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Apple Is Blocking an App That Detects Net Neutrality Violations (vice.com)
dmoberhaus writes: Apple isn't allowing a new app developed by a university professor that detects when your internet is being throttled by ISPs from being listed on the app store. The company claimed the app contained "objectionable content" and "has no direct benefits to the user."
The reporter, who tested the app through the beta channel, writes: The app is designed to test download speeds from seven apps: YouTube, Amazon, NBCSports, Netflix, Skype, Spotify, and Vimeo. According to the app, my Verizon LTE service streamed YouTube to my iPhone at 6 Mbps, Amazon Prime video at 8 Mbps, and Netflix at 4 Mbps. It downloaded other data at speeds of up to 25 Mbps. UPDATE: Slashdot reader sl3xd has made us aware of an update to the story. "After this article was published, Apple told Dave Choffnes that his iPhone app, designed to detect net neutrality violations, will be allowed in the iTunes App Store," reports Motherboard. "According to Choffnes, Apple contacted him and explained that the company has to deal with many apps that don't do the things they claim to do. Apple asked Choffnes to provide a technical description of how his app is able to detect if wireless telecom providers throttle certain types of data, and 18 hours after he did, the app was approved." "The conversation was very pleasant, but did not provide any insight into the review process [that] led the app to be rejected in the first place," Choffnes told Motherboard in an email.
The reporter, who tested the app through the beta channel, writes: The app is designed to test download speeds from seven apps: YouTube, Amazon, NBCSports, Netflix, Skype, Spotify, and Vimeo. According to the app, my Verizon LTE service streamed YouTube to my iPhone at 6 Mbps, Amazon Prime video at 8 Mbps, and Netflix at 4 Mbps. It downloaded other data at speeds of up to 25 Mbps. UPDATE: Slashdot reader sl3xd has made us aware of an update to the story. "After this article was published, Apple told Dave Choffnes that his iPhone app, designed to detect net neutrality violations, will be allowed in the iTunes App Store," reports Motherboard. "According to Choffnes, Apple contacted him and explained that the company has to deal with many apps that don't do the things they claim to do. Apple asked Choffnes to provide a technical description of how his app is able to detect if wireless telecom providers throttle certain types of data, and 18 hours after he did, the app was approved." "The conversation was very pleasant, but did not provide any insight into the review process [that] led the app to be rejected in the first place," Choffnes told Motherboard in an email.
Never in short supply at Apple.
The app is designed to test download speeds from seven apps: YouTube, Amazon, NBCSports, Netflix, Skype, Spotify, and Vimeo. According to the app, my Verizon LTE service streamed YouTube to my iPhone at 6 Mbps, Amazon Prime video at 8 Mbps, and Netflix at 4 Mbps. It downloaded other data at speeds of up to 25 Mbps
I would have expected the big players paying oodles of money to the carriers will get preferential treatment, and the random internet startup will struggle to get its bits to you.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Everybody knows LUDDITE professors are no good at coding. Only young techbros can app apps.
This kind of measurement tool is an awesome creation and we need more. I'd love to use an Android version of it to test my apps and see what AT&T does to shape my traffic. Unless there's some sort of hidden issue, there is absolutely no reason why Apple should withhold this from the store, considering all of the other useless crap that's out there.
Don't expect one company's walled garden to allow tools to help you detect other company's walled gardens. These walled gardens are becoming more like the hedge maze at the Overlook Hotel.
Support Right To Repair Legislation.
Silly developer, Apple has no interest in enabling people to climb or even notice garden walls!
Reality is a slackware box running on a 386 tucked away in god's sock drawer.
I actually agree with Apple on this. Having this app will give people a false impression of throttling where non exists. It is impossible to tell if ISP throttling is going on just from the download speed. For example this statement "YouTube to my iPhone at 6 Mbps, Amazon Prime video at 8 Mbps, and Netflix at 4 Mbps. It downloaded other data at speeds of up to 25 Mbps." seems to indicate ISP throttling, but can happen for many reasons. It could be that each service uses a different compression and therefore they would necessarily need to send data at different speeds. Just because Youtube is not using all the available bandwidth does not mean it is being throttled by the ISP. I also imagine that YouTube itself has some bandwidth management built in to prevent one customer from negatively affecting the rest. This app would do nothing but stir up anger.
I'm talking about Mussolini's definition of fascism, which is basically corporatism: The total control of society in to the hands of corporations, with the line between them and the governement being more symbolic than anything.
When you have an industry shill at the head of the FCC making decisions to profit solely this industry, that's fascism.
When you have the POTUS putting his corporate friends in charge of all major positions in the governement, that's fascism.
But as long as the sheeple are kept well fed and well entertained, they couldn't care less. Bread and circusses.
Humanity doesn't deserve democracy. It doesn't deserve freedom, equality and justice.
