On the heels of today's relatively toothless "sanction" against Comcast, the Electronic Frontier Foundation has released a new tool to help consumers check for ISP skulduggery. Dubbed "Switzerland," the open source tool is part of the EFF's Test Your ISP Project, and is being developed to give consumers a simple way to determine whether their ISP is quietly tinkering with application traffic. Switzerland looks beyond TCP reset packets and web page modifications, testing for ISP management of all applications, not just P2P. From the EFF:
quote:
Part of EFF's "Test your ISP" project, Switzerland is an open source, command-line software tool designed to detect the modification or injection of packets of data by ISPs. Switzerland detects changes made by software tools believed to be in use by ISPs such as Sandvine and AudibleMagic, advertising systems like FairEagle, and various censorship systems. Although currently intended for use by technically sophisticated Internet users, development plans aim to make the tool increasingly easy to use.
While the FCC and media focused their attention on Comcast,
I've previously noted that Cox uses a very similar packet forgery technique to throttle P2P traffic. Interestingly, Cox flew completely under the media radar -- simply by never lying about it. Other Internet-based packet forgery tests, such as Germany's Max Planck Institute's
Glasnost Project, suggest that Cox and Comcast certainly aren't alone.
"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 EFF staff technologist Peter Eckersley. "The few tests available have been for narrow and specific kinds of interference, or have required tremendous amounts of advanced forensic labor. Switzerland is designed to make general-purpose ISP testing faster and easier."
Unfortunately it looks like Switzerland (download
here) is still in alpha stage, and isn't quite simple enough yet for your grandmother to use. For those of you in the mood to tinker with it, please dump your feedback into the comment section below. With increased scrutiny and simpler user testing tools, it's likely the network neutrality debate will quickly shift from covert throttling to
metered billing.