Tor Metrics consists of several services that work together to collect, aggregate, and present data from the Tor network and related services. We're always looking for ways to improve, and we recently completed a project, the main points of which are included in this post, to document our pipeline and identify areas that could benefit from modernization.
The Tor network is comprised of thousands of volunteer-run relays around the world, and millions of people rely on it for privacy and freedom online everyday. To monitor the Tor network's performance, detect attacks on it, and better distribute load across the network, we employ what we call Tor bandwidth scanners.
Tor 0.4.0.4-rc is the first release candidate in its series; it fixes several bugs from earlier versions, including some that had affected stability, and one that prevented relays from working with NSS.
There's a new alpha release available for download. If you build Tor from source, you can download the source code for 0.4.0.3-alpha from the usual place on the website. Packages should be available over the coming weeks, with a new alpha Tor Browser release some time in the coming weeks.
Remember, this is an alpha release: you should only run this if you'd like to find and report more bugs than usual.
Tor 0.4.0.3-alpha is the third in its series; it fixes several small bugs from earlier versions.
Changes in version 0.4.0.3-alpha - 2019-03-22
Minor features (address selection):
Treat the subnet 100.64.0.0/10 as public for some purposes; private for others. This subnet is the RFC 6598 (Carrier Grade NAT) IP range, and is deployed by many ISPs as an alternative to RFC 1918 that does not break existing internal networks. Tor now blocks SOCKS and control ports on these addresses and warns users if client ports or ExtORPorts are listening on a RFC 6598 address. Closes ticket 28525. Patch by Neel Chauhan.
Minor features (geoip):
Update geoip and geoip6 to the March 4 2019 Maxmind GeoLite2 Country database. Closes ticket 29666.
As technology shapes many parts of our lives, we believe it needs to be built in a way that makes the world a better place. For this, we need everybody’s voice and perspective when making technical and political decisions at Tor.