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(split from 'Qualities of a good relay' thread)

I run a relay in Japan on a gigabit connection, but nobody cares too much, since (I assume) bwauths aren't anywhere near Japan and do not get good speeds to it, they give it a low weight, and as a result it doesn't see a lot of use.

Lets say the BW auth is located on your LAN and gives you "1GBit/s" measurements, that would increase the likelihood that clients choose you but if your 1GBit/s uplink is limited to your city/country and the international uplink is eg. 100MBit/s than the measurement value alone wouldn't help much for non-JP partners, no?

At least clients in JP would have an measurement value that matches reality better.

Actually it would indeed be fancy to have location-aware measurement clients.

Clients in Asia would consider asian* bw auth measurements to be more important than measurements from non-asian bw auths, but this presumably performance improvement would likely reduce anonymity properties as clients in JP would more likely choose guards in JP. Attackers targeting JP clients would than be in a better position because they could start guards in JP only and have a higher likelihood of being chosen as guards by a JP client (their targets).

performance vs. privacy trade-off as usual. ..and the bw auth system is currently (hopefully) undergoing other changes to prevent recent problems from happening again.

I just saw that JP has a guard probability of 0%. (at the same time JP is in the top 10 countries of directly connecting tor users.)

Out of 132 relays in JP, there are only 3 guard relays and these 3 are exits as well so they are used as exits only.

Your relatively fresh jp relay had the guard flag once for a short period of time, but lost it again - probably due to the last restart. So maybe its usage will rise once it is done with the bootstrapping phase and had the guard flag over a few months.

btw: Thanks for running the biggest declared family (by consensus weight) on the tor network!

*) there is no bw auth in Asia in reality, current locations: +----------+-----------+---------------+---------+ | nickname | city_name | region_name | country | +----------+-----------+---------------+---------+ | moria1 | Cambridge | Massachusetts | us | | gabelmoo | Erlangen | Bavaria | de | | longclaw | NULL | NULL | us | | maatuska | NULL | NULL | se | +----------+-----------+---------------+---------+