tl;dr: Low-load measurements coming; no action needed unless you would like to opt out.
Hi all,
Next week (week of 2021-05-31), we will be starting a wide-scale measurement of the latencies between relays on the Tor network for a research project; these measurements will last an estimated 1-2 months. We have the permission of the Tor Research Safety Board and this information will ultimately be used to improve the network. Further, the load at any one time on the Tor network from these measurements will be limited and negligible (approximately the same load as the start-up tests of a few new Tor clients). We are coordinating with the currently-running speed test[1], and will start our measurements after the conclusion of this speed test. If you operate a relay and would like to opt out of these measurements, please send us an email (shortor@csail.mit.edu) including the fingerprint of your relay(s). We will stop sending you traffic and, if the test has begun, delete past measurements involving your relay(s). Status updates will be posted publicly[2], and we will bump this thread before we start and if anything important changes. Please contact shortor@csail.mit.edu with any questions.
Regards, Zack Newman (on behalf of the ShorTor team)
[1] https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-relays/2021-May/019649.html [2] https://people.csail.mit.edu/zjn/tor.txt