Hot news flash: US 'net filter leaves Iran out in the cold

[unixronin]

enochsmiles found this article on filtering of the US Government's International Broadcasting Bureau's Web anonymizer service set up to allow Iranian users to evade Iranian censorship.  The IBB's filter, written by Anonymizer Inc, blocks access to any website whose domain name contains embedded strings including 'ass', 'bush', 'soft', 'hot', 'old', 'tv' and unspecified others (though I'll bet I could make some good guesses).  This leaves Iranian users unable to view, for example: usembassy.state.gov; microsoft.com; distributedfolding.net; pilkingtonglass.com; votebush.org; and so on, because it didn't occur to Anonymizer that ass, for instance, is a substring of glass, grass, pass, mass, class and assume, or that our current president is named Bush.

Lance Cottrell of Anonymizer claims that the filter "was put in to control costs, not to be prudish."  Yeah, RIGHT.  With that set of keywords?  Pull the other leg, it's got silver bells on.

(Though actually, I suppose I can see how blocking Bush could control costs....)

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Update:

New Scientist has a more comprehensive look at the filter.  The "banned word list" is even stupider than I thought.  How many non-porn sites can you think of whose domain names contain the string 'my'?

Comments

[ilcylic.livejournal.com]

The gov't isn't specifically to blame for this.

They just specified they wanted pr0n filtering, and Anonymizer Inc. (yes, that would be who I am working for) wrote a very poor one.

-Ogre

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

Aaaaaah. Interesting. That would explain enochsmiles' comment about "This is overdue". I hadn't realized that Anonymizer was who you were (and he had been) working for.

That does also put the lie to Lance Cottrell's statement that 'the filter was put in to manage costs, not to be "prudish"', doesn't it?

Original article amended. If you wish, I can remove this comment and yours, if you think there might be repercussions to you should anyone from $WORK stumble across it and figure out who you are.

[ilcylic.livejournal.com]

Nah, it's all good.

The filter is, in fact, to control costs, in some regard.

It's the same filter we use for the free service, so that the free users can't easily surf pr0n. It controls costs for the IBB project by limiting the amount of bandwidth that Iranians use through our servers.

-Ogre

[technoshaman.livejournal.com]

Though actually, I suppose I can see how blocking Bush could control costs....

Yeah, even radarrider was bitching about that last night, and he's been defending the War on Terror to all comers....

The one benefit we're going to get if we manage to override Diebold and elect Kerry is this: legislative gridlock. That in itself may keep things from spiralling out of control.

Maybe.

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

I guess I'm pretty skeptical about how much difference there really is between Bush and Kerry. I can't help but think it'll be a case of SSDP.

I really do think both major parties are quite intentionally working their way towards suspending the Constitution, de facto if not de jure. And I no longer trust the Supreme Court not to just passively go along with it.