Torrentfreak directs our attention to the Glasnost Project, a new Java applet project aimed at testing whether ISPs are fiddling with user BitTorrent traffic. A growing number of ISPs are deploying a variety of monitoring and traffic shaping hardware but aren't willing to talk about it. That makes shopping for a broadband connection a more difficult affair.

As a result, a growing number of outfits are trying to make these practices more transparent to the end user, who may not have the networking knowhow to test their own connection with applications like Wireshark.

Preliminary results show widespread blocking of BitTorrent transfers only in the U.S. and Singapore. The results highlight throttling, as well as the number of times that transfers to the Glasnost Project servers are interrupted by RST packets generated by some ISP along the path.

So far the project has only tested 5358 nodes across 78 countries, so I imagine they'd welcome your data. A more detailed explanation of their test can be found here which explains precisely how they determine a BitTorrent connection to be "blocked." As you might expect, Comcast doesn't exactly shine when tested.