This simple plugin allows any WordPress blog owner to participate in the Illuminati Internet measurement project. The plugin inserts a small amount of HTML which allows statistics about the Internet connectivity of your readers to be aggregated for research purposes (see below).
Snapshot of the plugin's configuration interface (under "Options" in the WordPress administration console):
Version 1.0.1: illuminati.php.txt. Rename this file to illuminati.php and drop it in your WordPress blog's wp-content/plugins directory.
Questions/bugs related to the plugin should be sent to @cs.rice.edu. General questions about the Illuminati project should be directed to its research team.
Illuminati is an ongoing project of computer science researchers at NYU and Stanford, including Martin Casado and Michael Freedman. The WordPress plugin is written and maintained by Dan Sandler at Rice University.
From the Illuminati project overview:
The goal of this project is to explore the transparency (or conversely opacity) of the Internet's edge. More specifically, given an online service request from a client such as an HTTP GET, what is the expected accuracy of decisions made on the IP of the client's corresponding DNS resolver or on the public IP address of the client?
[…]
Our study, hereafter called illuminati for its attempt to "illuminate the shadows of the Internet", seeks to perform opportunistic measurements using oblivious Internet clients. We apply a number of measurement techniques to explore the space around the extent, type, location, and configuration of web clients, their proxies, and their DNS resolvers.
To interpose ourselves on real web traffic and thus traffic patterns, integrating illuminati is as simple as either inserting a small embedded object on your webpage (a "web-bug") to load in the background. The web-bug is requested from out measurement servers and subsequently helps us perform some local measurements. […] To cast a wide net, we are asking third-party server operators to integrate such web-bugs on their own pages: We'll even track your individual page's stats for you and how this compares with other adopters. Please see our teams page for more information. We also transparently redirect some HTTP requests for CoralCDN through illuminati using our redirection scheme, which accounts for a significant amount of traffic spread world-wide.
Here's an example of the HTML that the Illuminati plugin will add to your WP blog:
<!-- Illuminati project; see http://illuminati.coralcdn.org/ --> <iframe src="http://www.cdn.coralcdn.org/noredirect.diet.html" frameborder=0 scrolling=no marginwidth=0 marginheight=0 width=1 height=1></iframe>