www.orkut.com: Web-surfing zombies

In my previous post titled "The change we need", I inspected some restrictions enforced by industrial countries like the US on a typical Internet user in Iran. Now, I'm going to let you know the other side of the story.

Iran is just a case study to show how different the Internet experience can be, how fragile this Web architecture is, and why we need clear and global Internet governance rules to make for a better Internet.

The Father of the World Wide Web, Timothy Berners-Lee, once said: "The Web works as a decentralized system, with no hierarchical or other structure to force society into a shape imposed by technology."
He also added: "Centralization, like filtering and censorship, prevents the Web from being an accurate mirror of society itself, and we should be very careful, by constant inspection, to ensure that this continues to be the case." [Link]

Internet filtering in Iran has a long story. I remember its very first generation when universities had just a single point of access to the Internet via the Institute of Physics and Mathematics.

At the beginning, there was very simple Internet filtering. Some DNS queries did not resolve the IP addresses and they were filtered by mistake. We had to change our DNS servers to public DNS servers (like Sun's 192.9.9.3) to bypass the filtering.

The second generation of filtering was based on keywords. You could not access Web sites that included some keywords in their addresses. I remember I couldn't access Sussex University just because of the banned word "sex" in its address. Bypassing filtering was via simple Web proxies and URL encoding.

This technology had many inefficiencies and the third generation of filtering used a combination of keyword filtering and a database of blacklisted and whitelisted Web site URL addresses.

ISPs had to install their own filtering system and keep their database updated. As a result there was no uniform filtering policy in different cities and ISPs of Iran.

As a founder of the first Persian blogging service I had to face funny problems. Once in a while there would be an ISP which filtered our domain or blocked our IP address. We had to call the ISPs individually to inform them that we ran a blog service with hundreds of thousands of subdomains and if it had to filter a single subdomain it should not block our server's IP address or filter the domain name and all its subdomains.

This filtering technology has evolved over these years. It uses a centralized filtering database with multi-layer filtering software. Web sites are ranked between 0 and 1, based on keywords in their URL and a lookup on filtering database rules. Those ranked as "1" are whitelisted, ranked as "0" are blacklisted, and the gray ones are evaluated manually by a group of operators or treated in a fuzzy way.

The database is updated manually or automatically by crawling robots that rank sites based on keywords in URLs, content or their neighborhood. The fuzzy-ranking algorithm is inefficient and has created many false results, especially when you are doing research on the Web and have to face false banned Web sites while opening search results.

At that period of time, all sites directly linked by a blacklisted address were added to the blacklist and this created a lot of problems for Web users.

Sometimes, there was a cat and mouse game between Web users and the filtering software. For example, Orkut was available for a year and became very popular among young Iranians. www.orkut.com eventually got filtered because of its matchmaking function. For users who accessed orkut.com (with no www), it got filtered, too. Users started to access it by adding a /login.aspx at the end of address. The filtering software got smarter and filtered all Orkut URLs. Users then employed the IP address. The software blocked the HTTP protocol on the IP address. Users started to use the HTTPS protocol. The software filtered total access to the IP on all protocols.

Power users use advanced VPN technology and SSH tunneling to connect to servers outside Iran and to surf the Net with European or American IPs like Zombies.

This technology is being sold to ordinary users for US$3 to US$10 a month and advertised as a way to bypass restrictions enforced by US companies against Iranian IPs.

This cat-and-mouse game makes the filtering rules very restrictive and puts Iran in ONI's pervasive category and on RSF's Internet enemy list. (Dated 2007)

In my opinion, these reports are involved with politics and exaggerated to some extent. Internet filtering is much worse in many other countries. Take the United Arab Emirates where FriendFeed, Twitter and many other popular sites are banned but available in Iran. Afghanistan has even filtered Persian language blogs just because it feels vulnerable and thinks this affects its culture and language.

In any case, Internet filtering is a global issue. We, as netizens, should take it seriously, like global warming, and decision-makers should protect the Internet, like with Earth. It does not depend on which country you are in. Most of the countries in the world have active Internet filtering. It's only the filtering rules that differ.

Source: asia.cnet.com