Switzerland: EFF Software Helps Track ISP Bandwidth Throttling [Updated]
The Electronic Frontier Foundation wants to thwart ISP bandwidth throttling and other devious practices that threaten the idea of network neutrality. But the FCC and other groups that oversee such matters often lack the tools and technical prowess to even know when ISPs are up to no good.
To lend a helping hand and put some more power in the hands of everyday users like you and me, the EFF recently released Switzerland, an open source software tool for “testing the integrity of data communications over networks, ISPs and firewalls.”
“Until now, there hasn’t been a reliable way to tell if somebody — a hacker, an ISP, corporate firewall or the Great Firewall of China — is modifying your Internet traffic en route,” says Peter Eckersley, EFF staff technologist and designer of Switzerland, in the press release.
Eckersley goes on to say that Switzerland is “designed to make general-purpose ISP testing faster and easier.”
Although Switzerland is currently an alpha release and only works on the command line, it does offer a nice looking set of tools that can detect packet modifications or injections as they travel over your networks.
That means if your ISP (Comcast, for instance) is using anti-P2P tools, like those from Sandvine, or otherwise tampering with your internet traffic, you’ll know about it.
Switzerland is free and you can download a copy from SourceForge.
[Update: We gave the software a shot, and felt it was necessary to reemphasize its alpha (testing) status. The software is clunky to install — it tries a “best guess” networking set-up. It also requires you to install Python 2.4 or higher on your system.
There’s not much for documentation so it’s not clear what expected behavior actually is. Our guess is it will tell you if there’s something funky going on. We saw a lot of sending and listening for packet data. We used the default host, but there are several Switzerland servers and configurable torrent hosts out there to try. In other words, your mileage may vary.
Still, this is a first step towards educating users about the issues behind net neutrality. It is so easy to blame network latency on anything thanks to the obfuscation of data exchange behind the internet curtain. With software like Switzerland and sites like Speedtest.net, consumers will be armed with the information needed to point fingers in the right direction.]
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