US cable provider Comcast has presented its long-term solution for managing broadband traffic...

"The new system appears to be a reasonable attempt at sharing limited bandwidth among groups of users," wrote EFF staff technologist Peter Eckersley.

"Comcast's objective here is still largely to prioritise non-peer-to-peer traffic above peer-to-peer traffic. But the criterion they use is the amount of data a cable modem sends during each 15 minute period, which is a much fairer rule than examining the traffic protocol."

In an effort to stymie Internet pirates, the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry, a music industry group, is asking European lawmakers to require Internet service providers to use filters to block the illicit transfer of copyrighted material.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (eff.org), a privacy advocate, responded by sending a letter to the European Parliament arguing that such filters would be an “ineffective measure that will do little to practically address the concerns of major rights holders while imposing serious costs on the individual rights of European citizens.”

The filtering technology would not be effective, according to the foundation, because pirates would simply encrypt files to bypass it in the same way that banks encrypt credit card information. Meanwhile, legitimate users of copyrighted material would be hampered in their ability to post video and music clips. And the costs would most likely be borne by service providers, and, by extension, their customers, the foundation said.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is releasing "Switzerland," a software tool for customers to test the integrity of their Internet communications.

"The sad truth is that the FCC is ill-equipped to detect ISPs interfering with your Internet connection," said Fred von Lohmann, EFF Senior Intellectual Property Attorney. "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."

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.

In recent years, ISPs have taken an increased interest in faking packets, and for some mysterious reason, they don't always like to make this fact perfectly clear to customers. Hoping to bring power to the people, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) yesterday released a tool called "Switzerland" that can help users find out if an ISP is modifying packets or injecting packets of its own into any protocol. The tool is open source and available now for download, but there's a reason that EFF refers to the current release as "Version Zero."

The software, designed to see if an ISP is delivering packets "neutrally" (hence the Switzerland reference), has undergone in-house development for some time. EFF Staff Technologist Peter Eckersley coded the initial version, which has now been opened up and made available on SourceForge. Enterprising network hackers (and GUI experts) are needed to continue development of version 0.0.4.

NEW YORK — Comcast on Tuesday acknowledged "delaying" some subscriber Internet traffic, but said any roadblocks it puts up are temporary and intended to improve surfing for other users.

...

The Electronic Frontier Foundation confirmed the AP's findings with its own tests — including spotting forged messages sent by Comcast's computers to shut down connections.

...

"These are the kinds of software bugs you get when you have ISPs messing around with hacking techniques to get some applications running on their networks and not others," said EFF's Eckersley, who is himself a Comcast subscriber.

The blogosphere is abuzz over an Associated Press investigative article this past Friday on the subject of Comcast's BitTorrent filtering. Briefly, there were a number of articles in early September which alleged that Comcast was using some fairly sneaky techniques to throttle BitTorrent traffic on its network. Comcast, of course, denied any such behavior. It took a month and a half, but both a mainstream media news organization as well as the Electronic Frontier Foundation have tested and confirmed the previously reported claims. It turns out that Comcast is not only throttling BitTorrent, but Gnutella and, strangely, Lotus Notes are also suffering.

...

I discussed this issue with Fred von Lohmann, a lawyer with the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Von Lohmann stated that "based on (our) own testing, as well as what has been reported, it seems clear that Comcast's techniques are bad for its customers and bad for innovation generally. The fact that Comcast's efforts are reportedly interfering with BitTorrent, Gnutella and Lotus Notes communications makes it clear that they are not narrowly targeted at particular users or protocols."

Time Warner Cable says access to a Web site that has been posting blog entries about an officer-involved shooting in Oceanside was temporarily inaccessible to its subscribers because of technical problems and wasn't intentionally blocked.

...

Peter Eckersley, a staff technologist with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an Internet free-speech and privacy advocacy organization, said information posted on badcopnews.com seemed to rule out that a firewall had blocked the site and was “somewhat consistent with Time Warner's explanation.”