The city of Solo in Central Java had a good thing going — previously its citizens were allowed 24/7 access to free wifi provided at kecamatan (district) offices throughout the city.

However, that’s come to an end now as the Solo Communications and Information Agency (Kominfo) has limited the use free wifi after claiming to find that citizens were using it for all sorts of illegal purposes — the most obvious being for porn, but for other even more illicit activites as well.

“There were narcotics transactions, prostitution, so now it’s limited,” head of Infrastructure Department at Kominfo Solo Taufan Redina said, as quoted by Republika.

Media reports do not explain how Kominfo Solo could know how such transactions were taking place, but presumably it means that they were spying on the messages being sent by individual users across the network, which would seem troubling as well. There are also no reports of them taking action against said users for their illegal activities.

At any rate, Kominfo Solo is now switching the free wifi off from 6 pm to 4 am every day. By doing so, they also addressed parents’ complaints that their kids used to hang out at district offices late into the night for free wifi.

Pornography is illegal in Indonesia and the government actively attempts to block all pornographic content online. It’s clearly an untenable, if not impossible, task, one demonstrated by the fact that, despite the IT Ministry announcing they had successfully blocking 800,000 porn sites manually by August, they are looking to launch an automatic porn detection and blocking system as the growth of internet porn is unstoppable.

However anybody with even a little technical savvy there are plenty of workarounds to the government’s censorship system, making their battle against internet porn all but futile.

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