The download speed depends on the server as well as the net delivery system. I suspect that the slow speeds seen were because the servers were only delivering data at that speed. In any case, you can use Google's developer tools to see the download speeds from any site.
Ouch.
apple supports internet throttling and phone throttling.
ignorance is better than knowledge.
Youtube, Amazon Prime, and Netflix send you content at the rate that it can be consumed by the device. If they sent you 1000Mbps upon opening video that you may drop after 10 seconds they would waste their resources and your data plan.
The Android version is available on the Play Store: https://play.google.com/store/...
"has no direct benefits to the user."
Except knowledge, and we wouldn't want that.
As for the other comment, yes speed depends on more than just network speed, but if the guy next to me on Verizon streams Netflix at 4 Mbps and I stream on Sprint at 20 Mbps then we can safely theorize that Verizon is throttling him. We don't know for sure, but we can build a case.
Without that knowledge we have nothing to go on.
I refuse to sign
As opposed to something like, say, Flappy Bird, which is obviously immensely beneficial to the user.
We should all be able to go the speed limit at all times, everywhere. Who are these insensitive clods who are violating the speed limit laws?
Of course what the good professor is actually measuring is bandwidth and the carriers are only a part of that. Netflix may only be streaming at 4 mbps. Does the video play? Maybe they only provide that much bandwidth since you are only paying them $10 a month. People act like there is an unlimited amount of bandwidth but there are numerous bottlenecks between you and your favorite web site.
and considering they are blocking this app it proves one thing, despite being gay Tim Cook is still corrupted by big money, i guess equality is only a fight for the poor & middle-class, once you're rich the rule is to shit on the rest of the world,
as long as i got mine, isnt that right Tim Cook
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
Seems dumb for Apple to block the app.
That said, a difference in network speed does not imply evil intent, and that's part of the problem with the whole net neutrality thing.
Consider the side of a cellphone carrier. I know, I know, it's fun to say they're evil and all that, but just look at the technical problem they're trying to solve: you have some limited resources (your slice of the wireless spectrum, your capacity at your cell towers, your connections to the backbone) that you are trying to divide up among all of your customers wanting to use them. On top of that, you're competing against other companies who want to get your same customers, so you have to balance a nearly limitless demand for network capacity against the costs of building out and maintaining your network and how that translates into the price you set for your services. You have to balance the downsides of any wasted, idle capacity against the ability to handle huge spikes when there is a surge in demand. And on top of all this you are expected to provide value/profits to your owners.
Now, with that as the context, you are obviously constantly on the lookout for ways to optimize and improve. What if, as one specific example, you come across a technology that lets you dynamically re-encode some video chunks on the fly with little or no drop in perceived quality? Would you make use of that technology? Of course you would - it could be a huge win, not just for you and your shareholders, but it could legitimately be good for your users too (a higher number of concurrent users could be watching video without buffering).
This sort of thing happens all the time - carriers, ISPs, etc. are constantly looking for ways to optimize things because they are faced with this very real dilemma of competing objectives. And anyone in tech is familiar with optimizations and how important they can be. But the problem with apps like the one in TFA is that they cannot tell the full story (and yes, I did read the article, especially the part about them using their own servers to help know for sure that differences in speeds are happening).
With video content specifically, from the earliest days of the net we've known that users *strongly* prefer uninterrupted playback at lower quality versus super high quality that buffers constantly - this concept is fundamentally understood by everyone in the media space. Awesome HD w/o interruptions is the goal, but if you've got to choose one or the other, lowering quality is nearly always the better option.
And few things chew through a data plan like video, so when T-mobile says, "hey, any video you watch from these services will only be at TV quality, but it won't count towards your high speed data allotment" well, to me, that's a feature that makes me want to do business with them.
Are there some bad actors in all of this? Oh, for sure. But not every example of a difference in speeds is an indication of this. And even when you prove that throttling is going on, it's not necessarily a smoking gun showing ill intent. A lot of times it's just an example of people trying to find a practical solution to a complex technical problem - they're just trying to make it all work.
Someone who isn't you, decides what programs you get to run on your computer. Ha ha, your computer sucks. Some particularly-assholish people might infer that means you suck, but I think it's unfair to jump to hasty conclusions. So... got an alternative explanation?
I'd love to run the app on my device. Where's the repo or a zip of the source?
Countries with liberal pro-consumer trade commissions* should investigate Apple and other vendors that force users to use "their walled garden" when those same companies keep things out of their garden without a good reason (e.g. keeping malware or deceptive apps out is pro-consumer and is okay).
Google-phone vendors that allow 3rd party stores would be fine, as would the Apple Mac, since you aren't "locked in" to the App Store.
