Twenty years ago, if you wanted to find something out, you’d probably have to visit a library, or look it up in a collection of encyclopedias. If you wanted to buy food, you’d go to the supermarket, or if you wanted to browse for a new TV or gadget, you’d go to an electrical outlet and look around. Now, we can Google virtually any fact we like and get the answer instantly, we can do our grocery shopping online and have it delivered directly to our doors, and for anything else there are a multitude of Internet companies selling electrical goods that offer significant savings to those found in actual shops.

So the question is, with all these services that enable us to do virtually anything from the comfort of our armchairs, are we getting to dependent on our Internet connections? Have you ever wondered what would happen if the Internet were to be disconnected globally just for one day? Is your Internet connection really just as important as your gas or electricity supply?

For many people, especially those who run a business from home, the answer to this question could be a resounding yes! The Internet being down for just a day could devastate a business that operates on a schedule and to tight deadlines. This is why many service providers promise an always-on service with 99.999% uptime, for companies and people who simply must have the Internet at all times. Some people even go to the length of installing more than one Internet line into their homes and offices, just for the occasion when one service goes down. Imagine if you have a small workforce working online. You still have to pay these people, even if they are unable to do their work due to a service disruption. Without electricity, you can run computers on battery backup or a generator for a number of hours, but if your working environment is in the cloud, you’re truly stumped without your Internet.

Many people are also looking at satellite connections and mobile phone technology to provide backups to their primary Internet connections. After all, having more than one cable into your home or office is no good if a construction worker puts a spade through a bundle of cables at the end of your street!

So think to yourself. What would you do without the Internet for a day, or a week? How would you get on? What kind of inconvenience would it be? How much money would you lose? Should you consider backing up your connection with an alternative service?

The third possibility are software programs that are executed on the computer system. One of these is Down Tester by the popular software developer Nirsoft. Down Tester comes with all the usual traits that all Nirsoft applications come with. It is portable, offers command line options and highly customizable for the purpose at hand. Its main purpose is to record the download speeds of various files that get added by the user. The reason why the software does not come with a default set of files is server overload.

This means that the user has to add files manually in the software program before the Internet speed test can be started. Down Tester will then download one file after the other until all files have been downloaded. It displays the speed in bytes and bits at the end plus other values like the start time, download duration, size and url of the file.

It is possible to create html reports of the results of the Internet speed test. The software offers some advanced options like setting ftp mode to passive or active, stopping downloads after 5000 Kilobytes automatically or the amount of retries if a connection fails. Down Tester fails to test the upload speed of a connection which might be worth an upgrade and should not be to hard to implement; Maybe by adding a list of upload file hosts to the program.

Why is Phorm so dangerous? The tracking is definitely a privacy issue. The user cannot opt out of the tracking and data like search queries and visited websites are stored and analyzed. Since British companies are world renowned for data safety it is only a matter of time before data leaks user profiles.

Firephorm is a Firefox extension that is forging the cookies placed on the system to make the tracking system useless. It provides the option to forge the master cookie and the tracking cookies to either poison the system by using random cookies, using an opt-out cookie or from an UID list specified by the user.

The Firefox extension modifies http requests and response headers and can also warn the user if a webpage request was redirected via Phorm’s webwise.net.

This brings up some interesting moral but also legal questions. Website owners have no idea, and obviously no control, that ads are displayed on their websites. The problem here is that they probably do not have the means to verify that ads are displayed either unless someone would come up with a log that showed which websites have been affected by this practice. Customers however are on the other end of the spectrum. Their traffic is meddled with and are shown ads that are probably specifically targeted to increase the success rate.

Some ISP names have been published by the researchers already: RedMoon, Mesa Networks, MetroFi and XO Communications with the last being one of the largest ISPs in the country and only in that list because of a smaller reseller according to an XO spokesman. It will be interesting to access the full list of Internet Service Providers that inject ads in websites without their customers consent.

Update: The topic of injecting ads into websites that their customers visit has really caused that much of a public outcry than it should have. Most newspapers and news agencies, even technology related ones, have not covered ad injection by Internet Service Providers ever since it first became known.