gHacks technology news » internet service provider http://www.ghacks.net A technology blog covering software, mobile phones, gadgets, security, the Internet and other relevant areas. Mon, 23 Nov 2009 22:22:46 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.8.6 en hourly 1 Test Your Internet Speed With Down Tester http://www.ghacks.net/2009/05/13/test-your-internet-speed-with-down-tester/ http://www.ghacks.net/2009/05/13/test-your-internet-speed-with-down-tester/#comments Wed, 13 May 2009 07:37:20 +0000 Martin http://www.ghacks.net/2009/05/13/test-your-internet-speed-with-down-tester/ microsoft windowsIt is sometimes advisable to test the Internet speed either to test if the advertised speeds that the IPS lured you in with are reachable or to download speeds from various parts of the world. Internet Service Provider usually offer a test file on their servers that their customers can use to test the download speed. This however can be highly different from the download speed to other parts of the country or overseas. Another possibility to test the Internet speed is by using websites that offer speed tests (check broadband speed test or the broadband speed test article at Connected Internet for example).

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.

internet speed

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.

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]]> http://www.ghacks.net/2009/05/13/test-your-internet-speed-with-down-tester/feed/ 7 Firephorm – the anti-phorm Firefox extension http://www.ghacks.net/2008/10/14/firephorm-the-anti-phorm-firefox-extension/ http://www.ghacks.net/2008/10/14/firephorm-the-anti-phorm-firefox-extension/#comments Tue, 14 Oct 2008 08:14:41 +0000 Martin http://www.ghacks.net/?p=7613 We have covered Phorm before at Ghacks. It is a very scary cooperation between several Internet Service Providers and advertising companies. The Internet Service Providers install tracking cookies on user systems and create a unique profile for each user which is then used by the advertising agencies to display targeted advertisement to the user. Especially British Internet Service Providers seem inclined to make use of Phorm to earn an extra bug. The best way of dealing with such companies would be change to another phorm-free provider as soon as possible. This however is not always possible. That’s when anti-phorm tools come into play. They are also great for the time it takes to transfer the account from one provider to another.

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.

firephorm

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.

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]]> http://www.ghacks.net/2008/10/14/firephorm-the-anti-phorm-firefox-extension/feed/ 3 Is Your ISP Injecting Ads on websites you visit ? http://www.ghacks.net/2008/04/17/is-your-isp-injecting-ads-on-websites-you-visit/ http://www.ghacks.net/2008/04/17/is-your-isp-injecting-ads-on-websites-you-visit/#comments Thu, 17 Apr 2008 08:08:21 +0000 Martin http://www.ghacks.net/?p=3833 Internet users have to cope with all kinds of things when they are online. Malware, security vulnerabilities, tracking, phishing, traffic shaping and some, as it seems (thanks Dante for the link), even with Internet Service Providers that inject ads of their own on websites that are visited by their customer. That’s what researchers at the University of Washington have discovered after analyzing data sent by 50000 computers in July and August of 2007.

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.

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