design mockup for the
>> ExoneraTor service for the past few months and would want to hear
>> what you think about this:
>> 
>> https://people.torproject.org/~karsten/volatile/exonerator-mockup/
>
>> 
> Good job! This new page looks a lot fresher.

Glad you like it!

> Logo: I'd like a version of the third one in which the fingerprints
> were more or less aligned to the onion layers on the original Tor
> logo, keeping the correct perspective and all that.

Added as *quickly* drawn logo suggestion number 4.

> Dates: I was going to suggest 3 separate comboboxes to prevent
> users from entering wrong formats, but if Joshua's solution works
> without javascript, then it's a killer. Would be nice that the
> fallback on older browsers were those 3 combos.

I'm not sure if that's possible, but I added it to the open discussion
points for when we work on implementing the new web design.

> Results: do we really need the "Exit: yes" column? Seems pretty
> redundant to me.

I think this is answered later in this thread.  We should probably
keep that column.  Not sure if exiting to at least one of the two
ports 80 and 443 justifies having that column set to yes.  But
assuming we can figure out good criteria there, having this
information might be useful.

> Also, there seems to be 24 rows with white background, then 24 with
> light grey bg. If the search returns eg. 30 results, then only the
> last 6 would be in grey, and users could potentially think there's
> something special about those. I'd use a much smaller number, eg. 5
> at most, so it's obvious that the background is just there for
> aesthetic reasons.

Ah, the highlighted rows contain results for the searched date,
whereas the other rows are for the previous and next date.  The idea
is to always search +/- 1 day in order not to rely on users figuring
out timezones correctly.  Maybe the highlighting is too implicit
though.  I'll leave it out.  It's not worth explaining to users what
the highlighting is about, and it's particularly not worth confusing
users with it.

>> The main idea behind this redesign was to simplify the existing 
>> ExoneraTor service by omitting technical details (e.g., Tor
>> descriptor contents) and removing mostly unused features (e.g.,
>> parsing detailed exit policies).
> 
> Maybe a link to a "Technical details" could still be kept for the
> most weirdos among us :), containing some more details. Not the
> full gore we have now, but something like platform, bandwidth, exit
> policy... things that could be explained to your sister in 5
> minutes.

I guess you'd rather use Globe or Atlas to explain such details to
your sister.  (Note that it's not possible to link to those services
from ExoneraTor, because they only display relay details for relays
running in the past 7 days.)

The ExoneraTor service has a specific set of users in mind that want
to investigate whether or prove that a given IP address was a relay at
a certain time weeks or months ago.  If this task requires looking at
raw Tor descriptors we should provide them, together with tools to
verify cryptographic signatures and a probably long FAQ.  But my
understanding is that it's easier to process these descriptors
internally and provide them in a table view that can be consumed by
humans.  I think the typical use case is to look up an address and
print out (to PDF, hopefully) the result.

Another reason for leaving out technical details is that they're
making the database behind ExoneraTor huge.  I'd like to kick out all
raw descriptors unless we really need them.

Oh, and if a technical person really cares about raw descriptors,
they're all available on https://collector.torproject.org/.  But those
people don't need the ExoneraTor service anyway.

> Just my 2sat,

Very helpful.  Thanks for your feedback!

All the best,
Karsten

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