Internet transparency tools for everyone gets wads of cash

LAYING ON LEVELS OF IRONY like it is going out of fashion, Internet transparency and anti-censorship research is getting funded by unsecured data harvester Google.

A team of researchers from Georgia Tech have been awarded $1 million from Google to develop tools to detect when governments are censoring content or Internet Service Providers are choking bandwidth.

The team wants to use Google's wonga to design web-based, Internet-scale measurement tools that anyone can grab for free to monitor how web use is controlled by external forces like ISPs and governments . The research has been dubbed 'Transparent Internet'.

"In addition to new network measurement and security monitoring algorithms, we want to create and deploy a ‘transparency watchdog' system that uses monitoring agents to keep constant tabs of network performance and availability in strategic Internet locations around the world, " said Nick Feamster, assistant professor in Georgia Tech's school of computer science.

The team reckoned that as the number pf Internet users, 1.9 billion, is expected to double in the next decade, and 4.5 billion of us are already networked over mobile devices, we are all now or sooner rather than later going to be in a constant battle with the 60 nations that censor content.

The research will evaluate if users are accessible from a variety of networks, actual network performance over ISP speed claims and the integrity of information on those networks.

It is a brilliant idea we can't fault but coming from Google it takes the biscuit. The company has hardly been the poster child for Internet transparency over the last year.

Google refused to hand over harvested Street View data and was eventually fined this week by the French for breaching data and privacy violations.

In September last year Google bit the bullet on Buzz privacy violations and settled a US lawsuit for $8.5 million. Then in February this year Google wouldn't reveal compliance over a US anti-trust probe in to alleged anti-competitive search rankings. µ