Recently, the Indonesian Ministry of Communication just announced that they have a new form of censorship tech that will let them automate censorship in Indonesia.

Previously, the Ministry had to manually input each website to be blocked. The Indonesian censorship blockade already includes over 800,000 websites that are blocked that mostly fall under a few categories like gambling, extremism, porn, or any content that relates to “negative content”.

But now with this new automated censorship system, Indonesia will be able to spread its censorship blanket quicker and more effectively. The cost? Well, only a measly $15.6 million USD. State owned company, PT Industri Telekomunikasi Indonesia will be implementing the new censorship system on behalf of the Ministry.

Initially there were concerns that this new system would utilize DPI (Deep Packet Inspection) techniques to spy on users’ web browsing habits and apply censorship blockades. However, now it appears the process will be largely automated.

The Ministry has explained how the new system will work through a crawling system that will analyze keywords on websites for negative content, and then proceed to block it. The target is an estimated 30 million websites that are currently uncensored.

The new system is scheduled to begin at the beginning of 2018.

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