EFF Unveils Open Source Network Throttling Detection Tool

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has unveiled an open source tool designed to detect the throttling of your Internet connection. This could come in very handy for Comcast customers who want to make sure Comcast follows the order recently given to it by the FCC, to halt P2P throttling.

Nicely, the tool was first unveiled last week, just before the FCC's decision was announced.

Earlier Google said it was working on such a detector, and the Max Planck Institute unveiled one (which promptly turned me off with a NSFW pop-up), but so far, I haven't found anything useful.

The EFF's tool, called Switzerland (I hope I don't have to explain how Switzerland and neutrality are linked) "will spot IP packets which are forged or modified between clients, inform you, and give you copies of the modified packets."

The alpha release is a command-line only utility that is written in Python, runs on OS X, Linux and Windows, and requires a fair degree of sophistication to run. The project is part of the EFF's larger Test Your ISP project.

In order to really make this thing fly, though, the EFF needs some enterprising coders to help flesh out the product (and write some GUI as most people aren't going to use this otherwise).

In their press release, Peter Eckersley, EFF Staff Technologist and designer of Switzerland said:

"Until now, there hasn't been a reliable way to tell if somebody -- a hacker, an ISP, corporate firewall, or the Great Firewall of China -- is modifying your Internet traffic en route. The few tests available have been for narrow and specific kinds of interference, or have required tremendous amounts of advanced forensic labor. Switzerland is designed to make general-purpose ISP testing faster and easier."

The EFF also remarks on why it's doing this: it doesn't feel the FCC has the necessary tools to monitor Comcast and other ISPs. Strange: ISPs seem to have plenty of tools to monitor us!

Fred von Lohmann, EFF Senior Intellectual Property Attorney said:

"The sad truth is that the FCC is ill-equipped to detect ISPs interfering with your Internet connection. It's up to concerned Internet users to investigate possible network neutrality violations, and EFF's Switzerland software is designed to help with that effort. Comcast isn't the first, and certainly won't be the last, ISP to meddle surreptitiously with its subscribers' Internet communications for its own benefit."