Collin Anderson:
> (or it's just a botnet, obviously.)
>
> On Thu, Aug 29, 2013 at 11:59 PM, Collin Anderson <collin@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
>
> > Firstly congratulations Tor; secondly this seems pretty solvable with math
> > and what not.
Dude I love math and whatnot. Maybe science too, but this isn't exactly
a controlled experiment. So whatnot it is, then! (Also plus one to you
Collin, for being awesome).
Can someone with more free time than me try to investigate one or more
of the following ideas.. You know, in the interest of whatnot?
We seem to have three competing hypotheses, sorted in order of
decreasing prior probabilities:
1. Botnet (Totally *not* run from Israel, we swear)
2. Pirate Browser (âs & PLUR guys, but get with the program: Src+Gitian FTW)
3. Censorship/sudden unrest (sudden+globally coordinated? Seems unlikely)
Breaking down the math and whatnot for each case:
1. If this was a botnet:
A) The change in user counts for each country should be proportional
to the installation base of some infectable software population
for that country. Can we start with the easy ones with lots of
public data on them, such as Windows, Flash, or Java?
B) Weird that we saw no new countries. Why? Is this just a canary
test to see if we'd fall over? Can we check for correlations
between our change in userbase per-country and the current number
of Internet users per-country too, to see if that matches?
C) People on IRC have suggested there is correlation to work hours.
Does this actually apply to countries with atypical work weeks
and holidays? (Is some popular corporate/work-group software the
target here?)
2. If this was Pirate Browser:
A) The change in user counts should be proportional to their existing
userbase
B) There may be some additional weighting with their censorship areas
C) Do our numbers should correlate with their download counts for PBB?
Would any of the Pirate Bay crew care to leak the us your numbers for
that? Pastebins are fine. We won't ask too many questions and whatnot.
3. If this is widespread local censorship/unrest:
A) No level of censorship/social unrest happens across 91 countries at
once. Justify your existence, meme.
P.S. To the bot-herders who are totally not Israeli: Our network can't
scale as well as anything you can infect this fast. It will fall over,
and when it does, the whole Internet will be looking for you. Maybe you
should chillax a bit and consider running your own mix network. Good
luck! ;)
> > I downloaded the direct connecting users csv and created a
> > spreadsheet between the start of the month and the end. It seems that it
> > was the confluence of many states increasing their censorship of the
> > Internet, especially instances like Vietnam and Facebook. Here is the raw
> > data:
> >
> >
> > https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0Amq69Ncu9Fp_dDlFYWhDZlNCTkdfWGhFWGlCOWFFNWc&usp=sharing
--
Mike Perry
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