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EFF Releases Tool For Testing ISP Interference
Placid notes that the EFF has announced Switzerland, a tool for testing if your ISP is interfering with your Net connection (e.g. by resetting BitTorrent transfers). It's command-line only at this point. Of course the tool is FOSS, and you can contribute to it via its SourceForge project. From the announcement: "Developed by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Switzerland is an open source software tool for testing the integrity of data communications over networks, ISPs, and firewalls. It will spot IP packets which are forged or modified between clients, inform you, and give you copies of the modified packets."
A dozen Blackberrys are ringing.
Look, Tim. I know it's Saturday but I need you to get to the switching center and shut down project ticktock right away. We're about to have some serious liability issues with it.
After the weekend we can start on a workaround.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
and am installing Python now and trying to get it running.
Ha, why did you just ask your ISP is they are blocking packets?
This things require root and I am not knoledgable enough to investigate the source code.
As I have not suitable testing environment, I will have to wait trusting Ubuntu or Debian for a pre-packaged version.
I strongly advice you, non-techy, non-programmer to be patient and wait a bit your Linux distribution or vendor to provide a package.
Léa Gris
I thought Switzerland was a country!
For the lazy: https://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=233013
Definitely! We all know that they fight for stupid, commy, hippy, un-American things like he First and Forth Amendment, curbing Government and corporate power, etc.....
I wouldn't want them anywhere near my God fearing American machine!
Windows are holes in walls or computers.
Just use it from a LiveCD (with HDDs unplugged or controllers disabled) or run it in Qemu :)
Twinstiq, game news
Switzerland is alpha software. Remarkably, it runs on lots of different operating systems (we've seen it work on Linux, OS X, BSD and Windows XP), but because it's alpha software we can't promise that it's easy to install on all of these operating systems. We're looking for volunteers to help with a Windows installer!
So for those looking for an easy install in Windows, you won't find it yet. Seems like cgywin under Windows XP is indeed the way to go.
Yeah and this on the 2. August. Maybe now we will get 2 days off one for Switzerland's birthday and the other for Switzerland's birthday. I am all for less work.
Running fine for me on a Debian VM however im getting lots of spam and nothing seems to be happening!
Listening for traffic with peers: 24.24.94.110*
Peer 82.5.36.143 has disconnected
Peer 24.24.94.110 has disconnected
Listening for traffic with peers: 68.149.183.24*
Listening for traffic with peers: 74.95.113.201*
Peer 74.95.113.201 has disconnected
Peer 76.10.186.206 has disconnected
Listening for traffic with peers: 24.24.94.110*
Peer 24.24.94.110 has disconnected
Listening for traffic with peers: 76.172.207.233*
Peer 76.172.207.233 has disconnected
Listening for traffic with peers: 76.172.207.233*
Listening for traffic with peers: 208.65.90.32*
Peer 208.65.90.32 has disconnected
Listening for traffic with peers: 82.158.26.94*
Peer 68.145.182.69 has disconnected
Peer 82.158.26.94 has disconnected
Peer 96.13.233.235 has disconnected
Listening for traffic with peers: 24.24.94.110*
Peer 24.24.94.110 has disconnected
Peer 74.245.115.130 has disconnected
Listening for traffic with peers: 79.2.240.120*
Peer 79.2.240.120 has disconnected
Listening for traffic with peers: 82.158.26.94*
Peer 82.158.26.94 has disconnected
Listening for traffic with peers: 24.24.94.110*
Listening for traffic with peers: 74.95.113.201*
Listening for traffic with peers: 24.91.53.178*
I'm working on a much more straightforward app that will be nearly as accurate on a large scale - it just scans your ip address and matches it against a list of known comcast ip classes - a hit means you're being throttled!
ôó
It is often a bad idea to select a project name that is a common dictionary word. It makes the project almost ungooglable and also dilutes the original meaning of the name -- I wonder if the nation of Switzerland wants to be associated with this piece of software. The global English dictionary namespace isn't running out yet, so we don't need to start reusing words.
- Ismo
DNS requests forge themselves.
Nice name for a tool actually.
Disclaimer: I'm swiss
Not in debian unstable ... or experimental, yet.
If you want your life to be different, live it differently.
I have been ordering stuff from Red China over the Internet and paying with $ dollars.
Help end the use of Sigs. Tomorrow
Switzerland is known for neutrality and *privacy*.
There are a few packages available on the Network Neutrality Squad's website:
(These were mentioned on Slashdot a little while back)
"For every right, an equal responsibility..."
They're also likely to put competitive ISPs out of business, leaving you stuck with a choice of at most two providers: the telephone company and cable company.
haha what
There are many errors in perspective/context regarding your arguments, and I'll let someone more eloquent than me list all of them. However, the glaring one I want to point out is your reference to the Comcast ruling this past week.
