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."

A government that seems to understand the Internet

[ottawanker]

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.

Only Pakistan?

[SolitaryMan]

May be Pakistan is the only country that didn't manage to keep this secret. You wait for it and this will be everywhere. I wonder what country would love to block Wikileaks or The Pirate Bay, for example.

Re:A government that seems to understand the Inter

[Anonymous Coward]

That's because their leaders(or at least many important people in the government) were educated in freer Western nations and exposed to what happens with the freedom of information. Bashar Al-Assad is an example of this.

Of course you realize..

[wbr1]

...that this is one of our most important allies in the war on terror. I wonder how much of the billions we give them will be spent on this while we stand idly by. Remember the US of A and its allies have carte blanche to do what we tell others is wrong. Greed and hypocracy make the world go 'round.

Re:A government that seems to understand the Inter

[crutchy]

and they don't rot their brains watching oprah

Re:Steve Jobs said it best

[crutchy]

don't try to solve social problems with technology

..."because my company is doing that and I don't like competition"

Keep on setting those unrealistic expectations

how about this for a famous quote:

"People who say it cannot be done should not interrupt those who are doing it." - George Bernard Shaw

Re:A government that seems to understand the Inter

[Anonymous Coward]

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.