So Google and Verizon want to be business buddies, I do not understand how anyone can think this is good.. . detailed official crap here.

In short this all about saying that net neutrality isn't necessary on wireless (mobile) networks. This is very smart on their behalf because so many humans believe that Google will do no evil however as we may already know, the future Internet may have most of it's traffic come from mobile networks. Preparing the terrain while claiming that mobile networking is still beta might actually get them to finish killing off the Internet we love. Oh, and all this while confusing the non-Internet-savy by stating how much neutrality and accessibility to The Network is important (as long as it's by wire (*DSL/Fiber/cable/RTC).. .

The other day I was running some tests because it seemed that my VPN traffic was being slowed down quite alot. One of the tests was plain FTP, that went at about 1mbyte/sec, then FTP via VPN, that seemed capped at around 200kbytes/sec. Some say "overhead because encryption", and I believed it, until I tested between two weak machines (VIA 2ghz) on a LAN:

• FTP: 10Mbytes/sec
• FTP/VPN: 6.5Mbytes/sec

obviously 200kbytes is a joke.

I of course suspected one of my ISPs (ADSL or dedicated server provider) of doing something uncool.. this lead me to discovering two things:

• Some ISPs openly cap VPN traffic like PlusNet. They actually have a whole timetable with various speed limits for various services ! You might have noticed P2P gets the lowest speed ever and youtube is way up there.... ..in short, the client's needs are not important, what is important is who's paying.. anyway.
• a cool tool called shaperprobe. This tool helps detect if there is any packet shaping happening on your network.

I soon after figured out where the issue was, my ISPs who say they don't throttle or shape etc are correct. : ] The issue was with this WAG54GS I hooked up temporarily that has this super cool option called "SPI Firewall", it's sole purpose is to slow down your VPN traffic, that's all it does.

In the end I learned that there are many bad ISPs nowadays that decide what's good for you, I am glad mine(s) don't, but how long will this last ? As they say, it's the consumer who decides, so if this matters to you, pick an ISP that doesn't shape their bandwidth.

Do you wonder if your internet is being sieved somewhere along the line ? People have been working on this subject and this question lead me to a few sites like OpenNet Initiative, You canget some gathered information on per country basis and more. Herdict is another site that I that met thanks to the previously mentioned site allows you to report a blocked site and view other's reports.

I also did a whois on a random IP that posted a spam comment, the "remarks" sections was quite explicit:

% Information related to '212.138.113.0 - 212.138.113.255'
...
remarks: ------------------------------------------------------
remarks: Part of this IP block has been used for proxy/cache
remarks: service at the National level in Saudi Arabia. All
remarks: Saudi Arabia web traffic will come from this IP block.

And this led me to this page which has more details..

Other ideas are to publish parts of censored material all over the internet to play ball with the filter "guys". More concise information and more at irrepressible.info.