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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."
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.
This is not only a non-technical argument, but a fallacious one. No ISP offers "unlimited" bandwidth or throughput, and all have terms of service which limit what you can do with it. And this is a good thing. You shouldn't be allowed to degrade others' service or hog bandwidth. If your ISP does so, then it's being negligent.