ICSI Netalyzr – probing for problems
p2pnet news view Freedom | P2P:- There’s no limit to the ingenuity employed by ISPs to shape, throttle cap and otherwise deliver bandwidth that’s a little less than pure — and it’s not always easy for regular users without networking knowledge to test the quality of their connection, says dslreports‘ Karl Bode.
“With that in mind there’s been a growing number of tools and tests designed for regular users, one of the more recent being the Google-driven MLAB — a suite of tools to which Google lent resources, helping them in their network neutrality battle against giant carriers,” he says, going on »»»
Many users are oblivious to whether outbound services are blocked or whether there problems with their ISP’s DNS servers.
To that end, researchers at the International Computer Science Institute say they’ve developed a new java applet connection analyzer dubbed the ICSI Netalyzr.
Netalyzr allows users to probe their network to discover various properties and problems, hidden HTTP proxies and caches, port filtering, IPv6 connectivity, latency, bandwidth, buffer properties, and DNS server health.
The tools don’t just help users — they help ISPs as well by fact-checking user claims, and helping to eliminate cries of network neutrality wolf.
For instance, Slashdot today directed their users to this post from a user claiming that Comcast was messing about with port 53 traffic to force customers to use Comcast DNS servers (and by proxy their DNS redirection ads).
Except, “Comcast argues this isn’t the case, and user tests using the new Netalyzr tool seem to confirm Comcast’s side of the story,” Bode adds.
dslreports - Introducing the ICSI Netalyzr, June 9, 2009
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June 10th, 2009 at 11:53 am
“…user tests using the new Netalyzr tool seem to confirm Comcastâs side of the story…”
I wouldn’t be too quick to dismiss this, just because the Netalyzr tool didn’t see it.
Many savvy users of various networks have been experiencing what seems to amount to a “DNS hijacking” by the providers. Rogers in Canada seemed to start the ball rolling some time back by inserting their own pages (complete with their advertising) whenever a user would enter an invalid URL. A few people I know say Rogers is still doing this.
Many have reported that they’re not getting their browsers’ error pages in return for a bad URL, they’re getting something with their provider’s name on it. And some have been complaining they’ve gotten strange search pages that don’t trace back to the mistyped URL in any way. Indeed, many of the erroneous URLs in question didn’t have a registered forwarding page, and therefore, should not have resolved.
There isn’t a good reason why invalid URLs should resolve, instead of returning the proper “error page” from the browser’s own internal files. And, providers just may have an interest in fucking with Port 53, as some popular torrent clients direct most of the UDP requests for bittorrent connection discoveries through that port.
Now, I’m not saying everyone needs to immediately put on their tinfoil hat here…
I’m just saying it might not hurt to keep it handy.
Many of the providers out there have been consistently demonstrating they will do pretty much anything to circumvent file sharing. I’m conditioned not to trust them. Whether this is another attempt to screw with BT, I can’t answer that right now.
But, I’m going to do what I can to find out!…