On Wednesday, 20 May 2015, Speak Freely <when2plus2is5@riseup.net> wrote:
To be a bwauth you have to be a dirauth, if the bwauth draft spec I read
was correct. But how do you become a dirauth? The addresses are
hardcoded into Tor, so it's not like I could just spin up a dirauth in
an evening and let the network do the rest. There's got to be more to it.
You don't need to *be* a DirAuth, but you do need to work closely with a DirAuth to have them use your data to vote. Being a DirAuth requires an incredible amount of trust by the community, established operational skills, and usually a solid public reputation.
Right now Tor has two new BWAuths spinning up, one of which will hopefully be included in the vote this week or weekend. One of the things we're finding through the process is that the torflow scripts are a little buggy. So far they've been buggy in obvious ways, but the worry is that they're buggy in non-obvious way - that some change in the dependencies since they've been written are causing wrong results. We're not sure if that's the case yet. If it is, we will hopefully be getting an indication soon, and will want to work on debugging it, possible with the affected relay operators.
While reviewing and testing the code may be useful, I would caution against everyone spinning up a BWAuth though. By it's very nature, it uses a lot of bandwidth. I don't know if it would put strain on the network if suddenly 16 BWAuths were running instead of 6. (Maybe someone better at the math part of the network bandwidth would have an idea.)
-tom