As with anything, there are ups and downs to a ruling... sure, Comcast may start charging by the bit and so forth. However, the big reason the EFF went after them was because they were forging packets, including the RST packets, and otherwise impersonating users on the bittorrent protocol.
The EFF was never saying they can't use traditional QoS on their network... they're saying companies need to reign in "bandwidth hogs" (as you put it) using protocol-agnostic methods, and they certainly shouldn't be forging any traffic.
Full disclosure: I'm a paid, card-carrying member of the EFF. Just gave them another $15 a week ago.
Network neutrality just means that they can only block bandwidth hogs by the bandwidth they use, not the type of traffic they use.
If you happen to use live linux cds and have comcast, you can see exactly why they need network neutrality. The only way to get them close to release time is via bittorrent since the ftp/http mirrors are either out of date or user capped.
OK, this is somewhat of a network techie/geeky thing, but you can hog the network even if your bandwidth is capped. This is due to a flaw in TCP, which does very weak, per-flow congestion avoidance. Suppose one user is running a single download at X bits per second. A second has 100 streams going, each with 1/100th of the bandwidth (or X/100). Which one gets priority if the network gets congested? The second -- by a factor of 100! BitTorrent, which is used for downloads that are not time critical, seizes priority over other traffic such as VoIP, which really needs real time performance. What's more, the streams for which it seizes priority use large packets because they are downloads. The large packets, in turn, create jitter, which really messes up VoIP. The same is true for gaming. So, ISPs are doing the right thing when they throttle BitTorrent and keep it from opening up too many streams. And if they recognize that the thing that's hogging the bandwidth is BitTorrent, they can do so gracefully. They can undo the attempt to seize priority and mete out the bandwidth appropriately. If they are forced to be "protocol agnostic" (the word "agnostic" means "without knowledge;" in other words, their bandwidth limiter is not able to recognize exactly what's causing the problem), they can't use a strategy that's carefully tailored to the problem. So, the networking management can't be as good, and all users suffer. That's what the Sandvine appliance does. It "prunes" the number of streams started by BitTorrent down to a manageable level. It doesn't stop it altogether, but it keeps it from interfering with others by exploiting a vulnerability in the protocol.
The use of RST packets to administratively terminate connections goes back more than 15 years. I know, because my ISP has been doing it for that long -- as have many, many others. (The WebSense software has also been doing it for nearly that long.) It's a reasonable and in fact common practice. We started doing it back in the days of dialup... specifically to protect dialup users' privacy. When a dialup user hangs up, it's possible for the next caller on the same line to receive packets, containing private information, intended for the previous caller. So, we set our systems up to send RST packets to anything that was communicating with a dialup user at the time of a hangup. We still do it to this day, and the open source software that does it (it's called Slirp, developed at the University of Canberra in Australia) is still popular.
As for being "protocol-agnostic:" As I have mentioned in another posting, the word "agnostic" means "without knowledge" -- or, to put it another way, "dumb." The more intelligent your bandwidth control mechanism, the better it can handle certain bad actors -- including BitTorrent, which tries to exploit a vulnerability in TCP to seize priority over other applications, including time critical ones.
Apparently, the reason why the EFF got involved in this affair is that its Chairman, one Brad Templeton, happens to be on the Board of Directors of BitTorrent, Inc. IMHO, it is embarrassing and a direct conflict of interest for Brad to make the EFF act in his personal financial interest. They should fire him as Chairman. If they do not, it again shows their lack of ethics in that they are willing to tolerate this direct and blatant conflict of interest.
hm... my svn co reported host not found /.ed?
Is the repos
Or is my ISP helpfully filtering -- ahem -- suspicious traffic for me?
My turnips listen for the soft cry of your love
Sent from my desktop computer
You can bet that the same lobbyists who went after Comcast at the FCC would be all over them -- again -- if they charged P2P users more, even though that's a fair thing to do. But if one does charge P2P users more, there's the matter of how to do this. Should all connections be metered by the bit? Users overwhelmingly do not want this, and it seems unfair to do it just because a few other folks are bandwidth hogs. The other alternative is to have two rates: one for a connection on which P2P is prohibited and blocked and a higher one for a connection which allows P2P. This is what my own ISP does, in fact. We prohibit P2P on residential class connections but not on business class connections. The rate we charge for business class connections allows for the possibility that it will be saturated 100% of the time, and is sufficient to let us break even if that happens. But will the lobbyists come after us next?
It's not true that ISPs "can't handle" P2P; it's just that it dumps huge costs on them. They have to prohibit it and/or charge more if it's done.