Georgia Tech to Pursue 'Transparent Internet'

[n2doc]

ATLANTA – March 22, 2010 – What if Internet users could click a button and determine whether their service was being artificially slowed down? Or if the government were censoring their content? In the name of Internet transparency, a team of Georgia Tech researchers will use a $1 million Google Focused Research Award to provide Internet users around the world with just those kinds of tools.

The two-year unrestricted award (with a third-year option for an additional $500,000) will fund a range of activities that together are intended to make Internet access more transparent for the billions of network subscribers around the globe. At the end of the project, the team hopes to provide a suite of web-based, Internet-scale measurement tools that any user around the world could access for free. With the help of these tools, users could determine whether their ISPs are providing the kind of service customers are paying for, and whether the data they send and receive over their network connections is being tampered with by governments and/or ISPs.

“Community collaboration is a big part of this project,” said Wenke Lee, Professor in the School of Computer Science and a principal investigator on the grant. “Ultimately we hope this project will help create a ‘transparency ecosystem,’ where more and more users will take advantage of the measurement tools, which in turn will improve the accuracy and comprehensiveness of our analysis.

“For example,” Lee continued, “say something happens again like what happened in Egypt recently, when the Internet was essentially shut down. If we have a community of Internet user-participants in that country, we will know instantly when a government or ISP starts to block traffic, tamper with search results, even alter web-based information in order to spread propaganda.”

more

http://www.gatech.edu/newsroom/release.html?nid=65059

[The Backlash Cometh]

1. Georgia Tech. Leading the way.

I knew there was something I liked about that college.

To Hell with Georgia!

[GaYellowDawg]

5. If there's something to like about the North Avenue Trade School...

... it's the first thing. Tech sucks.

[baldguy]

2. There should be an app for that.

[RKP5637]

3. Excellent!!! When designed the Internet (originally Arpanet) was adequate, but

as the Internet developed at least where I was employed although we knew obviously intrusion was possible, IMO in the early days just after Mosaic came to be, the level of intrusion today was not envisioned. It was good back then just to get the stuff to work.

I think this effort by Georgia Tech is outstanding. One needs a little bit of privacy left in the world. Don't get me wrong, security was always of concern, but the rapid development of the WWW has pushed the envelop exponentially as to the need for tools like this. This is great!

As we used to say way back, anytime you have two wires leaving the mainframe security is gone in the big picture.

[FreakinDJ]

4. NICE - Google to the Rescue