Over 5 million sites censored by IRI
Thursday, January 8th, 2009According to Reporters without Borders:
The Tehran attorney-general’s adviser said on 19 November that the authorities were responsible for filtering out “five million websites.”
I was on a VOA program where one of the guests was claiming that a five-person committee determined what cites would get censored.
Just by using simply arithmetic we can conclude that the regime is using a script / program to analyse contents of sites to determine whether they contain any specific words / phrases that would relegate them to the “black list.”
Let’s take a look of how much effort it would take to compile the “black list” via route good-old-fashion - aka manually.
Even if it took a person a mere 10 seconds to read a page on a site and determine whether to censor the site or not, and then update the database:
Each minute a person could censor 6 pages
5,000,000 websites divided by 6 = 13,888 hours
13,888 hours divided by 24 = 578 days
Even if every site they analysed would get censored, it would take about a year and 7 months to come up with the list of 5 million censored sites (working 24 hours a day / 7 days a week).
Keep in mind that not every site they visit will be censored so even if we go with a liberal censorship rate of 25% of sites they visit will get censored, you’d have to spend more then 6 years to manually create a list of 5 million censored sites.
