The Max Planck Institute for Software Systems has developed a handy web-based Java applet that can detect whether or not your ISP is blocking BitTorrent (P2P) File Sharing traffic - 'Glasnost'.

The tool itself simply simulates BitTorrent traffic for a period of several minutes before reporting its results, though we were unable to run the test ourselves due to heavy load on Glasnost's servers. We suspect that firewalls may also impede the results.

Most UK ISPs do not completely block Peer-2-Peer BitTorrent traffic and the tool can not detect throttling, which many providers do use, so its uses are limited.