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Ask Slashdot: How To Diagnose Traffic Throttling and Work Around It?

Posted by timothy on from the watch-where-the-soap-bubbles-emerge dept.

Aguazul2 writes "I live in Peru and use OpenVPN to connect to my own Linux VPS in the UK for non-live TV. Recently the VPN connection has slowed to a crawl (5% previous rate). Further investigation shows that all connections to my VPS from Peru (even HTTP) are equally slow, whilst the rest of the 'net seems fine. My VPS host says they do no traffic shaping, and connections from Germany to the VPS are fast. This leaves the NSA and Telefonica (Movistar) as suspects. Could the NSA be slowing all VPNs to/from South America because of Snowden and Greenwald? A traceroute shows traffic going through domains with NYC in their name — are my packets being indefinitely detained in transit? Or maybe it is Telefonica and their Sandvine traffic management? Either way this certainly isn't network neutrality, especially on an 'unlimited' plan. Is there a way to tell for certain who is throttling me? If Telefonica have throttled traffic to/from that one IP address, what options do I have to work around it? It seems that separate connections are throttled independently, so can I multiplex over many UDP ports without having to hack OpenVPN myself? This is really frustrating, especially with two untrustworthy parties on the route. I wonder, is this kind of mess the future of the internet?"

1 of 251 comments (clear)

  1. Re:NSA by jamesh · · Score: 1, Redundant

    They do not need to do real-time processing of the data: that is only necessary for filtering.

    That may be true for passive surveillance (http traffic, emails, IMs), but most-definitely not for VPNs, as in this specific case.

    You absolutely need to trap the packets in real time in order to actually break the VPN connection open so you can get at the actual payload (cleartext, post-decrypted) data within the stream. The initial cryptographic handshake has to be captured, in order for them to peel it open and get inside.

    You can't do that days later, when all you have is an encrypted stream of bits.

    They only need to know that the citizen is using an encrypted VPN. This implies that they have something to hide and are therefore a suspect, and actual evidence no longer matters.