EFF Releases Tool For Testing ISP Interference 96
Placid notes that the EFF has announced Switzerland, a tool for testing if your ISP is interfering with your Net connection (e.g. by resetting BitTorrent transfers). It's command-line only at this point. Of course the tool is FOSS, and you can contribute to it via its SourceForge project. From the announcement: "Developed by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Switzerland is an open source software tool for testing the integrity of data communications over networks, ISPs, and firewalls. It will spot IP packets which are forged or modified between clients, inform you, and give you copies of the modified packets."
Re:Warning to non-tech people (Score:5, Insightful)
If you can't trust them to be non-evil, who can you trust?
Completely? No one. Not even yourself.
However, it's likely this tool is relatively safe.
Dictionary words make bad project names (Score:3, Insightful)
It is often a bad idea to select a project name that is a common dictionary word. It makes the project almost ungooglable and also dilutes the original meaning of the name -- I wonder if the nation of Switzerland wants to be associated with this piece of software. The global English dictionary namespace isn't running out yet, so we don't need to start reusing words.
Re:Dictionary words make bad project names (Score:1, Insightful)
I keep hearing people say this but yet no one ever suggests an alternative name, or fails completely at seeing the overwhelming number of projects/products with common names. And of course names like Snargleblad or some other BS are oh so easy to remember.
Ever think maybe that Switzerland was chosen for a reason? Perhaps because it is NEUTRAL??? As should be the internet, and this tool helps to determine if you ISP is in fact neutral regarding traffic management.
Re:Warning to non-tech people (Score:4, Insightful)
Debian's not exactly the most trustable team considering they INTRODUCED a bug into what I'd consider the most important to security package there is(OpenSSL).
When the people who are responsible for verifying the security of a package add their own exploit, and nobody finds it for many months of heavy use.. you sort of just tore down your web of trust.
Re:Behavior is as important as bandwidth (Score:5, Insightful)
There is a very simple, non-technical argument against all of this. I pay my ISP for a certain amount of bandwidth. This connection is not metered in any way, other than having a limit to the total amount of bandwidth available at any one time. It is an "unlimited" plan. It suited my ISP to offer this deal, and it suited my needs to accept and purchase it. Other users of this ISP have similar if not identitcal arrangements. Whether it's BitTorrent, running an FTP server, real-time video, or whatever, the principle here is that if anything that another unrelated user does can reduce the quality of my connection, then my ISP has failed because they have oversold their capacity. Everything you said about how multiple BitTorrent streams greatly increase the latency of applications like VoIP is quite reasonable, if you are talking about MY bittorrent client causing latency for MY VoIP client, but that is not what we were discussing.
... oh, unless you use an application we don't like, then we'll sanction you" is hypocritical the same way that saying "you have the right to free speech ... oh, unless you say something we don't like" is hypocritical.
Now, if ISPs decide they want to meter their connections (say, by the megabyte or gigabyte), or that they won't carry certain types of traffic, then let them announce this to their customers. If their customers decide they want to continue paying for this, great. If they don't, too bad. But what is happening right now, where ISPs want to sell "unlimited" connections and then surreptitiously place limits on them and screw around with my traffic to conceal the fact that they are overselling their capacity (and/or refuse to upgrade their equipment) is unacceptable. This is unacceptable whether TCP fails to manage this type of network congestion, whether BitTorrent really is a bandwidth hog, whether an RST is a good way to deal with that, blah blah -- you're getting caught up in minutia and missing the real point. Saying "you're free to use this connection as you please
Re:Paying more to use P2P (Score:3, Insightful)
If they charged by the bit you bet your life they'll charge a lot more than they do now.
Nope. In fact, anywhere I can find a service under a "pay as you go" system, I subscribe to it instead of to the seemingly "cheaper" layered system provided by other companies. And guess what? In all cases I invariably end up paying less monthly than in the cheapest "fixed price" service provided by a competitor, all coupled to an absolutely outstanding service, since it's in the interested of a pay-as-you-go service provider that you use more of its services, not less, so they keep their customer service top notch.
For an example of metering applied to a service which, unlike your examples, are NOT utilities whose prices are heavily regulated by the government, see: american cellular providers.
A bad example. Cellular providers are a regulated market. A company bids for monopolistic rights at a frequency band, wins, and gets to do whatever the hell he wants. Bands are limited in number, thus you can only have a fixed amount of service provider. End result: a cartel, and mafia-level prices.
If anyone could build cellular antennas and tap into a frequency to provide unregulated services, do you really think a situation like this would have developed? It would be trivial to develop a protocol to make such a shared setup work, then open the frequencies to any application. Government got greedy though ("What? To let people use RF without artificial impediments? Without big-friendly-corpTM paying us billions for the privilege? ARE YOU CRAZY?!?"), and the result is what you see.