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Hi everyone,

Jens asked me to forward this email here, so that other people can follow the recent changes we made to ExoneraTor.

https://exonerator.torproject.org/

Harmony did a wonderful job summarizing these changes even more in this week's TWN issue. Thanks, harmony!

Of course, if you're curious about the details, be sure to check out the commits and/or tickets:

https://gitweb.torproject.org/exonerator.git/

https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/query?status=!closed&component=...

All the best, Karsten

- -------- Forwarded Message -------- Subject: Changes to ExoneraTor for this week's TWN Date: Wed, 15 Jul 2015 12:51:17 +0200 From: Karsten Loesing karsten@torproject.org To: harmony harmony01@riseup.net CC: Tor Assistants tor-assistants@lists.torproject.org

Hi harmony,

here's a quick overview of improvements made to ExoneraTor in the past days in no specific order:

- Restrict searches to dates: Rather than allowing searches by timestamp we restrict searches to full dates. Most people don't understand timezones nor that all our dates and times are in UTC. Letting them specify a precise time makes it more likely that they'll search for the wrong thing. The timezone problem doesn't go away by limiting searches to full days (if their incident happened on February 17 at 9pm EST, would they know that it was already February 18 in UTC?). But we can easily widen searches to +/- 1 day. The technical details still contain hours.

- No raw descriptors anymore: We stopped processing server descriptors and linking raw descriptors in the latest version of ExoneraTor. The idea was to simplify the service and make it useful for the average user who doesn't care about this level of detail. And it's a good opportunity to prevent the database from growing even larger.

- No target addresses and ports anymore: If there's a result to the question "Was there a Tor relay running on this IP address?", do not offer a subsequent form to answer the question "Was this relay configured to permit exiting to a given target?". The second search increases complexity of searches a bit, and it's unlikely that people would interpret results correctly. The technical details now contain an "Exit" column that indicates whether a relay permitted transit of Tor traffic to the open Internet at that time.

- New non-technical explanations of Tor and ExoneraTor: We rewrote the text that explains what Tor is and what ExoneraTor does, and we tried to make it as non-technical and still accurate as possible.

- Translations: There's now a translation to German, and we're currently making plans for adding more translations. The difficulty is that we'll want those translations to also be as non-technical and still accurate as possible.

- New design: We're now using a basic Bootstrap design which is already much cleaner than the previous design, but which still leaves room for improvement.

Hope I didn't miss anything important. Please feel free to pick whatever you find most important, and feel free to rephrase as needed. Sorry, gotta run!

Thanks!

All the best, Karsten