The timing of the award announcement is coincidental – the grant process was well underway before the anti-government revolutions recently grabbed international attention – but the aim of the research would address exactly some of the issues protesters and others have had accessing the Internet and certain applications or Web sites. The will be put to use building free Web tools designed to let Internet users, including those on smartphones and tablets, detect whether service providers are living up to service-level agreements and whether data or apps are being messed with along the way by governments or service providers.
MORE ON NETWORK RESEARCH:
MARCH MADNESS:
"The recent actions [Internet shutdowns] we’ve seen have been drastic, but this is by no means a new issue," says Nick Feamster, assistant professor in the School of Computer Science, who is a principal investigator on the project along with computer science professor Wenke Lee and three other co-principal investigators.
"What we are aiming to do is provide transparency for the user," he says. "Whether or not it is outright censorship of content, throttling of performance through traffic shaping or blocking of a particular application or domain, all these things could have either reasonable or unreasonable motives behind them. What we think is important is that the user have information about what is going on in the network."