The expensive, much-discussed internet censorship tech purchased by Indonesia’s IT Ministry earlier this year will finally be ready to launch at the start of 2018.

Samuel A Pangerapan, director general of information application at the IT Ministry, said that they will have the system installed in their office shortly and that it will be operational on January 1.

“We’re receiving (the machines) on December 29, it will be housed on the 8th floor of the IT Ministry building,” Samuel told Liputan 6 yesterday.

The project cost the state IDR194 billion (US$14.28 million — slightly cheaper than the previously reported IDR211 billion cost). Samuel said the automated porn blocking tech utilizes a “crawling” system that would use keywords to analyze sites for negative content. The content that is crawled would then be further analyzed for censorship by a team of 58 people using an unspecified method at a control room in the IT Ministry.

Samuel allayed fears that the system would be used to conduct real-time surveillance on users’ internet activities.

“It’s different from surveillance. Our machine uses a crawling system that detects data (for negative content). The one that’s doing the browsing is the machine, whereas for surveillance we’d have to ‘listen’ to the activity,” he said.

Before the implementation of this tech, the IT Ministry had to manually find and censor porn and other negative content (including gambling, extremism, sexual education, etc.), revealing that they only managed to block 800,000 sites earlier this year, which is minuscule compared to the amount of pornographic websites out there and their unstoppable growth. With the automated porn censorship system, the ministry is hoping to be able to block access to 30 million websites.

The auto porn blocker is arriving just in time for anyone planning to cut down on porn consumption as their New Year’s resolution. For everyone else, especially those who are tech-savvy, there have always been, and theoretically always will be, workarounds to the government’s internet censorship.

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