Neubot (the network neutrality bot) is a
free software
Free software or libre software is computer software distributed under terms that allow users to run the software for any purpose as well as to study, change, and distribute it and any adapted versions. Free software is a matter of liberty, no ...
Internet bot, developed and maintained by the
Nexa Center for Internet and Society
The NEXA Center for Internet & Society is a research center founded at the Department of Control and Computer Engineering of Polytechnic University of Turin.
It is an academic research center which studies the Internet with a multidisciplinary appr ...
, that gathers
network performance data useful to investigate
network neutrality.
Description
Once installed on the user's computer, it
runs in the background and periodically performs ''active''
transmission tests with servers hosted by the distributed
Measurement Lab server platform (and, in future, with other instances of the software itself). These transmission tests measure end-to-end
network performance emulating different protocols (currently
HTTP
The Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) is an application layer protocol in the Internet protocol suite model for distributed, collaborative, hypermedia information systems. HTTP is the foundation of data communication for the World Wide Web, ...
and
BitTorrent) as well as transmitting and receiving "raw" data over
TCP
TCP may refer to:
Science and technology
* Transformer coupled plasma
* Tool Center Point, see Robot end effector
Computing
* Transmission Control Protocol, a fundamental Internet standard
* Telephony control protocol, a Bluetooth communication s ...
. Performance are measured at
application level as well as at
TCP level (using Web100).
Measurements results are saved both locally (where a
localhost
In computer networking, localhost is a hostname that refers to the current device used to access it. It is used to access the network services that are running on the host via the loopback network interface. Using the loopback interface bypasses a ...
-only
web user interface
A web application (or web app) is application software that is accessed using a web browser. Web applications are delivered on the World Wide Web to users with an active network connection.
History
In earlier computing models like client-serve ...
allows users to browse them
) and on
Measurement Lab servers. They are collected for research purposes
and automatically published on the web
[http://data.neubot.org/mlab_mirror/README Introduction to collected data]
under
Creative Commons Zero
A Creative Commons (CC) license is one of several public copyright licenses that enable the free distribution of an otherwise copyrighted "work".A "work" is any creative material made by a person. A painting, a graphic, a book, a song/lyrics ...
(
public domain
The public domain (PD) consists of all the creative work
A creative work is a manifestation of creative effort including fine artwork (sculpture, paintings, drawing, sketching, performance art), dance, writing (literature), filmmaking, ...
) allowing anyone to re-use them freely for the same purpose.
See also
Network Neutrality
References
{{Reflist, 30em
External links
Neubot home pageNeubot github repository* ''Basso, S., Servetti, A., & De Martin, J. C. (2011, June). The network neutrality bot architecture: a preliminary approach for self-monitoring of Internet access QoS. In Computers and Communications (ISCC), 2011 IEEE Symposium on (pp. 1131-1136). IEEE.'' https://web.archive.org/web/20160304031834/http://www.neubot.org/neubotfiles/2011-iscc-paper.pdf
* ''De Martin, J. C., & Glorioso, A. (2008, June). The Neubot project: A collaborative approach to measuring internet neutrality. In Technology and Society, 2008. ISTAS 2008. IEEE International Symposium on (pp. 1-4). IEEE.'' https://web.archive.org/web/20160304002403/http://www.neubot.org/neubotfiles/istas08-neubot-paper.pdf
"Neubot e Nexa Per Un Web Piu` Democratico" (in Italian)"Ma la rete e' ancora neutrale? Possiamo misurarlo con Neubot" (in Italian)"Servizi ADSL sotto esame" (in Italian)
Free software programmed in Python
Public domain databases