e_Paper_Thursday_December 30, 2016

Feature
17
FRIDAY, DECEMBER 30, 2016
DT
Government’s hard-core ban on porn sites
• Mahmood Sadi
Midway through the
second season of
Silicon Valley, the
popular HBO series
which skilfully spoofs the Bay Area
tech scene, the plot turns to porn.
Inside the offices of Pied Piper,
the fictional startup at the heart
of the show, the team members
thought of selling their groundbreaking
compressing algorithm to
a porn outfit called Intersite. Citing
reasons, one of the members
of the team said, “Pornography
accounts for 37 percent of all
Internet traffic.”
“Thirty-eight when I’m on it,”
says another member jokingly.
Punchline aside, the truth
is porn accounts for some
astronomically large portion of all
Internet traffic. Porn sites get more
visitors each month than Netflix,
Amazon and Twitter combined,
and these generate equally
enormous sums of money for all
the faceless people who run its
operations.
So, blocking porn websites is
much easier said than done.
Bangladesh government,
however, has started to venture
out this daunting task of blocking
porn websites from Wednesday in
an unprecedented move.
Porn sites get more visitors each month than Netflix,
Amazon and Twitter combined, and these generate equally
enormous sums of money for all the faceless people who
run its operations
Why this ban?
Earlier, the Ministry of Post and
Telecommunication (MoPT)
of Bangladesh listed down
names of 500 porn websites
and sent it to the Bangladesh
Telecommunication Regulatory
Commission (BTRC).
The list is forwarded by the
Telecom regulator to internet
service providers (ISP), as well as
to International Internet Getaway
(IIG) service providers who have
started taking the actions right
away.
About the closure, Tarana
Halim said that initially they
have decided to block around
500 websites that contain
pornography, obscene pictures
and video contents. In the first
phase, they will go for blocking the
locally hosted sites.
About 70 to 80 percent of the
pornography sites, operated from
overseas, would also be blocked in
phases, Tarana added.
The Minister said that she is
aware of accessing porn websites
through virtual private network
(VPN).
A VPN helps someone encrypt
traffic between his/her device
and the VPN server. With VPN,
that person can get access to the
blocked websites.
“I know it is not possible to
completely block all websites
because there will always be ways
of accessing those porn sites. But
we are trying to make it as difficult
as possible for the users.”
Why banning porn websites is
difficult?
Experts concerned in the field
said that aside from VPN, a user
can get access to the blocked
porn websites through proxy
servers. There are a lot of proxies
on the world wide web that allow
someone to use their Internet
connection, thus bypassing
most of the restrictions set
up by the ISPs or the network
administrators.
Cyber expert Hasib Muammar
Rashid said when it comes to
the question of blocking porn
websites, the Government is just
wasting its time.
He said that to block content,
the Bangladesh Government- with
the help of ISPs and IIGs- use a listbased
approach.
This means the list of websites,
with their exact Uniform Resource
Locator (URL), are fed into a
system and then access to those
sites is denied to a user.
It can be easily bypassed if the
blocked website decides to create
a mirror site or if it changes the
name, said Hasib.
“The list-based filtering system
can also be defeated if a website
decides to encrypt the traffic by
using HTTPS instead of HTTP
because then the internet service
providers can’t see what a user is
accessing.”
Is there any way?
Hasib said that the blocks and
content filtering can be made
more robust with keyword-based
filtering or by employing deep
packet inspection of the internet
traffic.
“This is something China or
countries like Saudi Arabia do, but
it is also vastly more expensive
and difficult to maintain.”
Adult websites are just one
part of the internet. There are
other communication protocols
that internet users follow. “For
example, even if websites are
banned, porn can be downloaded
using Bit-Torrent technology.
PHOTO: BIGSTOCK
Similarly, peer-to-peer networks
like eMule or Bulletin Boards can
be used to download and share
files, including porn files.”
“Porn is fairly easily and widely
available on the web and clamping
down on it is near impossible,
unless the Government is willing
to spend crores every year just
to keep an updated web content
filtering system in place,” said
Hasib.
Besides, no Government
generally bans porn sites as
they are the biggest driver of
e-commerce intervention, he
added.
“It is a good intention but the
Government should not bite more
than they can chew.”
Hasib said that the US and
China tried to fight porn and
saw its results and then they
only limited themselves to child
pornography. “In the last two
years, the United Kingdom and
India tried very hard to block porn
websites in their countries but
they have failed.” •