Tor usage doubles in under a week, and no one knows why

Re:Tor usage doubles in under a week, and no one knows why by jchung on Thursday August 29, 2013 @03:43PM (#6298153)

I was initially worried about end-to-end traffic, but saw that the exit nodes and bridges haven't increased. If Google search traffic is a fair indicator, it looks like genuine user growth is driving this. Google searches for "tor" haven't seemed to move much globally [1] but Russia saw a huge jump starting on August 16th [2].

Anyone know how to get the same info for Yandex to cross-check?

[1] http://www.google.com/trends/explore?q=tor#q=tor&date=today%...

[2] http://www.google.com/trends/explore?q=tor#q=tor&geo=RU&date...

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Re:Tor usage doubles in under a week, and no one knows why by zokier on Thursday August 29, 2013 @05:02PM (#6298595)

The RU increase is relatively minor compared to the 50-60k user increase in the US. I find it very difficult to believe that these increases represent new actual people using Tor for web. The botnet-theory seems far more likely.

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Re:Tor usage doubles in under a week, and no one knows why by TobbenTM on Friday August 30, 2013 @03:00AM (#6300570)

Using only Google search to measure the increase would not be enough though. There are other really popular search engines in russian.

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Re:Tor usage doubles in under a week, and no one knows why by avlasyuk on Thursday August 29, 2013 @04:39PM (#6298474)

This might be the reason: "Russia’s FSB mulls ban on ‘Tor’ online anonymity network" http://rt.com/politics/russia-tor-anonymizer-ban-571/

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