New on LowEndTalk? Please Register and read our Community Rules.
All new Registrations are manually reviewed and approved, so a short delay after registration may occur before your account becomes active.
All new Registrations are manually reviewed and approved, so a short delay after registration may occur before your account becomes active.
Beware of Download Speed Testing Cheats (SingleHop in this Case)
LowEndAdmin
Member
Just saw this article:
http://charlie.bz/articles/singlehop_are_cheats.html
Basically this guy tried to download SingleHop's speed test file, and got faster transfer rate than the maximum of his physical link. And after investigation,
- The 500MB
tar.gzfile turns out to be null-padded throughout. - Test file is served through HTTPS, using SSL's built-in compression, to achieve the appearance of ridiculously high speed, even though the actual bandwidth used is a lot smaller.
So there you go. Don't always trust the test file from the provider -- they might make wget download test appears faster than it actually is.
Comments
That's very interesting
I'll have to watch out for this kind of thing in the future
I was wondering if you took my comment to heart.
Another example of trickery is where a provider has the test file on it's own allocation. Maybe using one of those reverse IP lookups to see what else is allocated on it.
What other things can you look at for trickery?
It is a very interesting trick. I think they should even patent this
True, I will try downloading it once Virgin Media get my internet connection back to normal, hopefully on Saturday, tomorrow
If I get higher than about 3Mb/s then.. I can't get higher than that with the best best servers in the US.
interesting indeed thanks for head sup
They looks spend more time scamming than their time in doing noble work, what a **** company.
Thanks for sharing that!
I doubt it was done by "mistake"
That's low
Really low.
I LOVE how in the WHT thread, they actually understand their mistake and aren't so judgmental like you guys above me are.
Here, read this since you'll will believe every word off any page you read.
@Zetta: No one actually saw an explanation from them prior to your post, or focus on the company name/history either, but it's interesting to know this can happen. And associated company didn't do it intentionally seeing your WHT link
Depends if you believe their explanation, Zetta. Perhaps we're judgemental, perhaps the people on WHT are gullible.
Hardly like SingleHop are going to admit it was intentional, thats like them saying HAHAHA YOU FELL FOR IT, WE LIED ALL ALONG.
@zetta: Well, to make it short, a presumption of innocence does not exist on LEB. That's something exclusively reserved for the higher levels of human beings.
'They should even patent it' - lol
Do you think that they would admit to it if they had done it on purpose.
To be honest, I could care less about SingleHop. Not a fan or against them. Worse players out there doing far worse.
Pretty cute idea if intentional.
@ kylix - with some of the shit people have tried to pull, do you blame us for being cynics?
Actually i think this setup (doesn't matter if it is trick or mistake) would only speed up the download test if you are on a relatively slow connection. If you try it on a gigabit connection it could probably slow down the download (due to the encryption/decryption requiring a lot of CPU cycles). Haven't tried it and measured it actually, so it is just a guess.
@Gary: Then again, this incident just happened to work with wget and Chrome. With Firefox it just did not work. If we would be cynics we would not even consider buying any of that stuff offered on LEB because of one/two/three bad experiences. No its more of a rage attack against bigger names.
Having been a customer of SingleHop in the past, I can say that their network is pretty good and most people know that. I don't see why they'd feel the need to 'cheat' speedtests, i'd like to believe it was not intentional.
I mean, I can understand how a provider with a horrible or spotty network would want to do something like that (though it'd still be wrong), but I don't think they did it to mislead anyone.
It's interesting though that their test files are in the same account as their ticket/support system.
Why would they have compression enabled?
If I'm using Apache I always activate compression. I also tar files and compress them to lower the amount of data to be transferred. What's wrong about that?[1]
[1] http://www.belshe.com/2010/11/18/ssl-compression-and-you/
That SingleHop used it to cheat?
@kylix -- I think it's more of having a big null-padded file and calling it a
.tar.gz, which people would assume that's already compressed which further compression would not have speed it up.Anyway. I posted it not to question whether SingleHop has intentionally tried to mislead or not. I am just saying -- be careful with the test files provided by the providers.
@Daniel: To cheat just Chrome users? Well I doubt that.
@LowEndAdmin: That taken into account, but the compression just worked for Chrome (and wget?) because Firefox doesn't support compression-over-SSL.
@kylix -- it doesn't matter whether it's Chrome or Firefox. Most download speed quoted here or at WHT uses wget.
@LowendAdmin: But does wget support SSL-compression? I can't find any evidence on that.
@kylix -- actually wget and curl uses OpenSSL which supports deflate by default. I'm more surprised that Firefox is not using it.