Re: [tor-talk] Surge in Users

[Roger Dingledine <arma@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Thu, Jun 06, 2019 at 01:21:09PM +0300, Van Gegel wrote:
> Take into account that statistics are number of unique user's IPs
>connected to bridges per day. My cellular provider change my local GPRS
>IP exactly every hour and my external IP also changed to random value of
>provider's pool. Each time IP was changed my Tor rebuild 3 new circuits
>to introduction points of mounted HS. So one mobile app with HS can
>generate 24*3 connecting events per day.

No, this is not right. Bridges and relays collect two kinds of aggregated
statistics -- total IP addresses they've seen over the time period,
and total consensus fetches they've seen over the time period.

Clients fetch a new consensus networkstatus document every couple of
hours, so you can get a count of the number of Tor clients that are
running, no matter how many different IP addresses they have, or how
many entry guards they use.

It's still not perfect, (a) because you'll overcount users like Tails
who don't keep state, if they reboot many times per hour, and (b)
because you'll undercount users who don't stay online for the whole
day, which is potentially a huge undercounting for countries like Iran
where a good chunk of users are using dialup or internet cafes or other
transient connections.

See also
https://gitweb.torproject.org/metrics-web.git/tree/src/main/resources/doc/users-q-and-a.txt
as linked from
https://metrics.torproject.org/userstats-relay-country.html
and there's lots more at
https://research.torproject.org/techreports/

And for that second category of undercounting, see this totally different
method for estimating the total number of Tor users, which at the time
estimated a much larger 8 million daily Tor users compared to the 2
million daily users that our older metrics approach estimated:
https://www.ohmygodel.com/publications/tor-usage-imc18.pdf

--Roger

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