Researchers Latch Onto BitTorrent To Spot Connection Problems

alphadogg writes "Northwestern University researchers have developed a system that gives a heads up about traffic problems on the Internet, where there is no central management system. Their Network Early Warning System (NEWS), which latches on to a popular BitTorrent client, is designed to spot problems by encouraging feedback from end users who are experiencing problems. 'You can think of it as crowd sourcing network monitoring,' said associate professor Fabián Bustamante. He has a track record with BitTorrent users, having developed the popular Ono plug-in for speeding up P2P interactions."

Re:Fine but you have to use Azureus

[Shakrai]

What's wrong with Azureus? Is there a better open-source client out there that I'm not aware of?

Re:how about a name or some links smartass?

[compro01]

According to their FAQ [utorrent.com], utorrent is not open source and likely never will be, which the GGP states as a requirement.

Re:Fine but you have to use Azureus

[compro01]

You might take a look at the new vuze 4. They've changed things up some to make it more like the 2.X series and it seems to be far more lightweight than the 3 series (Kinda like comparing firefox 2 to firefox 3). I've seen 3.X versions sometimes use over 200MB of RAM. 4.0 currently taking 45MB with 14 seeds up. not exactly utorrent's runs-on-a-486-with-14MB-ram trick, but it works fine for a relatively modern system.

http://azureus.sourceforge.net/upgrade.php [sourceforge.net]

Re:Something like this c/would be awesome

[zappepcs]

Yes, but when 37% of their clients show the same poor service it's much more convincing than one person's tale of woes. There are plenty of ways to monitor your own ISP, but when it's not your ISP, where do you go for the information? That's why this would be brilliant.

Re:how about a name or some links smartass?

[chammy]

Deluge [deluge-torrent.org] is opensource, and has almost every feature uTorrent has. If I'm going to be using a program for traffic that's as controversial these days as bittorrent it had better be able to demonstrate what it's doing under the hood.

Re:Fine but you have to use Azureus

[Terminus32]

I love XMMS, think i'll stick with it for a loooong time.....can't stand the thought of Windows Media Player or iTunes, yuck!

Re:Fine but you have to use Azureus

[szaka]

NTFS-3G and all FUSE based file systems support shared-writable mmap
since kernel 2.6.26:
http://ntfs-3g.org/support.html#wine [ntfs-3g.org]
http://ntfs-3g.org/support.html#vmware [ntfs-3g.org]