Zeroization

The New York Times has made no small amount of effort on being a forward looking digital media company. Their site is loaded with special web-only features, blogs, and cool infographics. However, sometimes good ideas can also be found by looking to the past. So, the Times is attempting to replicate the experience of browsing the newspaper with their new article skimmer.

The Gough Map is thought to be the earliest roadmap of Britain, dating from as early as 1360.

If you read Barry Ritzholtz blog, The Big Picture, you may have read that he was working on a book about the fiscal crisis. Bailout Nation was to be published by McGraw-Hill. McGraw-Hill owns Standards & Poor’s a credit ratings agency.  The book, which was critical of the role that the ratings agencies undoubtedly played in the creating the current crisis, has now been dropped by McGraw-Hill. Now, while a major publisher should be allowed to drop any book it so chooses, it certainly raises eyebrows. But what about the other significant conflict of interest, that BusinessWeek Magazine is also owned by McGraw-Hill. Can we reasonably expect a major business information periodical to maintain its editorial independence when McGraw’s professional division is having its books reviewed by S&P?

Incidentally, the book is still avilable for pre-order on Amazon.

The most important formulae for the 21st century as determined by some very intelligent people.

Google-sponsored M-Lab or Measurement Labs is a project that provide tools and research on Internet connectivity. Currently there are three tools in the suite, a general Network Diagnostic Tool for detecting issue that might limit network connection speed. Glastnost can help you determine whether your ISP is throttling or blocking BitTorrent traffic.  The also provide a tool for Network Path and Application Diagnosis. More tools are in the works.

The tools are all Java and fairly easy to use. I gave Glasnost a try and here is what I saw (apparently, my ISP does not block BitTorrent traffic at this time.)

Is BitTorrent traffic on a well-known BitTorrent port (6887) throttled?

The BitTorrent upload (seeding) worked. Our tool was successful in uploading data using the BitTorrent protocol.

There’s no indication that your ISP rate limits your BitTorrent uploads. In our tests a TCP upload achieved minimal 629 Kbps while a BitTorrent upload achieved maximal 757 Kbps.

The BitTorrent download worked. Our tool was successful in downloading data using the BitTorrent protocol.

There’s no indication that your ISP rate limits your BitTorrent downloads. In our tests a TCP download achieved minimal 1782 Kbps while a BitTorrent download achieved maximal 1880 Kbps.

Is BitTorrent traffic on a non-standard BitTorrent port (10015) throttled?

The BitTorrent upload (seeding) worked. Our tool was successful in uploading data using the BitTorrent protocol.

There’s no indication that your ISP rate limits your BitTorrent uploads. In our tests a TCP download achieved minimal 638 Kbps while a BitTorrent download achieved maximal 709 Kbps.

The BitTorrent download worked. Our tool was successful in downloading data using the BitTorrent protocol.

There’s no indication that your ISP rate limits your BitTorrent downloads. In our tests a TCP download achieved minimal 1319 Kbps while a BitTorrent download achieved maximal 1991 Kbps.

Is TCP traffic on a well-known BitTorrent port (6887) throttled?

There’s no indication that your ISP rate limits all downloads at port 6887. In our test, a TCP download on a BitTorrent port achieved at least 1782 Kbps while a TCP download on a non-BitTorrent port achieved at least 1319 Kbps.

There’s no indication that your ISP rate limits all uploads at port 6887. In our test, a TCP upload on a BitTorrent port achieved at least 629 Kbps while a TCP upload on a non-BitTorrent port achieved at least 638 Kbps.

They also provide a readout of who is blocking the traffic and where. Most of the reported blocking (US) is occuring in Cox and Comcast controlled networks.