The blocking system,

we were asked to try and play with a blocking tool and report on it, but unfortunately I could not get them for my OS, then I decided to share my experience with filtering in a wider range.

I come from Iran and we have overall filtering on our internet. It has been there for long and it develops and changes depending on the current situation : political, social , …

basically we had two types of filtering:

- total filtering of a website, like youtube is filtered altogether and independent of the content of the video you would like to watch it is impossible to assess it. Facebook, many photo sharing and video, audio sharing and news fall also to the same category.

- content based(better to call it keyword-based) filtering: the general website is accessible but specific pages and content is not.

Although the whole concept of filtering is absurd (at least in the context of free society), the first method works better to fulfill its purpose. Many funny cases happens when filtering is done based on some words or concepts because of imperfect content monitoring technologies.

The interesting fact about this filtering is that it is been reviews and revised based on user's suggestion (well I am not sure how well this system works, but:) when you try to open a forbidden page, a webpage appears telling you that this is a forbidden content and suggests you other pages!(not based on the original page, but it suggest a list of possibilities like entertainment, news …) and there is also a possibility to report a mistake, so you can say that this page is filtered without any reason and the content is fine and you ask them to revise it.