Indonesian ISPs Ordered To Ban All Porn In Just A Few Weeks

from the good-luck dept

Towards the end of July a few people submitted the news that Indonesia’s Information Minister Tifatul Sembiring had ruled that all Indonesian ISPs had to start blocking access to porn by August 11th (the start of Ramadan). As of this weekend, Sembiring appears to have backed off the deadline slightly, giving ISPs one month to implement a filter that would block access to porn. The NY Times is reporting, however, that ISPs are at a loss as to how they’re expected to do this. So far, all that Sembiring has apparently told them is that they should use the same keyword filter app that the government uses internally, not realizing the massive difference between a work-level filter and a country-wide filter. Also, it seems to ignore the ridiculous limitations of a pure keyword filter. The ISPs are, instead, saying that if there needs to be blocks, at the very least, the government should supply them with a list of sites to be blocked. They also warn that an internet-wide keyword filter would likely slow down internet access in the country. It seems like yet another case of someone demanding that “something” must be done, without realizing that said “something” isn’t really possible.

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Comments on “Indonesian ISPs Ordered To Ban All Porn In Just A Few Weeks”

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25 Comments
Michael Lockyear (profile) says:

Real Muslims (and Christians for that matter) don’t look at porn…why do they need a filter? The answer (quite obvious), from the NY Times article, “The filter would begin with pornography and would later be expanded to other undesirable sites.”

Even if they can scrape together a list of sites to block, circumvention is literally child’s play.

Berenerd (profile) says:

When will people realize...

2 things have always bothered me about Christian/Catholic religions. I say this because its the only 2 I know pretty well.
1) God loves all his children. So no matter what we do, he will love us. So if we are poly S&Mers that are gay, despite what the church says, god still loves us.

2) God made human kind in his image. if thats so, god is just a dirty little pervert like the rest of us.

So with that said…why all the hate?

Richard (profile) says:

Re: When will people realize...

1) God loves all his children. So no matter what we do, he will love us. So if we are poly S&Mers that are gay, despite what the church says, god still loves us.

You are right – and if you go to the right church you will find that it agrees with you.

2) God made human kind in his image. if thats so, god is just a dirty little pervert like the rest of us.

An interesting point. I think that it comes down to the fact that we distort the image of God with our own choices.

So with that said…why all the hate?

Absolutely no justification for it at all in the New Testament. There are a few bits of the Old that can be read that way if you are so minded – but for a Christian the New takes priority over the old.

Now it is true that Jesus did get angry on one occasion – but but it didn’t have anything to do with sex. It was with the moneychangers in the temple.

In general I think that a concentration on sexual morality is usually a displacement activity from the things that religious people ought to worry about. I don’t think that it reflects God’s priorities.

Lisae Boucher (profile) says:

I wonder if TechDirt would be blocked in even more locations if we not only mention sex and porn but also cialis, viagra and other common spam words. Anyway, it’s a dumb move since those who want to view porn will do anything to bypass those filters and those who don’t want to see porn will just end being blocked from many useful sites. It’s just going to hurt the wrong persons…

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