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.
