Network Measurement Tool Detects Reset Packets 118
kickassweb writes "If you think your ISP is sniffing packets, or worse yet, sending reset packets to stop torrents, there's now a beta Network Measurement Tool to detect them, courtesy of Lauren Weinstein of the Net Neutrality Squad. It's released under the LGPL, and runs under Win2K, XP, and Vista. Quoting: 'While the reset packet detection system included in this release is of interest, NNSquad views this package as more important in the long run as a development base for a broad range of network measurement functionalities and associated communications and analysis efforts.'"
Grammar? (Score:2, Insightful)
Aside from that, it's great the people develop tools like this, but very surprising to see this be Windows-only.
Re:Slashdotters would laud this, but... (Score:2, Insightful)
The race is on (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Slashdotters would laud this, but... (Score:4, Insightful)
tcpdump 'tcp[13] & 4 != 0'
Not sure what the point is (Score:5, Insightful)
What would happen on a closed proprietary protocol? (E.g., let's imagine that MS had pursued their initial idea of makingt a MS net instead of the Internet, or that AOL/Compuserve/whatever had never gone TCP/IP and managed to win on their own, or that we all were on the French minitel. Or, heck, that each ISP had their own protocol and proprietary browser, and just converted to and from it. At least one did try to convert the graphics like that, and at least one is currently re-encoding movies, so it's not a huge stretch of imagination.)
Well, then you'd be pretty much in the hands of whoever owns the protocol, i.e., most likely the ISP. If you were on, say, a proprietary AOL network, which works only with proprietary AOL software, and uses AOL's own proprietary protocols, then you're completely at their mercy. If they want to reset your connections, or whatever else, what are you going to do about it?
Of course, you could reverse-engineer their protocols and patch their programs, which is a hell of a lot more expense and effort than with the open protocols. Except then they could:
1. Just change the protocol from one version to another, to break your changes. (AOL actually did this for a while to keep breaking MS's attempts of making their Windows Messenger interoperable with AIM.)
2. Sue you under DMCA for hacking into their network and bypassing their checks. (Seriously, much smaller attempts at reverse-engineering a protocol resulted in DMCA lawsuits.)
So basically at best you'd have to bet a _lot_ on, well, how sympathetic a judge would be to your view that you have a right to bypass the usage or access restrictions on privately owned servers, to download more than you've bought, and to hack their software to that end. I wouldn't take it as a given.
So basically open software at least gives you a fighting chance at all. Yes, they can keep modifying their implementation, but so can you. In the closed version, they own the software and the protocol, they can change it, but _you_ can't.
Open standards even put a limit on how far they can take technique #1 above, because at the end of the day, they still have to remain compatible with a metric buttload of software and hardware that they don't control. In the all proprietary version, if they want to change the protocol and software _completely_, and leave the old channel open just for downloading the new software, they can.
No need to invoke Satan (Score:3, Insightful)
Not really. It's just the work of somebody who doesn't hold portability as an important requirement.
Sometimes this happens because they don't have the means to test on other platforms. Sometimes it's because they're so narrowly focussed that they're not even aware that there's more to computing than their own platform. Some people are simply too lazy, or lacking in computing skills, to write portable applications. And quite frequently it's the work of someone who is totally obsessed with his own platform's unique UI and so produces an UI app that can't run anywhere else, without actually wanting to be evil.
Only very rarely does a minor wannabe Satan appear, one who willfully writes open-source code that can't be run on other platforms by design. I'm not even sure I can name a clear example of it
Re:RST blocking? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Slashdotters would laud this, but... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Slashdotters would laud this, but... (Score:5, Insightful)
I would like to give the benefit of the doubt to the original poster and interpret his comments this way:
If there was a ready made package for me to use, I would gladly help the monitoring effort. However, I find the mantra "just port it" not only a reactionary response, but also totally unrealistic.
I find this totally hilarious and would have modded you funny if I had the points to give. You are a comic genius using the absurd to humorously make a point...
I mean it's like saying "If you are capable of reading all the books available on construction and building codes, then there is no excuse for you not being able to build your own house."
Of course I could be wrong and misinterpreted both of your responses, in that case nevermind...
Re:Slashdotters would laud this, but... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Slashdotters would laud this, but... (Score:5, Insightful)
Seriously, it is this sort of mentality that is killing tech. You DO have to be extremely smart/dedicated to do really low level CS work. You DO have to have a pretty heavy mathematics background to do any really serious code work and it is NOT something that you can "Learn in 7 days" no matter what the books you bought at borders are telling you.
Re:Slashdotters would laud this, but... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Slashdotters would laud this, but... (Score:2, Insightful)
If no one else is gonna do it, either do it yourself or a hire a programmer to do it for you.
I swear to the gods, non-programmers are some of the whiniest users of open source. People write stuff and offer it under a free software license like the L/GPL and let you download it and the source for free, and all the non-programmers do is whine when it doesn't work on their platform of choice or doesn't have feature X, Y or Z.