ISPs
are increasingly deploying a variety of middleboxes (e.g., firewalls,
traffic shapers, censors, and redirectors) to monitor and to manipulate
the performance of applications like peer-to-peer and Torrents. Most
ISPs do not reveal the details of their network deployments to their
customers. This knowledge is important to help users make a more
informed choice of their ISP. Further, such knowledge is also useful for
researchers designing protocols and systems that run on top of these
networks.
To improve network transparency, Prof Krishna Gummadi, along with
four of his students has come out with an online tool which tests if
your ISP is manipulating/throttling BitTorrent traffic called Glasnost.There are 2 online tools developed as part of this project, one, to Test for BitTorrent traffic manipulation and the other to test for Broadband link characteristics. The second tool measures certain characteristics of your broadband link, like link bandwidths and potential router queuing delays.
Glasnost tests work by measuring and comparing the performance of different application flows between your host and our measurement servers. The tests can detect traffic shaping in both upstream and downstream directions separately. The tests can also detect whether application flows are shaped based on their port numbers or their packets’ payload.It’s not just the downloading of illegal movies and applications that utilizes BitTorrent traffic; there is plenty of legitimate services out there, such as Valve’s Steam game distribution platform which uses P2P technology. Glasnost comes to the rescue of those users who are facing interference from ISPs, and helps them switch the services if required.
Test for BitTorrent traffic manipulation here
Comments
Post a Comment