Iran Plans To Filter Immoral SMS And MMS Transmissions

from the good-luck-with-that dept

Iran's Telecommunications Ministry has now announced that it plans to start filtering out any immoral video and audio messages sent via mobile phones. Of course, the key sentence in the article is: "It did not give details of the techniques it would use to filter such messages, when it would start or how it would define "immoral" messages." It's one of those things that may sound nice to overly paternalistic governments, but is impossible to accomplish in real life. Do they plan to have people actually reviewing every text and video message before it gets sent? That clearly will never work (or, will simply guarantee that the messaging becomes close to useless). Or, more likely, they'll buy some crappy filtering software to try to pick up on "naughty" words, which won't work very well and will probably just cause more problems than it solves (assuming you believe immoral messages are a problem in the first place). It's always amusing to see governments make claims like this when it's simply impossible for them to actually achieve what they claim.
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  1. identicon
    Anonymous Coward, 30 Apr 2007 @ 6:03pm

    baba ina hamashoon divoonan

    link to this | view in thread ]

  2. identicon
    Anonymous Coward, 30 Apr 2007 @ 6:03pm

    hamineshon kam monde ke sms haroham filter konan

    link to this | view in thread ]

  3. identicon
    Anonymous Coward, 30 Apr 2007 @ 6:03pm

    mardom hich azadii nadaran

    link to this | view in thread ]

  4. identicon
    Miguel, 30 Apr 2007 @ 6:03pm

    what?

    i think this comments allready been filtered .. didnt understand a word ...

    link to this | view in thread ]

  5. identicon
    Anonymous Coward, 30 Apr 2007 @ 6:03pm

    pathetic!!

    link to this | view in thread ]

  6. identicon
    dorpus, 30 Apr 2007 @ 6:24pm

    How Iranian Are You?

    link to this | view in thread ]

  7. identicon
    rEdEyEz, 30 Apr 2007 @ 6:44pm

    Opportunity Knocks

    Sounds to me like the perfect opportunity to subvert the Iranian Powers-that-be....

    Unless they have an isolated cellular network, with state sponsored access, (not), they're blowing smoke up the virtual digital hijab/burka of the modern islamic world.

    Is the world ready for a digital extention of the Sharia Law?

    ...only when you are able to kiss my digital ass.

    link to this | view in thread ]

  8. identicon
    TriZz, 30 Apr 2007 @ 7:04pm

    Is this...?

    Would this be considered immoral?

    Immorality test here...

    link to this | view in thread ]

  9. identicon
    TriZz, 30 Apr 2007 @ 7:05pm

    RE: IS this...?

    PS: The link in my comment above (the immorality test) is NSFW.

    link to this | view in thread ]

  10. identicon
    duane, 30 Apr 2007 @ 7:14pm

    Sophocles said

    What you cannot enforce, do not command.

    link to this | view in thread ]

  11. identicon
    rEdEyEz, 30 Apr 2007 @ 7:16pm

    Re: Re: IS this...?

    is that an Iranian parliamentary procedure? ...figures.

    when 9 yr. old girl can be married to an adult man, what can you expect?

    Sick F*cks.

    link to this | view in thread ]

  12. identicon
    Mark, 30 Apr 2007 @ 7:31pm

    badwords?

    Perhaps they will keep a badwords list like an IRCD.

    /msg smsserv badwords add *USA*

    :)

    link to this | view in thread ]

  13. identicon
    Anonymous Coward, 30 Apr 2007 @ 9:35pm

    I wonder if this is the reason they want nuclear power plants, to power a giant sms filter.

    link to this | view in thread ]

  14. identicon
    Anonymous Coward, 30 Apr 2007 @ 9:36pm

    I wonder if this is the reason they want nuclear power plants, to power a giant sms filter.

    link to this | view in thread ]

  15. icon
    Wolferz (profile), 30 Apr 2007 @ 10:22pm

    time to state the obvious...

    ...since no one but me seems to have noticed.

    Has no one yet realized that the government is basically looking for a way to sensor political unrest? Considering this is almost certainly the intended goal (or at the very least the end result) it is likely they would spare no effort or cost to achieve it to the best level possible. Over the counter software is not bloody likely for an application on which their government's stability could one day hinge.

    Also, word filters are not hard to implement. With negligible coding experience and very little effort it was possible to hack a feature like this into the production ircd hosting a few hundred users that works extremely well and NEVER produces false positives. With a reasonably competent coder and some time and money behind it, it is possible to have reasonably reliable coding for entire word patterns.

    As for problems, blocking a few hundred legit text messages per week is no big deal when your trying to control the minds of your population.

    link to this | view in thread ]

  16. identicon
    moe, 30 Apr 2007 @ 10:56pm

    Re: Sophocles said

    Has anyone considered that maybe this is a bluff? Perhaps they made the announcement in hopes that just warning that they would be surveilling the content would decrease people sending it? I'm in no way an expert on Iranian culture, but if your combined govt/religious leadership is denouncing it, a bluff may be all you need for a large swath of the population.

    Maybe they'll throw in a generic word-filter, just to add a touch of realism.

    link to this | view in thread ]

  17. identicon
    Anonymous Coward, 30 Apr 2007 @ 11:03pm

    let 'em try then DDoS their SMS system just for fun. send them stuff like "let's go have a drink" or "I like Bush... a lot" pardon the pun

    link to this | view in thread ]

  18. identicon
    hopscotch, 30 Apr 2007 @ 11:04pm

    of course

    Of course its just to read what people are saying. Sure, the guise of a thecratic government would give them the ability to claim moral filtering - but its undoubtably a way to monitor what is being said in their country - as well as who is saying it. Im surprised the US hasn't found a way to weasle this into homeland security yet.

    link to this | view in thread ]

  19. identicon
    Anonymous Coward, 1 May 2007 @ 6:31am

    actually i can see this working, using some sort of bayesian methods, it would at first let everything through, some messages are reviewed by hand, and marked 'go-nogo' as a training set..

    it gets better over time, never perfect but maybe close enough.

    in effect you have a spam filter where instead of adverts being blocked its stuff 'someone' doesn't like, probably very broadly defined. but it would work *if*

    1, its left running for a while to train it, no instant results
    2, you don't mind it not being perfect.

    link to this | view in thread ]

  20. identicon
    |333173|3|_||3, 2 May 2007 @ 2:50am

    1337

    All the Iranians will have to do to swear on SMS mesages is to use 13375?3@|

    link to this | view in thread ]

  21. identicon
    Nobody, 29 Oct 2007 @ 7:33am

    Jaleb injast ke amrikayiha nemidoonan ke bad az Patriot Act SMS khodeshoon ham dareh khoondeh mishe!!

    link to this | view in thread ]

  22. identicon
    Anonymous Coward, 20 May 2009 @ 5:35am

    As we all know, nearly almost plastic products around you was made through plastic injection molding – the mouse you are using to click, the PET containers you use to store water or food, and also China printing can help us made the labels to attract potential customers and steel and aluminum made scaffolding made for the purpose of construction and renovation works.

    link to this | view in thread ]

  23. identicon
    Charles Perera, 31 Jul 2009 @ 2:03pm

    SMS to Iran FREE

    I came across great site to send free SMS to Iran:
    Free SMS to Iran
    Free Picture Messages to Iran

    link to this | view in thread ]

  24. identicon
    Gandhi cap, 31 Jul 2012 @ 9:48pm

    "this application for development of new io's and linking it to our google account is just done wonder with the use of it multitasking has just became so much easy that it can'nt be said in word's....thnxxx "

    link to this | view in thread ]


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