Sing For Your Neutrality

In order to pressure lawmakers into keeping net traffic unrestricted, a group of web celebrities have put together a music video promoting net neutrality. You can view it at WeAreTheWeb.org.

The half rapped, half sung tune and the accompanying music video features Leslie Hall (the Gem Sweater woman), Tron Guy and Peter Pan. That's quite a cast -- but where's Mahir? Anyway, the video has a lot of heart and it's for a good cause, so check it out.

The Black Hat security conference is currently taking place in Las Vegas, (see Wired News' coverage of the RFID passport hacking story) and security researcher Dan Kaminsky of Dox Para in Seattle has created a software tool that everyone is anxious to see. Kaminsky has authored a network probe that can trace your data's route across the net and fool the telcos into exposing their throttles. As reported in Computerworld:

Kaminsky's software will be able to make traffic appear as if it is coming from a particular carrier or is being used for a certain type of application, like VoIP. It will also be able to identify where the traffic is being dropped and could ultimately be used to finger service providers that are treating some network traffic as second-class.

Dan has said that he plans on releasing his TCP-based active probing tool as a free software utility within six months.