The file-sharing world has been consumed by a continuous barrage of coverage on the Comcast vs BitTorrent battle. While Comcast may be able to escape their policy of delaying traffic relatively unscathed, their image has taken a beating in the public relations department. In response to the growing distrust of ISPs, members of the p2pforum.it community developed a tool, dubbed Project Gemini, which allows users to test whether their ISPs block traffic.

According to a forum post, a spokesperson for the project states that, "our aim is to produce evidence with the technique below: we've developed two "Live" operating systems designed to connect with one another over the Internet, to start a BitTorrent transfer, and to record the transmission - after which it will generate a report containing the analysis of the traffic."

Testing for a shaped BitTorrent transmission isn't terribly difficult, but may be foreboding for the less computer savvy. The project requires the end user to download and mount an ISO to CD, change the boot sequence to initialize from an optical drive, and run the program which can only function with Ubuntu. The end user isn't required to have Ubuntu previously installed, rather the CD is a self contained with all the required data.

So if you can burn and mount an ISO - a familiar task in the file-sharing world - and are suspicious of your ISP, this program may be worth a try.

Date: 2008-03-24 Source: http://www.slyck.com/news.php?story=1680