Wednesday, August 06, 2008

EFF launches tool to monitor ISPs for bad behavior

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is protecting your rights online again, this time with a tool called Switzerland. Switzerland lets you check your ISPs compliance with net neutrality, making sure they're not trying to shut down specific kinds of traffic, like BitTorrent and VOIP. Naturally, Switzerland is Open Source.

It's also a command-line tool, and still in alpha, so it's not necessarily for everyone. If you're comfortable with this kind of app, and you're concerned about your ISP's behavior, definitely give it a go. How exactly does it know whether your ISP is fiddling around with your bandwidth? The EFF says, "It will spot IP packets which are forged or modified between clients, inform you, and give you copies of the modified packets." It recognizes packets injected or modified by some of the most popular tools ISPs have been using to mess with p2p traffic, including SandVine and AudibleMagic.

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