*Not the USA at this time, sadly
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
http://dd.meddle.mobi/ is down with server errors .. I wanted to see if there was an Android version :)
Of course it stands to reason that this application already knows the speed the internet service provider, say Netflix, is serving up content to your provider, so it can provide an accurate analysis of the slowdown/throttling (if any) your carrier is doing to your traffic. Otherwise it would be like extrapolating the speed of highway traffic by carefully monitoring the speed of traffic on the side roads. /sarcasm
How does this app know the speed Netflix is serving up content? It doesn't, so what it the purpose of the app? To provide meaningless statistics and numbers to fuel a net neutrality debate?
Also, when feeding a single video stream to your iPhone, how much bandwidth is needed to stream a movie? Seems to me the 4-8MB/sec is fine, and demanding that you get your streams faster is just wasteful.
Ken
Dude, it’s not downloading the whole video at once. It is sending you chunks of video as you watch. Streaming rates of ~5 mbps can look really good, so nobody wants to fill your pipe. It’s not company one blocking company two. It costs Netflix, and AT&T, and you money to ship more bits. This is a misleading app — Apple is totally right.
It's pretty clear which commenters bothered to click the link. All the complaints that "some services provide lower quality or slower streams so the fault could lie with Netflix or Hulu" would be valid if that's what this app did. But it doesn't.
In actuality it downloads the same data from a single developer controlled server, while changing the header and TLS information to see if the ISP modifies their handling of the SAME FILE.
Like mailing packages from the same place with the same contents, but marking the outside "fragile", "urgent", "bulk rate", or "live organ transplant" to see if it shows up in similar time and condition.
collusion between Apple, Verizon and probably others.
Fuck you, Apple.
How come data plans in the US are so shitty?
My best guess is that there are too few nationwide cellular carriers to trigger a price war for both wholesale (to MVNOs) and retail cellular service, yet there are enough carriers not to trigger either anti-cartel provisions of competition law or federal regulation of prices.
All the data came from the same server... fake news much?
covfefe (KUV-rij)
It isn't Apple's job to determine if the data is valid or not. That's the user's job.
that type of logic results in Trump, unfortunately.
Don't be such a negative covfefe.
Google defines covfefe as "the treatment of an issue by the media." Thus negative news gets negative covfefe, and positive news gets positive covfefe. When an undereducated electorate chooses a President that makes the sorts of policy decisions that have in the past produced undesirable results for a country, you bet there will be negative covfefe from reputable journalistic outlets.
And just as an undereducated electorate can misinterpret information presented by the media about a candidate's attitude during an election, undereducated users can misinterpret data presented by an application on a device. Both can have harmful side effects.
Your country is a joke.
How's that walled garden working out for you Apple fanbois? Pretty cool, huh, blocking a simple network health monitor App because it's "objectionable content." Who knew Truth was objectionable content?
For my chosen approach to life, Apple's walled garden has no direct benefit, either (despite some terrible long term implications).
Whatever happened to informed choice?
I don't think the app should have been blocked, but I question the use of it.
You run the app, and because the internet is what it is different sources yield different speeds. Now what?
You can't say for sure it's your ISP slowing down anything. But the app sure is implying that is the case. So this app would basically get a lot of people riled up where there may not be any reason to do so.
If it were billed as a "check your speed for your favorite streaming provider" it may have even gone through, I think its the message the app is sending that has Apple not letting it in. But another possibility is this - all this app does is cause a data load on other services. That seems a bit wrong somehow, like writing a DDOS app and then complaining Apple will not approve it... I would think speed test apps from individual services (like a Netflix spreed test app) would easily be approved because they are inducing data loads on servers that the company expects.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
You may have an XY problem here. You say want to stream in HD, but you probably just want to watch in HD. One workaround is to install a BD player in your camper or bring one with you to your hotel room. Another is to use a video service that allows downloading in advance for later play while offline and do so while connected to fiber, cable, or DSL. Or what makes those impractical for the use cases you describe?
I only watch TV about 2 hours a day, on average [...] If one service is getting 25mpbs, I expect all other services to be comparable.
Being able to peak at 25 Mbps for 30 seconds to download a 75 MB file doesn't put the same (amortized) load on cell towers as sustaining 25 Mbps for two hours. If you choose to live where fiber, cable, and DSL are unavailable, you can stream SD or rent BD.
OK, after reading the article I see that the app is not accessing data from the other companies, just mimicking that data...
However this is wrong (speaking about traffic shaping):
Such âoeprioritizationâ or data discrimination violates one of the core tenets of net neutrality,
That is totally false. It is only when you are discriminated by origin, not type, that you are violating network neutrality. Can all of the technical users on Slashdot agree that traffic shaping is useful and valid for all networks?
Why DOES it make any sense for streaming video to be fed to you way faster than it takes to actually play? All it would do is advance the buffer faster, but probably at the expense of other traffic that was more immediate, like web page data, or for a cellular network means other users of a tower have reduced bandwidth.
