Disastrous Algorithms: The Internet Filtering Story

I've noticed that many cool websites have been filtered recently in Iran. For example, tinypic.com along with other famous image hosting services, ZDNet blog, makeuseof.com and even blogger.com! So you might have guessed that I'm surfing my own blog using a proxy service! Putting strange policies that support the Internet filtering aside, sometimes programmers are responsible for erroneous filtering of websites.*

Thanks to various proxy services available for free, any child can bypass the filter nowadays and the only tradeoff is speed. But sometimes it's more than that, for instance, when the U.S. government sponsored a service to assist Iranians in overcoming Internet filtering imposed by the Iranian government, the U.S.-sponsored service in turn sought to filter out pornographic sites so that Iranians would not use the circumvention service to obtain pornography. The service filtered any site with "ass" in its domain name—including usembassy.state.gov, the U.S. Department of State's online portal for its own overseas missions.[1] They have probably chosen to use The Most Simple Solution but missed the conclusion!

* I've seen an email address shown by my ISP which allows users to send website addresses filtered mistakenly for revision. You have to write the address in your email subject. Here it is: filter[at]dci.ir
[NEW 4/26/2009]: Almost all websites mentioned in this post are now unfiltered!

1. J. Zittrain (2008). The Future of the Internet And How to Stop It. Yale university press.