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by mattkirman 4678 days ago
The number of directly connecting users from Russia does appear to have doubled [1], but this can also be seen in UK user numbers [2]. For such an increase to be seen globally my hunch is that this is down to either the Pirate Browser [3] or some other software release - not necessarily a response to a particular law being passed, NSA leak etc.

[1] https://metrics.torproject.org/direct-users.png?start=2013-0...

[2] https://metrics.torproject.org/direct-users.png?start=2013-0...

[3] http://piratebrowser.com/

3 comments

Russia went up 15,000 in two weeks. But the world went up from 600k to 1.2M in the same two weeks.

https://metrics.torproject.org/users.html?graph=direct-users...

And usage from Bulgaria increased seven to eight times [1]. This is really strange, I don't know anybody who uses tor on purpose. My money is on a bittorrent client connecting automatically.

[1] https://metrics.torproject.org/direct-users.png?start=2013-0...

Interesting, similar jumps happened in every country I tried: Brazil, Vietnam, US, Argentina, South Africa.

I can't imaging the Pirate Browser thing would be immediately so popular across so many different cultures, even in countries without net censorship.

Maybe a botnet has started using Tor for connecting to a central command server? Might help explain a doubling of nodes but minimal traffic increase.