Google gives Georgia Tech $1 million to develop tools that could detect Big Brother, bust jerk Internet providers
Google has awarded Georgia Tech $1 million to study and develop tools to help people detect if their Internet access is being slowed down — or blocked — by a service provider. Or hell, even the government.
Via the press release posted on Engadget:
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." ...
According to Assistant Professor Nick Feamster, some 60 nations (including the United States) censor some access to information on the Internet. Moreover, the total number of worldwide users (currently estimated at 1.9 billion) is expected to double within the next decade. Finally, at least 4.5 billion people subscribe to cellular networks, accessing through their mobile devices everything from online banking services to streaming music and video. Both "traditional" Internet connections and cellular-based networks will be covered by the tools the researchers hope to create.