The Network Systems research group of the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems recently published a cool little online tool called Glasnost. It tests for BitTorrent traffic manipulation.
I’m not providing a link to the tool mostly because the institute – recently popular from Slashdot – seems to have been hijacked by malware that is causing pop-up windows to appear. Some of the pop-ups are pornographic – so I wouldn’t go checking out the site at work. Still, the basic idea is pretty damn cool.
In addition to testing for BitTorrent blocking, you can also get a pretty accurate bandwidth and latency reading. I have no idea if this program can be modified to keep WAN service providers honest and get a real measure of latency on a WAN, but the source code has been released to the public and anyone can use it.
But most people will just use it to check to see if their ISP does any BitTorrent traffic manipulation.
There is a bit of irony to the project as well; Glasnost is named after the well known economic and political reforms of Mikhail Gorbachev, the last General Secretary of the Communist Party and de facto last ruler of the Soviet Union. He opened up Russia to criticism from within.
The Planck Institute’s Glasnost has been gathering data on which ISPs are blocking or throttling BitTorrent transmissions. A copy of a map on which that data was plotted is found below – the black dots are tested connections that have no throttling, the red dots are tested connections that have throttling. I think I’ll just let the map speak for itself. (Click on the map for a larger version)
The raw numbers on the site confirm what is on the map. 889 total ISPs were tested. 14 of those had some sort of BitTorrent blocking. 10 of those were located in the United States. That’s 10 out of 199 – or a little over 5%.
The only other countries that have any sort of BitTorrent blocking ISPs are Canada (1 out of 99), Ireland, (1 out of 7), Malaysia (1 out of 2), and Singapore (1 out of 6). All the countries that were part of the former Soviet Union, and tested, came out with no blocking whatsoever.
Glasnost seems to be an appropriate name.
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