Pakistan Looking For Homegrown URL Blocking System 97
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."
They just love hiding stuff in Pakistan (Score:5, Funny)
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.
Easy fix (Score:4, Funny)
Just append the urls determined to be unholly to the Koran.
They already have the infrastructure to punish infidels.