Baku, Azerbaijan, Feb. 21
By Umid Niayesh- Trend:
It seems that Iran's online smart filtering system turned out to be not as smart as originally thought. An unexpected "switch" caused the system to become almost useless - only a couple of months after its initial implementation.
The Islamic Republic's "smart filtering software" reportedly is capable of accurate and rapid detecting "inappropriate" content (including text, image and video) online.
Mohammad Reza Aghamiri, a member of Iran's committee on Internet filtering told Fars news agency that smart filtering of Instagram was developed for HTTP protocol, meanwhile Instagram later switched to HTTPS, thus resulting in the system being of no use.
Iran started implementing smart filtering system for limiting access to certain pages in Instagram, a popular photo sharing network in December 2014
The official went on to add that currently the are measures being implemented on upgrading the system to be usable on HTTPS protocols as well.
This is while Aghamiri also admitted that working with Iran's ICT ministry is not easy and the changes to the filtering system may take a long time to implement.
It should be noted that several of world's most popular networks, such as Twitter and Facebook are banned in Iran while users are still able to access them via proxies. A proxy allows bypassing 'gates' meant to block certain sites.
A survey by Iranian Ministry of Youth Affairs and Sports indicates that 69.3 percent of the country's young generation use proxy servers to by-pass the filters and access banned Internet websites.
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