Updates

August 5th, 2011

This morning FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski announced the winners of the agency’s latest contest on Challenge.gov, a competition for scientists and software developers to engage in innovative research and create useful apps that further the understanding of Internet connectivity and network science. A video of theChairman’s remarksand the award presentation are available.

The three winning teams were recognized at a ceremony with remarks by FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski at FCC headquarters in Washington, D.C. The winning teams also presented their apps and research to the Commission.

The three winning teams are University of Michigan & Microsoft Research; School of Computer Science, Georgia Institute of Technology; and The ICSI (International Computer Science Institute) Netalyzr Project. Descriptions of the winning entries are detailed below.

The Open Internet Challenge sought to encourage the development of innovative and functional applications that provide users with information about the extent to which their fixed or mobile broadband Internet services are consistent with the open Internet. The research component of the challenge sought academic papers that analyze relevant Internet openness measurements, techniques, and data. The challenge was designed to encourage and reward the creation innovative and useful research.

The challenge is posted on Challenge.gov, a new website and digital platform where entrepreneurs, innovators, and citizen solvers can compete for prizes by providing novel solutions to problems large and small. Details of thechallengeare posted at the link. You also can viewother FCC challenges.

Thank you to our judges:

• Mark Allman, Senior Research Scientist, ICSI
• Mark Crovella, Professor of Computer Science, Boston University
• Peter Eckersley, Senior Staff Technologist, Electronic Frontier Foundation
• Jim Kurose, Distinguished University Professor of Computer Science, UMass Amherst
• Craig Labovitz, Chief Scientist, Arbor Networks
• Jason Livingood, Executive Director, Internet Systems Engineering, Comcast
• Venkat Padmanabhan, Principal Researcher, Microsoft Research India
• Dina Papagiannaki, Senior Research Scientist, Intel Labs Pittsburgh
• Craig Partridge, Chief Scientist, Raytheon BBN Technologies
• K. K. Ramakrishnan, Fellow, AT&T Labs-Research

And congratulations to our winners:

Open Internet App Award Winner
People’s Choice App Award Winner

MobiPerf, Mobile Network Measurement System

University of Michigan & Microsoft Research

MobiPerfis a lightweight and accurate mobile network measurement tool designed to collect anonymous network measurement information directly from mobile end users. It runs on Android, iOS, and Windows Mobile devices and completes within 2-3 minutes. Users are able to obtain a rich set of basic network information (e.g., the device’s IP address as seen by the server and the network type such as HSDPA), network performance information (e.g., downlink/uplink throughput), as well as a set of more advanced network properties including network policies (e.g., cellular ISPs' port blocking and NAT policies).? MobiPerf helps identify the bottleneck network behavior for resource constrained mobile platforms as well as expose both the performance and energy impact of mobile network policies on end users.

Open Internet Research Award

(co-winners)

Detecting ISP Traffic Discrimination and Traffic Shaping,

School of Computer Science, Georgia Institute of Technology

The research proposes methods that enable Internet users to detect two aspects of openness. First, an active probing method called "Differential Probing" or DiffProbe, to detect whether an access ISP is deploying delay or loss discrimination against some of its customer flows. The basic idea behind DiffProbe is to compare the delays and packet losses experienced by two flows: an application flow of interest and a probing flow. The paper describes the statistical methods that DiffProbe uses, a novel method to identify scheduling, evaluation experiments, and a few real-world tests at major access ISPs. Second, the work presents methods for active and passive detection of traffic shaping in ISPs. The active tool, ShaperProbe, enables users to detect whether their ISP is shaping traffic, and to estimate the extent of shaping. ShaperProbe is hosted as a free, open source, service on M-Lab. The paper presents traffic shaping data from users of the tool since2009 (from about one million runs), and showcases studies of four large ISPs. The passive tool detects and estimates application-specific traffic shaping by looking at an ongoing TCP connection on the user's machine.

Netalyzr: Illuminating The Edge Network

The ICSI (International Computer Science Institute) Netalyzr Project

This paper presents Netalyzr, a network measurement and debugging service that evaluates the functionality provided by people's Internet connectivity. The design aims to prove both comprehensive in terms of the properties it measures and easy to employ and understand for users with little technical background. Netalyzr is structured as a signed Java applet (which users access via their Web browser) that communicates with a suite of measurement-specific servers. Traffic between the two then probes for a diverse set of network properties, including outbound port filtering, hidden in-network HTTP caches, DNS manipulations, NAT behavior, path MTU issues, IPv6 support, and access-modem buffer capacity. In addition to reporting results to the user, Netalyzr also forms the foundation for an extensive measurement of edge-network properties. To this end, along with describing Netalyzr's architecture and system implementation, it presents a detailed study of 130,000 measurement sessions that the service has recorded between June 2009 and September 2010.

