11/29/2007

New Software Detects Web Interference

Filed under: — Aviran Mordo @ 4:23 am

Increasingly worried over Internet providers’ behavior, a nonprofit has released software that helps determine whether online glitches are innocent hiccups or evidence of deliberate traffic tampering.

The San Francisco-based digital rights group Electronic Frontier Foundation hopes the program, released Wednesday, will help uncover “data discrimination” - efforts by Internet providers to disrupt some uses of their services - in addition to the cases reported separately by EFF, The Associated Press and other sources.

“People have all sorts of problems, and they don’t know whether to attribute that to some sort of misconfiguration, or deliberate behavior by the ISP,” said Seth Schoen, a staff technologist with EFF.

The new software compares lists of data packets sent and received by two different computers and looks for discrepancies between what one sent and the other actually received. Previously, the process had to be done manually.

 

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