Posted on 11/28/2007 4:34:24 PM PST by ShadowAce
SAN JOSE, Calif. (AP) - Increasingly worried over Internet providers' behavior, a nonprofit has released software that helps determine whether online glitches are innocent hiccups or evidence of deliberate traffic tampering.
The San Francisco-based digital rights group Electronic Frontier Foundation hopes the program, released Wednesday, will help uncover "data discrimination" - efforts by Internet providers to disrupt some uses of their services - in addition to the cases reported separately by EFF, The Associated Press and other sources.
"People have all sorts of problems, and they don't know whether to attribute that to some sort of misconfiguration, or deliberate behavior by the ISP," said Seth Schoen, a staff technologist with EFF.
The new software compares lists of data packets sent and received by two different computers and looks for discrepancies between what one sent and the other actually received. Previously, the process had to be done manually.
"If you really had no idea what you were looking for, this could save dozens of hours," he said.
Increasingly people are contacting the EFF worried that their online activity has been disrupted by their Internet service provider, he said. The goal of the EFF's program is to "help consumers get more clarity about what the ISPs are doing."
An Associated Press investigation, published last month, confirmed in nationwide tests that Comcast Corp., the No. 2 U.S. Internet provider, interfered with attempts by some subscribers to it's high-speed service to share files online. EFF, which had been running its own tests, later said its findings were consistent with the AP's results.
The tests revealed that a PC would see messages from Comcast that were invisible to the user that told it to stop communicating, which would lead it to cancel a download or upload.
The AP's tests helped revive the debate over so-called "'Net Neutrality," how to treat all types of Internet traffic equally.
Comcast says it does not block access to any applications but does use sophisticated technologies to keep Internet connections running smoothly.
Some online activities, like peer-to-peer file-sharing, swallow massive amounts of bandwidth and can slow Internet connections for other subscribers.
Of course. Users also pay for that bandwidth, and it should be there if a subscriber needs it for whatever they choose.
bump for later read
In the RFC's comprising the internet standards, when a machine sends a packet from point A to point B, there are some things intermediate machines are allowed to do (including dropping the packet altogether, or holding it a few seconds), some they are required to do (NAT firewalls must remap source port numbers), and some they are forbidden (delivering packets that are modified in ways not expressly permitted, or forging packets in ways not expressly permitted). There are means within the RFC's to limit bandwidth utilization of any particular subscriber with a well-functioning protocol stack, and to limit the useful bandwidth utilization of any particular subscriber regardless of their protocol stack.
If a subscriber's computer wants to jabber away and send out oodles of packets without regard for whether they are delivered or not, dropping the subscriber's packets isn't going to prevent network congestion. On the other hand, most subscribers send data because they want it to be delivered. If a carrier limits the number of packets per second that will be delivered on behalf of each subscriber, the subscriber will achieve optimal performance by avoiding excess retries. Controlling the rate at which data can be delivered will effectively control the rate at which it's put onto the network, at least for any subscriber who isn't trying to flood the network.
I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: The ONLY reason it “can slow Internet connections” is because the ISPs advertise a bandwidth that is much higher than they can handle should all subscribers actually use that bandwidth they paid for.
If they have a problem with P2P then they should change their billing plans to reflect the reality of the situation rather than lying to consumers.
Time Warner Cable finally appears to have fixed their hiccups. I would have to constantly reset the modem because the connection would just die and I’d suspect there was network overload or maybe someone trying to hack in. Still by the sound of things Comcast has them beat for bad service.
I totally agree. I'm a huge fan of P2P software and technology. If an ISP has a problem with it, they should say so up front in service agreements and not mess with subscriber bandwidth. At the same time they shouldn't falsely advertise promising lots of bandwidth to everyone, while gating some users behind the scenes who running P2P apps to make it happen.
Thank God for the EFF
Comcast runs on the same business model as Bally’s Fitness Centers. For every several hundred people who sign up to use the 200 work out stations ath a location, Baly’s expects only 10% to regularly show up and work out.
Comcast has extended this concept to broadband bandwidth.
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