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."

Comments

Re:Warning to non-tech people

[urcreepyneighbor]

If you can't trust them to be non-evil, who can you trust?

Completely? No one. Not even yourself.

However, it's likely this tool is relatively safe.

Re:Behavior is as important as bandwidth

[causality]

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.

There is a very simple, non-technical argument against all of this. I pay my ISP for a certain amount of bandwidth. This connection is not metered in any way, other than having a limit to the total amount of bandwidth available at any one time. It is an "unlimited" plan. It suited my ISP to offer this deal, and it suited my needs to accept and purchase it. Other users of this ISP have similar if not identitcal arrangements. Whether it's BitTorrent, running an FTP server, real-time video, or whatever, the principle here is that if anything that another unrelated user does can reduce the quality of my connection, then my ISP has failed because they have oversold their capacity. Everything you said about how multiple BitTorrent streams greatly increase the latency of applications like VoIP is quite reasonable, if you are talking about MY bittorrent client causing latency for MY VoIP client, but that is not what we were discussing.

Now, if ISPs decide they want to meter their connections (say, by the megabyte or gigabyte), or that they won't carry certain types of traffic, then let them announce this to their customers. If their customers decide they want to continue paying for this, great. If they don't, too bad. But what is happening right now, where ISPs want to sell "unlimited" connections and then surreptitiously place limits on them and screw around with my traffic to conceal the fact that they are overselling their capacity (and/or refuse to upgrade their equipment) is unacceptable. This is unacceptable whether TCP fails to manage this type of network congestion, whether BitTorrent really is a bandwidth hog, whether an RST is a good way to deal with that, blah blah -- you're getting caught up in minutia and missing the real point. Saying "you're free to use this connection as you please ... oh, unless you use an application we don't like, then we'll sanction you" is hypocritical the same way that saying "you have the right to free speech ... oh, unless you say something we don't like" is hypocritical.