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Jakarta Post

Internet cafes given a month to block porn websites

Communications and Information Technology Minister Tifatul Sembiring said Saturday his office gave a one-month deadline for Internet cafes to install the anti-porno-graphy filter

The Jakarta Post
Jakarta
Mon, August 2, 2010

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Internet cafes given a month to block porn websites

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ommunications and Information Technology Minister Tifatul Sembiring said Saturday his office gave a one-month deadline for Internet cafes to install the anti-porno-graphy filter.

“The ministry gives owners of the cafes one month to install a filter to ban access to pornography sites,” he said in Bandung, West Java, as quoted by Antara.

He said he had talked with the Association of Indonesia’s Internet Cafes (Awari) and Internet service providers (ISPs) to apply censor or filtering.

“We have asked several ISPs to develop an anti-pronography application so they can block those who want to access certain sites.”

This measure, however, will take time as there were more than 200 ISPs that have open or closed networks, the minister said.

Tifatul put forward the idea last month. He said he wanted to block access to pornographic content on the Internet before fasting month Ramadan, which falls on Aug. 11 this year.

Internet business players such as ISPs have said they did not mind the idea but said it would be technically difficult to apply such filtering. They said if not careful, filtering could block access to many websites including those which did not carry pornographic content. “I am collecting various keywords, which may lead to sites with pornographic contents,” Tifatul said.

“Many words have different meanings depending on the context. But there are some used only in our country. We need to be careful about this,” he said.

Beside Internet cafes, Tifatul also warned schools, which had computer labs to install the filter in each of their computer units.

The minister suggested Internet users and cafes use DNS Nawala or the Nawala Project to have a “healthy Internet experience”.

Nawala Project is a tool blocking access to pornographic content based on domain name system (DNS). It specifically blocked access to any sites allegedly containing pornography, gambling and phishing. The project is initiated by Awari since last year to protect children from sites deemed harmful to children. Awari promoted the free-of-charge tool again on the heel of rampant downloads of sex videos of people who look like singer Nazriel “Ariel” Ilham and his girlfriend Luna Maya.

Another video has a man looking like Ariel with gossip presenter Cut Tari. Cut Tari owned up to the video and apologized to the public.

Since the private videos leaked to the public, many people downloaded them to their computers and handphones.

In the beginning however, the Nawala Project also blocked access to many sites such as flickr.com, a photo-sharing web service.

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