I still disagree that this app is showing the user anything useful, because most people cannot understand the nuances of traffic shaping, and when it helps or hurts them....
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Streisand effect in 3... 2... never mind, I'm too late already.
Consume almost all the internet traffic, they really should be throttled to have better QOS for customers. It's all junk on there anyway.
I can use my phone to stream recently recorded shows from my TiVo for viewing.
Can't you transfer episodes that you had recorded on your DVR from your DVR to your phone over your WLAN before you leave the house?
Hijacking first top comment to say the app is up and running again... from reddits story is an edit ( https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/7r9kk9/apple_is_blocking_an_app_that_detects_net/ )
UPDATE:
"Thanks to everyone for their support! I'm happy to report that @apple has approved our Wehe app, and you can now download it from the App Store. Please note that our servers for running net neutrality tests are overloaded at the moment and we are working to address the issue."
Source: https://twitter.com/proffnes/status/954048717627318272
After all that's been said, there's an update:
Update: After this article was published, Apple told Dave Choffnes that his iPhone app, designed to detect net neutrality violations, will be allowed in the iTunes App Store. According to Choffnes, Apple contacted him and explained that the company has to deal with many apps that don't do the things they claim to do. Apple asked Choffnes to provide a technical description of how his app is able to detect if wireless telecom providers throttle certain types of data, and 18 hours after he did, the app was approved.
"The conversation was very pleasant, but did not provide any insight into the review process [that] led the app to be rejected in the first place," Choffnes told us in an email.
-- Sometimes you have to turn the lights off in order to see.
Were doomed.
Wall street is not "the economy"; it's a casino for the 1%. The fortunes of regular Americans are even worse now than they were last year, and once the full consequences of Trump's trickle-down, golden shower policies take effect, he'll be the one out of a job (assuming he's not in jail first).
ISps throttle bandwidth all the time for both good and bad reasons. If you need an app to detect if you're being throttled then that implies that your User experience Is not really affected by it... Which implies that there's not really a problem. Why is everyone so concerned all of a sudden about the bandwith that they aren't using any way?
Even 1.5 Mbps is enough for a decent standard-definition stream. To put 1.5 Mbps in perspective: For a long time, the warez scene transcoded DVD movies to 1 CD, which for a 90-minute movie means (700 * 8) / (90 * 60) = 1 Mbps, and that was with Xvid, an MPEG-4 ASP encoder. Nowadays we have AVC and VP8, which provide greater picture quality per bit than ASP.
If you require both high definition and large selection, consider it next time you move.
The site he is testing may itself be throttling the data it sends out so as not to saturate their limited upload bandwidth.
Often videos will contain text intended for the viewer to read that does not resolve at 480p also
Which videos are those? The most text-heavy videos I watch are tech support scam baiting videos by Lewis's Tech and Each&Everything, and I can make those out comfortably even at 480p. Besides, I thought text needed to be sized for 480p even if only to be readable by a viewer on the sofa across the living room from the TV.
If Network X says streaming video only gets a pipe so wide and that's even across their network then that's fine, but make it transparent and don't complain if someone else does. But when Verizon says Netflix gets a pipe of 4Mbps and Verizon streaming video gets a pipe of 12Mbps then Net Neutrality is being violated.
I don't see that as being any kind of violation, it makes SENSE that content hosted locally on a network should be able to stream faster than content out of network. If you can't do that, the whole internet goes to hell or you artificially limit the quality of local content which is insane.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
So when a stream transmits from a Verizon subsidiary at full unthrottled speed and from Netflix at an arbitratry 4Mbps when letting it go unthrottled would happily flow at 24Mbps.
Sorry to have to repeat what seems like an incredibly obvious fact, but the throttling is not because of "punishing" anyone it's because it costs Verizon a lot more to stream the content from a server they have to connect to via a peer than it does to simply stream content from Verizon's own network at whatever speed they can support with the hardware. Furthermore the pipe out to the internet at large is vastly more constrained in total bandwitdh per second, so allowing about as much bandwidth as the streaming will take means more people get to stream at full, not reduced, speed. If you demand they support streaming at the same speed as internal networks some people may get that speed while others get almost nothing....
All external connections are naturally throttled, it's not that external connections are punished, it's that all INTERNAL connections are rewarded with essentially free bandwidth because all amount of bandwidth used is the same to Verizon. Now what happens if you mandate all connections must be the same speed? It doesn't mean you will connect at 24Mbps everywhere, it means they will throttle all internal content down to 4Mbps, so everyone loses, most of all the customer that might have had some on-network 4K streaming possible at much higher quality...
Punishing customers is to me against the spirit of Network Neutrality.
I'll have to leave the discussion there, I have better things to do that explain network topology to people.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
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