BitTorrent pirates have just been given a helping hand by Google. It’s launched a new set of tools to check if your ISP is blocking traffic to your PC. In particular, it’ll sniff out ISPs that block P2P traffic. That means BitTorrent, the filesharing system of choice for pirates.
Google has just unveiled Measurement Lab (M-Lab), to help test your connection’s speed. Of most use to pirates is a feature called Glasnost, which tests whether BitTorrent P2P traffic is being ignored.
Sound useful? Google has another pair of tools in the works too, DiffProbe and Nano, which determine if your ISP is routing traffic from certain groups, locations and applications. Best of all though, all the results of testing ill be available for all to view.
This is likely to cause uproar in America, where several major telecoms companies (Naming no names, Comcast) have been caught turning BitTorrent traffic away at the door, and one, Cox Communications, has only just announced that it plans to limit download speeds of non “time sensitive” data – anything that isn’t a web page, essentially.
Google is famously pro net neutrality, and while we don’t approve of downloading copyright material, anything that keeps the net moving quickly is good in our books – let’s not forget that the process of P2P itself isn’t illegal, and several legitimate TV streaming services use it to deliver pictures without crippling central servers.
Out Now | £free | Google (Via Wired)
