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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.
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
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.