University of Michigan & Microsoft Research team

• Z. Morley Mao
• Feng Qian
• Paramvir Bahl
• Cheng Chen
• Junxian Huang
• Yutong Pei
• Zhiyun Qian
• Birjodh Tiwana
• Zhaoguang Wang
• Qiang Xu
• Ming Zhang

The ICSI Netalyzr Project team

• Nicholas Weaver
• Christian Kreibich
• Boris Nechaev
• Vern Paxson

Georgia Institute of Technology team

• Partha Kanuparthy
• Constantine Dovrolis

Voting is now live (through July 15) for the Open Internet Challenge's People’s Choice App Award.  This award goes to the most popular open Internet app submitted during the challenge as determined by the Internet community.  Currently there are ten apps live for voting.  The winner of the People’s Choice App Award will be the app that receives the most votes. The winner in this category will be invited to FCC headquarters in Washington, DC, to be honored with a reception with tne FCC Chairman, and have the opportunity to present their work to the Commission. Winners will have their apps  featured on the FCC’s website and social media outlets. Authorized travel expenses will be reimbursed by the FCC (up to $500 per individual, or up to $1,500 per team).



Post by guest blogger: Richard Esguerra, EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation)

Original blog post available at EFF website.

Last week, the FCC announced the "FCC Open Internet Apps Challenge," a contest to attract software that helps ordinary users measure whether their Internet services — both mobile broadband and traditional "fixed" broadband — are consistent with open Internet principles. The FCC is also asking for submissions of "research papers that analyze relevant Internet openness measurement techniques, approaches, and data." This is a welcome effort from the FCC, and we hope to see software developers and researchers help the public better discover how our networks and service providers are treating our Internet communications.

While we have many points of concern about the FCC's net neutrality rules, EFF has always highlighted data, evidence, and provider transparency as unequivocally vital pieces of the complex net neutrality puzzle. Remember that in October of 2007, the Associated Press and EFF confirmed that Comcast was interfering with subscribers' BitTorrent activity. But the story didn't actually begin there — for several weeks beforehand, EFF had been receiving scattered, anecdotal reports of unusual BitTorrent behavior. However, until we had developed testing methods and tools to obtain some reliable data, there were countless technical questions yielding deeply complicated policy questions. Like, is Comcast actually responsible for the effects users are seeing, or is it some kind of bug? If Comcast is responsible, how irreversible or deep-seated is the method being used? Is this the kind of technical problem that users can address without inviting government regulation (from the FCC or otherwise)? Is there a form of government intervention that would be appropriate and effective to alleviate the actual BitTorrent blocking and other actions like it?

The best answers to these questions relied — and will continue to rely — on the public having real knowledge about how our Internet connections are functioning and whether or not ISPs are providing the open Internet that users want. EFF made an early attempt at providing such information gathering software with the Switzerland Network Testing Tool; the Measurement Lab is building an open platform to help give researchers more reliable, accurate tools for measuring Internet features; and hopefully the FCC contest inspires yet more innovation. As we continue to explore the challenges of maintaining an open Internet, strong data about the networks will be an important pillar in the defense of freedom of expression, user control, innovation, and more.

Submissions will be accepted from February 1 to June 1, 2011, and the winners will be invited to the FCC headquarters in Washington D.C. to meet FCC Chairman Genachowski, present their work to the commission, and have their work featured by the FCC online. Visit the challenge.gov portal for details about the contest.

Post by guest blogger: Josh King, M-Lab

Original blog post available at M-Lab's website.

The FCC has recently announced an "Open Internet Apps Challenge," a contest soliciting submissions of software applications which empower citizens to "monitor and protect Internet openness." Winners of the challenge will be invited to the FCC to present their work to the Commission and be honored by a reception. Winning apps will also be featured on the FCC website and via the FCC's social media outlets.

This effort is in keeping with M-Lab's mission statement, and we could potentially support the project as a host for applications that meet our guidelines. The FCC was kind enough to mention us in this capacity on the challenge page. Additionally, work on M-Lab's existing open-source suite of tools would be an interesting and rewarding eligible project for whomever would seek to undertake it. M-Lab encourages efforts like these to improve the ability of citizens to participate in a meaningful way in both measuring their own Internet connection and engaging with Internet researchers.

The challenge posed by the FCC constitutes an exciting opportunity to draw more attention to the kind of work that M-Lab participates in, and we look forward to engaging with this effort as it moves forward.

Challenge submissions start February 1st and run through June 1st, with winners being announced August 8th. Those interested in entering the contest can find more information at http://fcc.gov/challenge

For months, we've been hearing from a committed community of citizens that care deeply about preserving the foundational principles of the Internet.

Many of the same people have been involved with the FCC over the last few months through our FCC.gov Developer community. Now that the FCC has released the Open Internet order, we’re calling on that developer community to help us meet a new challenge.

The Open Internet Apps Challenge, released by the FCC, asks this community -- particularly the researchers and developers -- to help build the strongest safeguards possible to preserve these principles and innovate online.

This is an opportunity for the FCC to tap talent in a variety of fields -- technology development, research, monitoring, and more -- to build a powerful toolkit that protects and informs consumers. These software tools could, for example, detect whether a broadband provider is interfering with DNS responses, application packet headers, or content.

The winners of this challenge will have their work widely seen and used. We think that there a number of interesting opportunities in this challenge, particularly for researchers with deep experience in highly-technical and specified fields of industry and academia.

We've called on the FCC Developer community before, like the Open Developer Day we hosted in October, and this challenge presents a new opportunity for the agency to partner with innovators and researchers working towards important goals.

Check out all the details for the Open Internet Apps Challenge at www.fcc.gov/challenge.