Congress just whacked Comcast for throttling its users' broadband service when using BitTorrent. Now, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has announced a new tool to find out if other broadband providers are doing just that. On Friday, the EFF posted Switzerland, a free software utility that users can run to determine whether their ISPs are fiddling with their bits behind the scenes. According to Fred von Lohmann, the EFF's senior intellectual property attorney, "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."

Spy vs. Spy
Switzerland, a command-line-driven utility, tests whether a user's IP packets have been tampered with, added to or rerouted. An open-source project, the Switzerland utility is but one part of the EFF's "Test Your ISP" project, designed to raise consumer awareness of ISP activities.
Switzerland can also detect whether an ISP is using various spy tools, such as Sandvine, AudibleMagic and Fair Eagle. Sandvine is an application that monitors P2P network activity and inserts forged packets into P2P streams that exceed thresholds set by the ISP. The forged packets cause a reset of the transmission, slowing speeds to below the setting.
AudibleMagic is a software tool that samples the actual content of P2P transferred files, capturing a representative sample of a suspected copyrighted audio file. It then compares the sample to a database of more than 3.7 million copyrighted works to see if there is a match. The software can then disrupt the transfer or log the transfer to a file.
Fair Eagle, a particularly invasive application used by some ISPs, inserts ads into Web views, regardless of destination.
The EFF hopes that use of Switzerland will not only give consumers an opportunity to check their broadband connections, but also to...

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