The New Freedom

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The Electronic Frontier Foundation, a top digital rights organization out of San Francisco and DC, has just released a new tool which lets users automatically detect network neutrality violations and ensure that their internet experience is left untampered with.

Switzerland, as it is called, is an open source software tool for testing the integrity of data communications over networks, ISPs and firewalls. It will spot IP packets which are forged or modified between clients, inform you, and give you copies of the modified packets.

The software was just released and is still in early alpha (they’re calling it ‘version zero’) and can only be run from the command line right now, and it seems to crash quite often. Right now I’m having trouble with unclean disconnections which stop me from reconnecting.

Anyway, here’s how to get it it running in Ubuntu linux.

First, get the latest .tgz from here and unpack it to a directory of your choosing.

Next, you’ll need to get the Network Time Protocol service so you can synchronize with your Swiss server and peers. If you don’t, you won’t be able to connect to the EFF’s server. Type this to install it:

sudo apt-get install ntp

and then to set the time properly, type:

ntpdate ntp.ubuntu.com

Next, install the software by typing:

sudo python setup.py install

Then, run the program with the path you’d like to save the log to.

sudo switzerland-client -P /home/swisslogs/

Then sit back and let the packets bounce around and see if your ISP is meddling with your data!

I love seeing this kind of hacktivism and I’m really proud of the EFF for releasing this tool. Hopefully the project will become more user-friendly and people everywhere will use it to ensure that their internet service is untampered. Then we can set up a database of what companies in what regions are doing what to our traffic. Personally, I plan on using Switzerland to make sure that Anomos traffic isn’t being blocked once we set up our test tracker.

Rich!

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