Karsten Loesing, 21.05.2012 11:05:
Here we go with the similarities of bridge and relay nicknames.
Thanks for spending this much time on the analysis!
I could have done far worse, but also a lot better in terms of time spend on extracting the data that I wanted or at least considered that they'd might be useful.
Sometimes I'm just slow at things, e.g. writing this reply.
Here's what I did with your findings.txt:
- extract unique fingerprint pairs of relays and bridges that you found
as having similar nicknames,
- look through descriptor archives to see if relay and bridge were
running in the same /24 at any time in May 2008, and
- determine the absolute and relative number of bridges in a given
network status that could have been located via nickname similarity.
Results are that 24 of your 81 guesses (30%) were correct in the sense that a bridge was at least once running in the same /24 as the relay with similar nickname. At any time in May 2008, you'd have located between 1 and 6 bridges (2.5% to 18%) with 3 bridges (10%) in the mean via nickname similarity.
Not too bad.
I think it's acceptable to publish more recent bridge descriptors with nicknames in a week from now. Results may look quite different with 1000 bridges instead of 30.
May 2008 was the first month with bridges. I expected lot's of relay operators that tested a bridge with the same name. Things may have changed over time. I assume that further comparisons won't have such a "high" hit ratio.
Again, thanks for running this analysis! Maybe you're interested in automating your comparison and re-running it for a 2012 tarball?
My claim was you got the data, so you can check. (Not with May 2008)
To be honest, my first impression was that I wouldn't do anything useful and did not intend to do that. I guessed it wouldn't turn out that it doesn't hurt since at least 2011, so I wouldn't find anything good.
Then you asked and I agreed, but already thought "I couldn't keep my mouth shut!". I mean I replied to this topic. I surely could have said no there. I didn't.
After and while I was doing what I did. I would have said no to the question if I'm going to do this again. That's valid for up to Sunday night. Today I'm agreeing again.
That's a pretty long way to say: Yes!
Thank you,it's an 2012 tarball. The number of bridges is scary.
I'm going to upload some files somewhere and explain what I did. Step by step (somewhat around that). So anyone can check and reproduce what I did. It would be nice to hear feedback and ways to improve the way I did what I did.
Maybe you can tell me if the findings.txt was alright.
Unless one objects or you disagree I'm going to upload the files I created and explain how and maybe I can say even why.
I created a Blog, just because I wanted it some when in the past, but found it silly. That's the channel I planed to use. Maybe it's OK to put it on a Tor-List as well, but maybe it's considered as noise.
Thanks, Karsten
Thank you, Sebastian