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Network Measurement Tool Detects Reset Packets
kickassweb writes "If you think your ISP is sniffing packets, or worse yet, sending reset packets to stop torrents, there's now a beta Network Measurement Tool to detect them, courtesy of Lauren Weinstein of the Net Neutrality Squad. It's released under the LGPL, and runs under Win2K, XP, and Vista. Quoting: 'While the reset packet detection system included in this release is of interest, NNSquad views this package as more important in the long run as a development base for a broad range of network measurement functionalities and associated communications and analysis efforts.'"
Without a Linux version, it's obviously the work of Satan.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
IANANG (I Am Not A Network Guru) but, what harm could happen if, say, all reset packets were just ignored and dropped by the network stack? All the hubbub about figuring out if your ISP is sabotaging you seems less useful than just blocking the shanangans and moving on with your life.
More Twoson than Cupertino
I would point out that a tool has existed for years that possessed this capability AND has been available on BOTH Linux (*NIX) and M$ platforms. It's called Wireshark (formerly Ethereal). I will offer the caveat that you had to know a bit about TCP/IP protocol to use this tools but, there it is.
Unix has always been User Friendly
I'm not entirely sure what your point is, and if it's supposed to be a good or a bad thing.
What would happen on a closed proprietary protocol? (E.g., let's imagine that MS had pursued their initial idea of makingt a MS net instead of the Internet, or that AOL/Compuserve/whatever had never gone TCP/IP and managed to win on their own, or that we all were on the French minitel. Or, heck, that each ISP had their own protocol and proprietary browser, and just converted to and from it. At least one did try to convert the graphics like that, and at least one is currently re-encoding movies, so it's not a huge stretch of imagination.)
Well, then you'd be pretty much in the hands of whoever owns the protocol, i.e., most likely the ISP. If you were on, say, a proprietary AOL network, which works only with proprietary AOL software, and uses AOL's own proprietary protocols, then you're completely at their mercy. If they want to reset your connections, or whatever else, what are you going to do about it?
Of course, you could reverse-engineer their protocols and patch their programs, which is a hell of a lot more expense and effort than with the open protocols. Except then they could:
1. Just change the protocol from one version to another, to break your changes. (AOL actually did this for a while to keep breaking MS's attempts of making their Windows Messenger interoperable with AIM.)
2. Sue you under DMCA for hacking into their network and bypassing their checks. (Seriously, much smaller attempts at reverse-engineering a protocol resulted in DMCA lawsuits.)
So basically at best you'd have to bet a _lot_ on, well, how sympathetic a judge would be to your view that you have a right to bypass the usage or access restrictions on privately owned servers, to download more than you've bought, and to hack their software to that end. I wouldn't take it as a given.
So basically open software at least gives you a fighting chance at all. Yes, they can keep modifying their implementation, but so can you. In the closed version, they own the software and the protocol, they can change it, but _you_ can't.
Open standards even put a limit on how far they can take technique #1 above, because at the end of the day, they still have to remain compatible with a metric buttload of software and hardware that they don't control. In the all proprietary version, if they want to change the protocol and software _completely_, and leave the old channel open just for downloading the new software, they can.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.