Slashdot Mirror
Pakistan Looking For Homegrown URL Blocking System
chicksdaddy writes "Tech-enabled filtering and blocking of Web sites and Internet addresses that are deemed hostile to repressive regimes has been a major political and human rights issue in the last year, as popular protests in Egypt, Tunisia, Libya and Syria erupted. Now it looks as if Pakistan's government is looking for a way to strengthen its hand against online content it considers undesirable. According to a request for proposals from the National ICT (Information and Communications and Technologies) R&D Fund, the Pakistani government is struggling to keep a lid on growing Internet and Web use and is looking for a way to filter out undesirable Web sites. The 'indigenous' filtering system would be 'deployed at IP backbones in major cities, i.e., Karachi, Lahore and Islamabad,' the RFP reads (PDF). It would be 'centrally managed by a small and efficient team stationed at POPs of backbone providers,' and must be capable of supporting 100Gbps interfaces and filtering Web traffic against a block list of up to 50 million URLs without latency of more than 1 millisecond."
Porn, websites that criticize the government, members of Al-Qaeda--that whole country is like a big ole' fun game of hide-and-seek. The government hides it, and you get to seek.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
The sad thing is that the governments in these oppressive countries seem to understand how the Internet actually works.. and manage to come up with actual requirements for filtering devices.
May be Pakistan is the only country that didn't manage to keep this secret. You wait for it and this will be everywhere. I wonder what country would love to block Wikileaks or The Pirate Bay, for example.
May Peace Prevail On Earth
...what they could make of themselves if they used some of that brain power(and money) towards more constructive things.
That's because their leaders(or at least many important people in the government) were educated in freer Western nations and exposed to what happens with the freedom of information. Bashar Al-Assad is an example of this.
Just append the urls determined to be unholly to the Koran.
They already have the infrastructure to punish infidels.
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B - D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0 45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
...that this is one of our most important allies in the war on terror. I wonder how much of the billions we give them will be spent on this while we stand idly by. Remember the US of A and its allies have carte blanche to do what we tell others is wrong. Greed and hypocracy make the world go 'round.
Silence is a state of mime.
and they don't rot their brains watching oprah
Why not just block everything and only allow what's whitelisted? Examples to include in the whitelist are Corporations, Universities, and other governmental sites. All others seen as non-islamic get blocked outright. If you're not on the list, you simply fill out a form for internal review and hopefully added to the whitelist.
If they're going for total control, do it right. Better yet, just create an entirely new Pakistani network without any outside peering. A pakistani version of Wikipedia could be translated and updated via an air-gapped network scheme.
And no, I'm not the first person to think of this. I'm not that much smarter than everyone else :-P
Life is not for the lazy.
don't try to solve social problems with technology
Keep on setting those unrealistic expectations
how about this for a famous quote:
"People who say it cannot be done should not interrupt those who are doing it." - George Bernard Shaw
They remind me of our former communist politicians - thanks to their position, they got to visit the West, and they still didn't see. They went back home and continued vilifying things they had seen but hadn't grasped. This is such a similar situation that it's not even funny. Islam is the new communism is the new fascism.
Ezekiel 23:20
Maybe but URL filtering in under 1ms with any sizeable list of URLs is going to be pretty darn impossible. Its pretty tough to do much of any thing to traffic that requires any sort of lookup that fast. I mean DRAM fetch is 5+ns.
Even if you can search your lookup table fast enough keep in mind you are not just comparing values at fixed offsets like NAT and IP Access lists and similar need to you first have to figure out is this traffic http? Locate the host header and read until new line. Non of that is especially time consuming but its still going to be a chuck of that already tight ms.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
Don't worry, someone will come up with a half assed solution to extract some money from the Pak government.
"However beautiful the strategy, you should occasionally look at the results" - Winston Churchill
1 millisecond is 1,000 microseconds or 1,000,000 nanoseconds. A 2 GHz CPU runs at least one instruction every nanosecond and usually more like 6-12 instructions. As you say, the DRAM fetch is significant, but a well-designed B-tree database already loaded in RAM reduces the impact because of good algorithm design.
It's like an eternity in CPU time.
Of course, you can't write the code in Python, Perl or Ruby. You have to use C++.
