Researchers Latch Onto BitTorrent To Spot Connection Problems

alphadogg writes "Northwestern University researchers have developed a system that gives a heads up about traffic problems on the Internet, where there is no central management system. Their Network Early Warning System (NEWS), which latches on to a popular BitTorrent client, is designed to spot problems by encouraging feedback from end users who are experiencing problems. 'You can think of it as crowd sourcing network monitoring,' said associate professor Fabián Bustamante. He has a track record with BitTorrent users, having developed the popular Ono plug-in for speeding up P2P interactions."

Comments

Fine but you have to use Azureus

[Bearhouse]

As per the Ono plugin. Not everybody's cup of Java.

Re:Fine but you have to use Azureus

[pilgrim23]

Azureus is OK...for a Java app...but Vuze sucks....
Constantly clicking HELL NO! on the:
  "Do you want to update? OK? Oh Come on! do ya do ya? you REALLY wanna update now doncha? Ok?
    button(s) every single use is old....
  I do not use plug-ins in Torrent Clients, Firefox or anything else because you CONSTANTLY spend time maintaining them: "Client XYZ needs to restart to use the new thingy do you wanna do that thing now later, never, when hell freezes over, or when you are in a total rush to use this app so I can spend that 5 minutes updating?

Re:Fine but you have to use Azureus

[X0563511]

Azureus was great until they pushed Vuze down. Fuck that shit.

Re:Fine but you have to use Azureus

[BattleApple]

sorry, but.. pebkac

Re:Fine but you have to use Azureus

[Shakrai]

Azureus was great until they pushed Vuze down.

It takes less than 10 seconds to disable Vuze and verison 2.x is still supported in any event.....

Re:Fine but you have to use Azureus

[compro01]

You might take a look at the new vuze 4. They've changed things up some to make it more like the 2.X series and it seems to be far more lightweight than the 3 series (Kinda like comparing firefox 2 to firefox 3). I've seen 3.X versions sometimes use over 200MB of RAM. 4.0 currently taking 45MB with 14 seeds up. not exactly utorrent's runs-on-a-486-with-14MB-ram trick, but it works fine for a relatively modern system.

http://azureus.sourceforge.net/upgrade.php

Re:Fine but you have to use Azureus

[X0563511]

The problem is that I don't want a content management system at all. All I want is a flexible torrent application with all the advanced configuration etc. I don't want any of that multimedia stuff.

In the same way, I want a media player that plays media. Nothing. Else. Things like rhythmbox and amarok drive me nuts as well... back in windows, the old "classic" winamp was perfect, foobar2000 was perfect, and in linux xmms was perfect.

Lately, it seems that there is a disturbing trend of feature bloat. Every program can do everything. I like lightweight functional applications, and always have.

Torrents are no exception.

Re:Fine but you have to use Azureus

[benow]

You kids! Get off my lawn. Kitchen sink apps are a great, if often bloated, showcase of ideas. In a perfect world the good ideas stick around in new versions or interpretations and the cruft dies out.

Re:Fine but you have to use Azureus

[hitmark]

i blame itunes...

when it hit windows, it became almost a fad to use it, even if one didnt own a ipod.

so to "keep up", more and more players started adding media library features, ripping features and info downloading features.

me, im so "old school" that my concept of "media library" is to pile my files into different dirs, and aim the players playlist at the top dir, then setting playback to random...

that is, unless i just fire up a stream off shoutcast or icecast and leave it at that. right now i seem to have a preference for "the eagle".

Re:Fine but you have to use Azureus

[szaka]

NTFS-3G and all FUSE based file systems support shared-writable mmap
since kernel 2.6.26:
http://ntfs-3g.org/support.html#wine
http://ntfs-3g.org/support.html#vmware

To What End?

[TheNecromancer]

From TFA:

The main goal of this plugin is to reliably find problems in the network and raise alerts about them. As a user, you want to be sure that you are getting the service that you're paying for and be notified quickly about network problems, especially those that can lead to compensation for service interruption.

As a user, so what if I know what the problem with my ISP's network is? I still have to call their crappy support lines, and wait the hours it takes their idiot technicians to fix the fucking problem.

Re:To What End?

[Ethanol-fueled]

How do you know that it's a legitimate bad connection and not just throttling by your ISP?

Re:To What End?

[compro01]

You are implying there is a difference.

Something like this c/would be awesome

[zappepcs]

When the smiling AT&T cable sales people come knocking on my door, I'd like to show them a website or printed graph of how badly their Internet service really sucks. I'm starting to get a couple of options for ISP now, and it would just be so awesome to hold up a graph and smile the entire time I tell them how badly their service/product sucks!

Re:Something like this c/would be awesome

[zappepcs]

Yes, but when 37% of their clients show the same poor service it's much more convincing than one person's tale of woes. There are plenty of ways to monitor your own ISP, but when it's not your ISP, where do you go for the information? That's why this would be brilliant.

Wrong question

[Fnord666]

Unfortunately this answers the wrong question. It doesn't tell me about network performance, it tells me about bittorrent application network performance. Big difference.

Re:Wrong question

[girlintraining]

Well, since BT traffic stresses a network's resources more than any other, and is the subject of aggressive filtering and other control methods, I'd have to say it's as good a baseline as any. It's easy enough to do performance testing in a laboratory where all conditions are controlled, but when you start running packets through dozens of administrative domains each with their own configurations, equipment, etc., what you have is a very organic problem that it nearly impossible to diagnose.

To use the obligatory car analogies we heart so much on slashdot, this is like your real world week to week gas mileage, whereas the laboratory testing is like the EPA rated gas mileage. As your car gets older, gets stuck in traffic, etc., it's going to fall short of that rating -- but because it all averages out in the end it's a more reliable metric. But like any other statistic, it needs to be taken with others; Getting 40 miles to the gallon sounds great until you find out the car only has a briggs and straton engine and does zero to sixty in about a minute. Or as I call them Saturns.

I've been wanting something like this for ages

[Narnie]

Finally a tool that will allow end users to objectively compare ISP networks!

I've switch service providers several time because of network outages and performance issues. I can't tell you how frustrating it is to be on the phone with tech support, insisting that I need to reboot windows one more time (though it's funny as hell to tell them it's a linux box) and after 45 minutes holding and 4 or 5 technical support reps I finally talk to a tech that admits network issues. It will be nice to see how my current provider compares against the local competition.

But I wonder how much bittorrent "traffic shaping" (blocking) will effect ISP scores?

Re:I've been wanting something like this for ages

[corsec67]

But I wonder how much bittorrent "traffic shaping" (blocking) will effect ISP scores?

That is a good thing: combining network performance with how much the ISP fucks with your traffic into one easy score.

Bittorrent is a pretty good benchmarking system: it checks upload, download, making tons of connections, bulk data transfer, and is considered by some people to be "evil". That really is a fairly good combination of network parameters.

Re:how about a name or some links smartass?

[Shakrai]

utorrent seems to be one of the most popular.

utorrent isn't open-source. And I'm not brave enough to use a closed-source client from a company that has signed agreements with the RIAA and MPAA, particularly when open-source alternatives are available.

Re:how about a name or some links smartass?

[compro01]

According to their FAQ, utorrent is not open source and likely never will be, which the GGP states as a requirement.

Re:how about a name or some links smartass?

[chammy]

Deluge is opensource, and has almost every feature uTorrent has. If I'm going to be using a program for traffic that's as controversial these days as bittorrent it had better be able to demonstrate what it's doing under the hood.