How to check if your ISP is throttling your Bittorent traffic

[3NIGM4]

Seems a lot of americans get slowed down...

At a high-level, our test sets up a series of BitTorrent flows between an end user's host and our Glasnost test servers. We collect the packet trace for each flow on the server side, and we closely monitor both end points for any error conditions that might cause a flow to be aborted. If a flow is aborted by a control (RST) packet that was not sent by either of the end points, we report the flow as being blocked by some ISP along its path.

More specifically, we report a BitTorrent connection as blocked only when:

* Both end points report that the connection is reset and neither of them actively closed the connection: This suggests that the RST packets are generated by some middlebox in the network and not the end hosts. On the server side, we check for received RST packets in the packet logs we collect and that we have not sent any RST packet. On the client side, we detect connection reset when the client JVM aborts the flow raising a "Connection reset by peer" or "An existing connection was forcibly closed by the remote host" IOException.

* None of the multiple control TCP connections (with random bits in the payload) established immediately before or after the aborted BitTorrent transfer are interrupted: This suggests that BitTorrent transfers are being specifically targeted for termination.

* The BitTorrent connection is reset after the exchange of "bitfield" messages and before any data messages have been transferred: Bitfield messages in the BitTorrent protocol indicate an intent to initiate data transfers. That the connections are aborted immediately after protocol specific messages offers further evidence that BitTorrent traffic is being actively profiled and manipulated.

Note: At this point of time, our reporting of BitTorrent blocking is conservative i.e., there are scenarios when a BitTorrent connection is blocked but we do not report it because it does not meet our rather stringent checks. For example, we exclude BitTorrent connections that might have been blocked after a few data bytes have been transferred. Similarly, we exclude blocked connections for which we cannot parse the IOException string thrown by the client JVM (the exception varies between JVMs, and especially between different languages). We are actively working to improve our methodology and we expect to uncover more cases of blocking over time.

Glasnot test site

Google tools will soon tell you if your isp is slowing you down too

Gizmodo Article

[3NIGM4]

Argh Zeus Hunt posted that already!!

[shought]

Hehehe, you're right about that :P But it's a nice reminder, since their servers were(and still are, i just noticed) always busy. Now, at first click, i managed to get through, but some error occurred and now i can't do it over due to business :P ;) Me sad. Stupid servers :D Why don't they just scan a ISP once and show the same result to everyone using that? And just keep rescanning those ISP every 3 months or something? blahblah

Edit: And you did put some news in it, about Google :D