On 20 October 2014 13:14, Pine W <wiki.pine(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Sorry, let's see if I can rephrase.
The issue is not really about the Signpost (I didn't know which person was
involved, and I wasn't planning to ask for a name; as I said up front, I am
not interested in stirring up trouble). My questions were about how to
reconcile that access with the recent discussions about instrumenting
Wikipedia to track unique readers (which I was under the impression is
still in the planning stages, so I was surprised to find out that this
already happens),
No, it doesn't. It is still in the planning stages. The reason it doesn't
currently happen (well, other than that we have historically not had any
need for it) is that fingerprinting based on user agent and IP address is
fundamentally unreliable. You cannot grab all requests from one person or
one client on a consistent basis using that.
However, if you have three million requests in five hours from one IP
address, using the same user agent each time, we can /probably say/ that
they're the same person, and actually not a person at all, based on the
information available.
This does not happen on a regular or consistent basis; it does not happen
even within the Signpost requests most of the time. I don't care what the
{ip,user_agent,referer} tuple outputs, merely how many combinations it
outputs. It's simply a very basic heuristic for "how likely is it that this
is natural traffic". Natural traffic has a wide range of tuples. Unnatural
traffic does not.
Outside of this situation (obvious spiders) the only time we have done it
(at least, when I've been on the R&D team, so since January) was for a
session analysis project that is fully documented on meta (
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Mobile_sessions) and has a
transparent codebase (
https://github.com/Ironholds/MobileSessions). As part
of that study I conducted a series of entropy tests that ascertained that
this kind of fingerprinting was completely useless for generic user habits.
how to reconcile that access with the Privacy Policy
What do you mean by this? What element of it conflicts with the privacy
policy, or in your mind, might conflict with the privacy policy? Again, I'd
like explicit statements of "I perceive that X happened", not "I have
questions about this broad domain", if possible.
and how to make sure that in the general case of
anyone accessing raw
access logs that the access itself is logged.
On the last point, to use an analogy, it's like someone accessing patient
charts in a medical facility; there might be a good
reason for a technician
to view 100s of records of patients that he/she wasn't directly involved in
treating, such as if the technician is helping to conduct a study of which
doctors prescribe which treatments most often; on the other hand, if a
technician is able to access those records at will and without that access
being logged, then this creates worrisome potential for large-scale data
harvesting for unauthorized uses without that access being noticed,
including uses by someone whose account is compromised by a third party.
Certainly. However, for someone to do this, they would have to compromise
my private SSH key - a key that lives in two machines, both of which have
full disc encryption, one to Xubuntu standards and one under cascading
AES-Twofish-Serpent. They would have to do this without me noticing and
immediately reporting it to Operations and having my keys revoked. They
would then have to navigate to the one specific cluster of machines able to
access these logs (which live behind a bastion), and, because of the
dataset size, run a query lasting several hours or days to get anything
useful.
Once they had this useful thing, and assuming they could download it to
their machine, they would be confronted with the problem that every query
run against this system is already internally logged and stored, along with
the username of the person who triggered it. This service runs distinctly
to our Trello instance, which logs the actual rationale for particular
research projects in a transparent, community-and-staffer-accessible way.
So: yes, someone external could do this, although it would be fairly hard
and frankly once you assume someone can compromise SSH keys without anyone
noticing all of our infrastructure is screwed. And I could do this,
internally. But were either of these situations to occur, we already have
automated logging of the actual queries and a social convention around
logging active research projects, be they related to pageviews or no, in a
way that allows for staff and community observation and review.
I guess mostly I'm just confused as to what you'd add on top of "SSH keys,
automated logging and transparent documentation".
If I was accessing the Wikipedia raw logs, I would
expect that my access
would be logged and monitored in the same way that I'm suggesting should be
happening here, and it's not because I'm any more or less trustworthy than
anyone else.
Does that make sense? I am less worried about the specific case of the
Signpost and more worried about the general case of how the raw logs are
accessed and making sure that there are good controls and logs for that
access.
Thanks,
Pine
Pine
*This is an Encyclopedia <https://www.wikipedia.org/>One gateway to the
wide garden of knowledge, where lies The deep rock of our past, in which we
must delve The well of our future,The clear water we must leave untainted
for those who come after us,The fertile earth, in which truth may grow in
bright places, tended by many hands,And the broad fall of sunshine, warming
our first steps toward knowing how much we do not know.*
*—Catherine Munro*
On Mon, Oct 20, 2014 at 7:15 AM, Oliver Keyes <okeyes(a)wikimedia.org>
wrote:
Sorry, but no; what "additional conditions
attached"? We're *not giving
them any information* except for a boolean "this looks like illegitimate
traffic, this one is legitimate or we can't tell" and a wild stab at what
kind of illegitimate traffic it might be.
Please bear in mind that what you're essentially saying - or, how it's
coming off - is that there is some shady, undocumented,
privacy-policy-thorny thing going on here. That's a pretty big statement to
make about the activities of a researcher. If you think you can
substantiate it: tell me what conditions you might attach to the
aforementioned information? Better yet, what information do you think is
being transmitted? If you don't think you can substantiate it, don't say it.
