Chad MILLER:
If someone is spoofing them, then I reckon they are doing a good job updating them to match the (ever-increasing) revision number, now at 249-252.
I don't think anyone is "spoofing" the nickname behavior of your snap. I think these are actual running snap installations.
Downloads are anonymous, but the dashboard I have says it should be about 6000 nodes wishing to join
these are scary high numbers and the fact that no operator appears to be asking why any of these >5600 failing installations do not come online is making this even more odd-looking to me.
are these actual 6000 unique deployments? how are they counted? are endpoints submitting a unique ID to the update endpoint for the counter to work? (or are these counters just based on counting unique source IPs hitting the update endpoint? [within a day?]) do you have AS or country break downs for that number?
(though failed connectivity might remove some) and metrics.torproject.org says "at least 2000".
There are currently[1] 359 running relays with a nickname starting with "UbuntuCore" (that is more than 0.5% of the tor network's consensus weight fraction). That would be the 10th biggest tor relay operator if it were a single operator.
If someone has an idea for a veracity experiment, contact me.
What would you like to verify with an experiment?
We were in contact about this before, but maybe you could add a simple check for the existence of a file where the operator needs to add the ContactInfo and if it is not there the snap exits + adding that new requirement prominently to the snap documentation.
Then we can observe how many - disappear? - get a ContactInfo? - get the same ContactInfo? - get a random ContactInfo? - get an actual working ContactInfo?
[1] onionoo data from 2018-11-24 23:00 UTC [2] https://medium.com/@nusenu/is-this-a-ubuntu-based-botnet-deploying-tor-relay...