Dailymotion classified as “Pornography”?

Apr 7th, 2007 | By cybversion | Category: DailyMotion
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English: The Internet Censorship Explorer (ICE), the blog maintained by the Citizen Lab’s technical research director, Nart Villeneuve, has published an article (Alternative Explanations) about how SmartFilter (made by U.S. company SecureComputing) is configured in countries like Tunisia to block access to sites classified as “Pornography”. He concluded that dailymotion is most likely blocked because it has been categorized by SmartFilter as pornography:

French: The Internet Censorship Explorer (ICE) (l’Explorateur de la Censure sur l’Internet), le blog de Nart Villeneuve, directeur des recherches techniques chez Citizen Lab, a publié un article (explications alternatives) qui explique comment les SmartFiltre (logiciels produits par l’entreprise américaine SecureComputing) sont, dans certains pays comme la Tunisie, configurés pour bloquer l’accès à des sites en les classifiant comme « pornographique ». L’article conclut que Dailymotion est probablement bloqué parce qu’il a été classifié « pornographique » par SmartFilter :

[...] Although Tunisia deploys the same filtering software as Saudi Arabia they attempt to disguise their blockpage as a generic “Internet Explorer” 404 error. In the past ONI/HRW identified,tested and confirmed that misclassified sites — categorized as porn — were blocked in Tunisia because they filter SmartFilter’s pornography category.[...]

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Source: The Internet Censorship Explorer (ICE)

[...] The website http://www.dailymotion.com/ reported to be blocked in Tunisia. Although there are political videos hosted on the site that are critical of Tunisia the site is also categorized by SmartFilter as pornography. It is very easy to add websites — including specific URLs — to SmartFilter to block. This is what countries do when they add their own content to block — usually political content — on top of SmartFilter. If Tunisia added the block (they have to unblock it first because it is blocked as part of the pornography category) they could have just added the specific URLs, however, countries often do not care about collateral blocking. (See Thailand’s blocking of YouTube.) Still, I think that the more mundane — over-blocking as a result of SmartFilter categorization — applies to the Tunisian case.[...]

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