Not as difficult as it seems. A Bloom Filter of 60-million URLs would only take up 75MB. With only 64 gigs of ram, you could reliably blacklist billions of URLs in a deterministic amount of time.
So if they mostly blocked porn websites, it would be nice if they shared it with me so I can... ahem... train my parental control software ?
Yeah, right...
It's a shame to waste resources trying to stop the few who can read from doing so.
block 50 million urls, 100 million spring up the next day. block those, and 200 million more pop up. it's a game of whack-a-mole you can never win. so they'll waste all this money, instead of just letting their people be free. of course a lot of it is porn and thought critical of religion, and this is why they hate it. because it represents their end: the end of the thought control of an oppressive system, this one based on religion. they know what they are fighting: they are fighting their extinction. and by "they" i mean those who think you can control or dominate others, based on religion or whatever basis that unfortunately some in society still believe is right. it just makes your society weak and violent and cruel
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Painting Islam in broad strokes as fascism is not very helpful nor descriptive. Most muslims are moderate and/or secular.
Remember that Islam is some 80% jewish/christian theology at the least, and that it is regional culture and real world politics that prompted what we do recognize as fascist movements to grow.
You want the moderate and intellectual muslims, as well as like-minded jews and christians, on your side against totalitatianism.
Defining Statistics and Social Research
The Russians had very little chance grasping anything after the regime broke down, what with the half a millenium spent in real or virtual serfdom, first to samoderzhavie, then to the communist party, and now to the Russian style of government that is almost, but not quite entirely unlike samoderzhavie again.
So they are animals just like blacks and Arabs? I think, we have heard that crap already from other people.
My folks were in a better starting position, but we still have a long way to go and we're not ashamed to admit it (well, at least some of us).
Most immigrants to US are regretting ever stepping into a continent-wide snake pit you call a country, but they are too poor and mentally exhausted for another move across the globe, so they invent elaborate fantasies to justify their choice to come here. If you need any examples, just look at the Jewish immigrants from ex-USSR. All of them, myself included, faced mild discrimination based on their ethnicity not unlike Hispanics in US. Tiny percentage of them believed in any god, leave alone cared for any form of Judaism. Just look how most of them convinced themselves that they believe in an omniscient, but for some reason racist magical man in the sky despite 15-20 years of education absolutely incompatible with that idea. Want to know why they are so intellectually impotent? This is why, they have torn their brains apart with those delusions! It's painful for me to see those wrecks of human beings, especially considering that most of my relatives are in this category.
I do not suffer from those problems -- I came here because industry and science in all ex-USSR countries were destroyed, and remained in shambles for at least a decade. My choice to move into a country with functioning industry and dysfunctional society was justified despite being painful and despite my rejection of the most fundamental positions of its poisonous ideology.
You have the right to remain bitter, and I'm not questioning that,
I am not bitter. I hate you, I hate your masters, I hate your ideology, and I am perfectly content with my hatred toward people, organizations and ideologies who richly deserve it. It's your stupid American idea, a part of your brainwashing, that hatred is wrong yet somehow fighting enemies is good -- my position is the exact opposite, there is nothing wrong with rejecting and opposing something terrible and keeping it from entering your mind, but it would be a truly worthless kind of person if he can accomplish more by destroying what he hates rather than by building something he likes. That's right, in my mind all your heroes, politicians, criminals, businessmen and other "cool" or "powerful" guys are worthless and all those uppity engineers, scientists, mathematicians, artists and other geeks, are the best of the whole mankind -- how is that for a culture?
I find it ironic that despite this, you and your masters, along with everyone else, benefit from my work more than from any person that ever liked you or agreed with you. This became possible because I didn't have a single trace of greed in my motivation to study or to become an engineer -- I am free from the thing that taints your whole society, poisons your thoughts, destroys your education and derails your efforts. I may be talented and there are various circumstances of my life that ended up improving me in various ways, but it was purity of my motivation to study, that made my upbringing fundamentally different from all of you. It could not ever be done in US. It can't now be done anywhere. No one can reproduce the advantage I had because its source, a society that does not motivate people by greed and powerlust, is destroyed.
It was possible under a system that was destroyed by people like you. At some point it will become possible again, but it's very unlikely that anyone alive now, will ever see it. But when it will happen, modern Capitalism will be seen as something just
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.