The Electronic Frontier Foundation, a rights advocacy group based in San Francisco, released a software program last week that lets you track whether your Internet Service Provider (ISP) is purposefully making your connection run slower. Called Switzerland, the software monitors packet forgery, a technique by which ISPs add overhead to your broadband line. Instead of just slowing down the connection, packet forgeries are like adding potholes to a highway that you -- and anyone you connect to -- are travelling. Switzerland uses a separate server for monitoring your traffic: it compares the way your traffic looks to the way it should, and alerts you to any discrepancy.
According to Peter Eckersley, an EFF technologist involved with the Switzerland project, there's just not enough transparency for end-users to know whether a service provider is deliberately tampering with their connection and therefore reducing the value of the service.
"At a technical level, the problem we're really addressing is that there are no existing tools that make detection and examination of modified traffic easy and automatic, Eckersley told me via email. "There have been some tools released that detect specific kinds of interference -- such as modified Web pages or TCP RST spoofing -- but nothing that spots arbitrary modifications."
According to Eckersley, there's also a misunderstanding about the term "Internet throttling."
"The word 'throttling' has been used to describe the network management undertaken by ISPs such as Comcast and Cox against various programs, including P2P apps like BitTorrent and Gnutella/Limewire," he says. "But 'throttling' isn't a very accurate description of what Comcast and Cox were doing, because it suggests that the ISP was just slowing down or 'shaping' the traffic. What we saw with U.S. cable ISPs was not just the slowing of some communications, but the actual injection of forged packets."
Switzerland is a free program, published under the open-source GPL license. Whether it might raise enough red flags to cause ISPs to think twice about manhandling their users' connections is still an unknown.
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And if you happen to find that your ISP might be slowing down your connection. What then?
Do you confront them and request that they stop tampering? What does that lead to? Termination of service for investigation into ISP matters?
What good does it do us if we find out they are tampering with our connection?
If enough people complain, they'll stop. That's just how it goes. Quit being a coward.
from Winnipeg, Manitoba
You have no choice to accept all information sent to your computer, because of the FCC Rules 15~16 you must comply with all interference and may not cause harmful interference(To People or Machine) however a bent rule is that if you send information over the internet to a computer and it understands the information it must use it as it was programmed.
Aslong as you run on Any OS you can be hacked by anyone with the engineering information of the system. Linux, Mac or commonly Windows.
If you press CTRL-ShifT-ESC you will bring up your Administrative Task Manager in Windows. Go to the New Task Option (If not available double click the border) Type "Services.msc" These are most of the servicies and tasks running on your computer taking up large amounds of PID. These take up your Memory and Slow your bandwith.
Alot of these Servicies you do not need running, and some you do not want running as they may be malicious, even from trusted providers.
One is a common hackers tool, the Workstation Service, they may start the Command Prompt which is a Dos like Indexing program. They may start servicies manually, search your computer etc. This needs to be made Manual, and stoped when started.
Microsoft Uses the Following servicies in Relay to FORCE you to download there Authentication Protocols, Certificates and Updates. Just more stuff to stop you from stoping them.
-Cryptographic Servicies
-Background Intelligent Transfer Service
-Certificate Propagation
-DFS Replication
-Indexing Service
-Remote Registry (VERY BAD Enables Remote Users to Modify your Computers Registry) Set To Manual
-Secondary Logon
-Workstation
Otherservices May Be Malicous. In the Task Manager in VISTA if you have Servicies tab and a Unwanted Service is Running, Right Click and either STOP or if unavailable GO TO PROCESS and it may highlight SVCHOST.EXE and will take up more then 5K of your Private Memory..BAD. End Process Tree.
IF YOU EVER SEE TASK ENGINE RUNNING 30Mins After Startup, End The Task. May Also appear as Svchost.exe
* (If you see an odd service and you are sceptical, stop it, if nothign happens differntly {internet ok etc} then you probably dont need it, open the properties and if its running on a password protected undocked profile, disable it, and check the dependencies, if you see HTMP and RPC
These allow microsoft to send you information to link to there online database, to force download updates and to check for signatures of your programs and authentication of your windows.
RPC (Remote Procedure Call) RAC(Remote Access Connection) are services that if incase you manually shut of thier special servicies, they can use to log you off, shut down your computer, or noob you buy running them again as svchost.exe
Even if you manually shut of servicies, they can be started again, and eventually you have no power against them, not untill people have the common knowledge of building there own OS (Start with a linux os and hack it)
Anyways Knowledge is Power! So most of you are defenseless to your ISP using your Bandwidth and your OS Engineer from using your harddrive.
Sorry its long, but thats pretty compact.
-You fall somewhere in the Balanced Frequency of Nature. Someone Along the Indefinite Spectrum of Life.