Google To Track ISP’s Bandwidth Throttling

By Geoff Duncan Published January 29, 2009

With Comcast being sanctioned by the FCC for terminating P2P sessions and Cos just announcing it will soon be capping bandwidth utilization for anything it deems non-time-sensitive, many Internet users have been wondering if there’s any way to determine if their ISPs are monkeying around traffic behind their backs…presumably in the name of “reasonable network management.” But determining what an ISP is or isn’t letting through at any given moment is tough work, beyond the reach of most everyday Internet users.

Now Google is aiming to shed some light on ISPs bandwidth management practices with its new Measurement Lab, and open platform that will enable researchers to deploy Internet measurement tools. Championed by none other than Vint Cerf, Google’s chief Internet evangelist and so-called “Father of the Internet” (and in partnership with the New America Foundation’s Open Technology Institute and the PlatnetLab Consortium), M-Lab will start off with 36 servers in 12 distributed locations in the U.S. and Europe, and enable researchers to collect performance data. Google intends M-Lab to be a community-driven effort, and promises all data will be available for other researchers to build on.

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Initially, M-Lab is running three tools that are intended to help users diagnose common problems and determine whether BitTorrent is being blocked or throttled back by ISPs. Google anticipates additional tools will be running on M-Lab from other researchers and community members—two more network diagnostic tools are slated to come online soon.

“At Google, we care deeply about sustaining the Internet as an open platform for consumer choice and innovation,” wrote Cerf in the Google corporate blog. “No matter your views on net neutrality and ISP network management practices, everyone can agree that Internet users deserve to be well-informed about what they’re getting when they sign up for broadband, and good data is the bedrock of sound policy.”

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Geoff Duncan writes, programs, edits, plays music, and delights in making software misbehave. He's probably the only member…

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Google’s AI detection tool is now available for anyone to try

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Google announced via a post on X (formerly Twitter) on Wednesday that SynthID is now available to anybody who wants to try it. The authentication system for AI-generated content embeds imperceptible watermarks into generated images, video, and text, enabling users to verify whether a piece of content was made by humans or machines.

“We’re open-sourcing our SynthID Text watermarking tool,” the company wrote. “Available freely to developers and businesses, it will help them identify their AI-generated content.”

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This new Google Docs feature is exactly what I’ve always wanted

Text box in Google Docs on a laptop.

As a writer of a certain age, I've lived a lot of life in Google Docs. It's where my first drafts go, but it's also where my crazy ideas, unhinged brainstorming, and research dumps go.
There’s so many conveniences about Google Docs that make it my go-to for word processing, but let’s be honest: It’s still fairly barebones, especially when it comes to organizing and managing different files within Google Drive. But this new feature makes all of that much easier, keeping it all contained all within Docs itself.
It’s called Document Tabs, which you may have already noticed floating just to the left of your document.

The idea is simple: It lets you create multiple documents within a single Docs file. Create as many “tabs” or separate documents as a single project might need, and switch between them extremely fast. That accessibility to them is really where the gold is. No more switching between different browser tabs.
It’s even more handy on mobile, of course, where switching applications or tabs is even more cumbersome. Here, you’ll find Document Tabs hovering just at the bottom of the screen with some simple arrows to flip between your different tabs. All we need now is a simple gesture to be added to flip between them even more seamlessly.
Document Tabs takes the place of the old outlining system, which would grab headers and automatically create a table of contents around them. I used this frequently, but it was pretty finicky. More than that, it resulted in overly long documents that I still found myself scrolling through.
Document Tabs is a really elegant solution to that problem. Whether it’s segmenting chapters in a book, multiple aspects of a project, or even just different parts of an article, it’s already become an extremely useful outlining and productivity tool for me.
It even had a pretty clean way of converting the tabs when you need to export. All the tabs do is combine down into one document, but they’re sectioned off with titles and some basic formatting. That’s not going to be ideal in every situation, of course, so it’s something to keep in mind if you need to export and share it with someone outside of Docs.
At the very least, though, it’s worth trying out. And if you’re a Google Docs fiend like I am, I have a feeling you’ll get quite a lot out of it.

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Google Flights is making it easier to find the best-priced airfare

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Up till now, airfare search results on Google Flights have prioritized a combination of price and convenience over cost alone. This means you might be missing the cheapest options and spending more than you need to.

Via an update to its online tool that's rolling out gradually over the next couple of weeks, Google is finally making it easier to surface the best-priced airfares for your journey, though you may be sacrificing a bit of convenience if you opt for one of them.