Again, I'm sorry to be blunt. But to me this is kind of a big deal. If
I've screwed up in some way I'd like you to stop talking in subtext and
tell me how you think I have. Because at the moment I'm not entirely sure
what I'm meant to be clarifying. But if I haven't, this sort of discussion
can have a big impact on someone's reputation, and I'd like to clear it up.
On 19 October 2014 03:24, Pine W <wiki.pine(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Thanks very much, Toby and everyone.
Ironholds, I appreciate your doing traffic research on a volunteer basis
for the benefit of the Signpost and the community. I'm concerned about the
system as a whole may need a closer look, and I'm glad that Toby will be
doing this with input from Legal.
Toby: I hope we can continue to get some Ironholds-sponsored filtering
for the Traffic Report, although we may need to get it with some additional
conditions attached.
Thanks and regards,
Pine
On Fri, Oct 17, 2014 at 3:20 PM, Toby Negrin <tnegrin(a)wikimedia.org>
wrote:
Folks --
While I'm pleased that this validation was being done by a team member
with full knowledge of our privacy and data retention policies, I think
some good points have been raised that we're going to need to discuss as a
team. I've reached out to legal for their assistance is figuring out the
path forward.
-Toby
On Fri, Oct 17, 2014 at 3:16 PM, Dan Andreescu <
dandreescu(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:
> I see - Oliver's batman. Nothing to see here, moving on.
>
> On Fri, Oct 17, 2014 at 4:58 PM, Oliver Keyes <okeyes(a)wikimedia.org>
> wrote:
>
>> I should also point out that "Toby not knowing who the staffer doing
>> this one, highly specific, very minor piece of data-dogging is" does not
>> equate to analytics not knowing who it is. I don't know what you do for a
>> living but do you tend to give your boss's boss a constant play-by-play,
>> or? ;p. It's documented in Trello just like everything else.
>>
>> On 17 October 2014 16:55, Oliver Keyes <okeyes(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:
>>
>>> It's me. Hi! I'm sort of confused by this.
>>>
>>> In terms of shady back-alley data dealing, let me set out exactly
>>> what happens.
>>>
>>> Every week, the signpost emails me a list of articles that have
>>> unexpectedly high pageview counts and would be in the top 25, but nobody
>>> can quite work out why they're so popular. I go through the logs for the
>>> last week (I'd be unable to do this for any queries more than a month
ago
>>> anyway, since we only keep the unsampled data for that long, but a week is
>>> what's relevant here), and pull out a tuple of {ip,referer,user
>>> agent,article, requests} for the articles on that list.
>>>
>>> These tuples, which exist exclusively on our analytics machines (not
>>> even my personal, encrypted work laptop: they're only stored
server-side,
>>> at all steps in this) are than hand-parsed by me. Can we pin all of the
>>> requests for [article], or at least most of them, on a single IP address,
>>> or a single {IP,user_agent} pair? Then it's probably a spammer or a
spider
>>> or an [expletive]. No? Okay, if we sum by referer, do we see a common
>>> referer? If so, is that an actual referer or a fly-by-night live mirror?
>>> Questions like that.
>>>
>>> When I'm done with all of the articles, I email the signpost with
>>> "for article1, that looks legit. Article2 is a web crawler I'm going
to
>>> email and shout at. Article3 is a live mirror. Article4 looks legit.
>>> Article5...". These requests are logged on our trello board, just like
any
>>> other data request from any other party, community or staff. Milowent and
>>> the other signposters get zero IPs, zero user agents, and nothing anywhere
>>> near that range of information: that stuff doesn't even leave the
server.
>>> And when I'm done with it, I nuke it so it's not even *there*.
>>>
>>> I hope that clarifies what's happening here. If you have specific
>>> questions about what we keep that's obviously more of a question for
>>> management.
>>>
>>> On 17 October 2014 12:27, Jonathan Morgan <jmorgan(a)wikimedia.org>
>>> wrote:
>>>
>>>> Pine, have you considered asking Milowent who they work with on the
>>>> IP data? I really, really doubt that there is some sort of shady
back-alley
>>>> data dealing going down here. - Jonathan
>>>>
>>>> On Thu, Oct 16, 2014 at 9:52 PM, Pine W <wiki.pine(a)gmail.com>
>>>> wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> Thanks Toby.
>>>>>
>>>>> I understand that IPs are not an especially accurate way to look
>>>>> at unique visitors, but for the purposes of the Signpost's
traffic report
>>>>> and the Top 25 I feel that they are reasonable approximations of ways
to
>>>>> filter out what appear to be automated requests.
>>>>>
>>>>> I am ok with holding those logs for 30 days, although I am a
>>>>> little surprised to hear that this is happening. However, what
worries me a
>>>>> bit more is the idea that a staff member can be accessing those logs
>>>>> without that access being recorded. This might be something that you
wish
>>>>> to investigate further.
