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

[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.

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.

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!

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.

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: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.