Tormap – World map of Tor nodes – 5 years later

5 years ago I forked Moritz’s tormap project, updated it a bit and wrote about it. Tormap kept running for years until some changes in googlemaps broke it, not all KMLs were loading as they should. I later on figured out that googlemaps didn’t like that some of the KML files were larger than 3Mb. I didn’t have much time to play with it until recently, so a few days ago I decided to make it work again. I used newer googlemaps v3 API calls and compressed KML (KMZ) files to make it work. Then @iainlearmonth and @nusenu_ suggested making even more changes…

Their first suggestion was to use onionoo instead of parsing consensus on my own and running geoip on it, onionoo already provides that in a nice json output. Their other suggestion was to switch tormap to use OpenStretMap instead of googlemaps mostly because googlemaps block some Tor exit nodes and the tiles didn’t appear on the map when visiting over Tor. Both of these issues are fixed now.

I used leaflet.js and a couple of plugins like leaflet-plugins (for KML parsing) and leaflet-color-markers for the switch to OpenStreetMap. I will admit that using googlemaps APIs was far more convenient for someone without any javascript knowledge like me.

Maybe in the next 5 years I will have time again to implement their other suggestion, creating maps of nodes based on custom searches for relay attributes. Unless someone else wants to implement that, feel free to fork it!