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....)

---

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]

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