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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."
For the lazy: https://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=233013
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, all tools that do tcpdump/Wireshark-style packet inspection require root (you don't want normal user programs sniffing everything). It's true that it's alpha quality code that does TCP communications, so it's a good idea to not leave it running all the time, and/or wait until a beta version has been released.
A bigger issue is that some of your sniffed packets are sent in the clear to EFF, so 1) it's possible that a third party could sniff those few packets (but it's only a handful of packets, but it could still cause problems, and 2) if you use EFF's server, you have to trust EFF with the handful of sniffed packets you send them (but you can run your own server). It's too complicated to summarize in a few sentences, see the README.txt in the package.
They do say they'll fix the issue that third parties could sniff your packets though (by doing the obvious thing and encrypting them between endpoints), so again, waiting for a later version might be a good idea.
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..."
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.