>>>>>
>>>>> I am not interested in getting this staff person into trouble. The
>>>>> information that they are providing is useful to the Signpost and
certainly
>>>>> seems to be sanitized to a reasonable degree. However, it does
concern me
>>>>> that they can access these logs without someone knowing about it, it
seems
>>>>> to me that this sort of activity should be proactively disclosed to
people
>>>>> in WMF who conduct legal and security reviews, and I hope you will
consider
>>>>> what sort of security features are appropriate to make sure that
occasions
>>>>> when anyone accesses the raw logs are recorded in a robust manner. I
worry
>>>>> that if this one staffer can access logs without the higher-ups
knowing
>>>>> about it, it is possible that someone who intends to do unethical
>>>>> activities with WMF's data could also access the logs without
being noticed.
>>>>>
>>>>> Thanks,
>>>>>
>>>>> Pine
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> On Thu, Oct 16, 2014 at 9:31 PM, Toby Negrin <
>>>>> tnegrin(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>>> Hi Pine --
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Thanks for this -- it's a challenging topic but one that the
>>>>>> Analytics team takes very seriously.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> I'm not familiar with the IP address review that's
referenced in
>>>>>> the link. I don't know who the staffer might be. We don't
currently
>>>>>> calculate unique visitors to anything in Analytics and IP address
is not a
>>>>>> particularly accurate way to assess unique visitors regardless
(due to
>>>>>> proxies/NATs/etc).
>>>>>>
>>>>>> We do store IPs as part of page requests in our raw logs which
>>>>>> are deleted every 30 days. This data is kept on a system where
access is
>>>>>> limited and controlled by the operations team. We're in line
with the
>>>>>> privacy policy on this.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> To be clear, we are currently considering mechanisms to count
>>>>>> unique "requests" -- we rely on Comscore for this data
and for several
>>>>>> reasons, primarily related to mobile usage, it's not
sufficient to
>>>>>> understand our usage patterns. We are putting together some
proposals to do
>>>>>> this in as limited way as possible and that's respectful to
our users.
>>>>>> We'll share this with the community when we feel we
understand the use
>>>>>> cases and trade-offs well enough to discuss in an informed
manner.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> -Toby
>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>> We do store the IP address associated with varnish requests as
>>>>>> part of the log. This data is
>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>> On Thu, Oct 16, 2014 at 8:50 PM, Pine W
<wiki.pine(a)gmail.com>
>>>>>> wrote:
>>>>>>
>>>>>>> Hi again Analytics,
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> I was under the impression that no records are kept of which
IPs
>>>>>>> access which articles on Wikipedia when no edits are made,
but it appears
>>>>>>> that such records are in fact kept [1].
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> Is this proper? This practice appears to be permissible
under
>>>>>>> the Privacy Policy which states that "We use IP
addresses for research and
>>>>>>> analytics; to better personalize content, notices, and
settings for you; to
>>>>>>> fight spam, identity theft, malware, and other kinds of
abuse; and to
>>>>>>> provide better mobile and other applications."
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> It is possible that this information is relevant for
determining
>>>>>>> the number of unique visitors that Wikipedia gets and that
this information
>>>>>>> is always properly filtered before it gets to the Signpost.
However, given
>>>>>>> recent discussions which I thought said that Wikipedia was
not instrumented
>>>>>>> to track unique visitors, I am surprised to learn that this
already seems
>>>>>>> to be happening and that the situation has been this way for
some time, so
>>>>>>> I would appreciate clarification.
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> I want to emphasize that this question is about clarifying
the
>>>>>>> practice of tracking likely unique visitors by IP. This
question is not
>>>>>>> intended to start flame wars, get people into trouble, or
limit the
>>>>>>> Signpost's access to properly filtered information if
there has been a
>>>>>>> determination that WMF's retention of the raw data is
appropriate. There
>>>>>>> might be appropriate secondary questions about making sure
that access to
>>>>>>> the raw IP access data is carefully contained and secured.
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> Thank you very much,
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> Pine
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> [1]
>>>>>>>
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User_talk%3ASerendipodous&di…
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>>>>> Analytics mailing list
>>>>>>> Analytics(a)lists.wikimedia.org
>>>>>>>
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/analytics
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>>>> Analytics mailing list
>>>>>> Analytics(a)lists.wikimedia.org
>>>>>>
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>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>>> Analytics mailing list
>>>>> Analytics(a)lists.wikimedia.org
>>>>>
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>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> --
>>>> Jonathan T. Morgan
>>>> Learning Strategist
>>>> Wikimedia Foundation
>>>> User:Jmorgan (WMF)
>>>> <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Jmorgan_(WMF)>
>>>> jmorgan(a)wikimedia.org
>>>>
>>>>
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>>>>
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>>>>
>>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> --
>>> Oliver Keyes
>>> Research Analyst
>>> Wikimedia Foundation
>>>
>>
>>
>>
>> --
>> Oliver Keyes
>> Research Analyst
>> Wikimedia Foundation
>>
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