P2P Throttling Test Brings Glasnost to the Web. Or Does It?

Worried about your ISP throttling P2P transfers (you ought to be, particularly if you have Comcast service)? Want to embrace the spirit of Internet glasnost (meaning openness and freedom of information as in the Russian social policies introduced by Mikhail Gorbachev)?

Well, researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems have reportedly created tools for detecting if an ISP is manipulating BitTorrent traffic. The project is called: Glasnost: Bringing Transparency to the Internet.

In this case, the transparency the project is looking for is around manipulation and traffic shaping as it relates to P2P traffic. Go to their site and run the tools and you can check for such manipulation.

I will warn you that their servers are quite busy and I was unable to run a "full throttling test" even though I tried several times. I was able to run a "simple test," but it failed after starting.

I was also extremely annoyed by the fact that when I ran the second tool, the "broadband link characteristics" tool, I was greeted with a decidedly "not-safe-for-work" website. The second time I ran it, I received a different pop-up, but still a spam-type site.

While in general I would trust the Max Planck Institute, I feel somewhat betrayed by pop-ups on a site that's supposed to bring "greater openness to the Internet."