About site blocking

As promised, we’ll talk about website blocking technologies.

First, about the methods of political

Which differ little from the methods of dealing with objectionable media, and the effectiveness of which increases from the parallel use of modern means of collecting information, and technical means (and hence from decent funding).

First of all, the practice of adopting laws prohibiting the publication of information of a certain kind is widespread in the world. Leading copyright infringement and child pornography - they are banned almost all over the world, regardless of the political or religious affiliation of the country.

In developed countries, as a result of this prohibition, self-censorship is quite developed. That is, self-respecting resources themselves track dubious content, and do not post it, or clean it on demand. Some international sites take into account the situation in the country, and despite the fact that they do not formally fall under foreign jurisdiction, they still filter the content, taking into account the wishes of the government. Leaving it open in other, more liberal, countries. For example, in appreciating the emerging Chinese market, most companies voluntarily consider domestic Chinese restrictions.

In addition to the "legal", the practice of physical pressure on providers and site owners is widespread in the world. Among the measures - the deprivation of a license or domain name, fines, the arrest of servers and equipment, or even businessmen themselves. In countries where laws are fuzzy, and any text can be classified as a “call to violence”, this works great.

The following are technical methods:

• Content filtering. It refers to self-censorship: users from some countries receive the full content of the site, users from others receive a truncated version or an error message.
• Blocking by IP address. The server is unavailable to users from some countries. If more than one site is located at one address, then all of them will be inaccessible. Often, because of one intruder, hundreds of other sites “fall under the distribution”.
• Distortion of DNS records. The user asks for the site name, the computer sends a request to the DNS server and translates the domain name into an IP address. In case of distortion, the DNS server returns an invalid address, and the site becomes unavailable to the user.
• URL blocking.By analyzing HTTP traffic, the provider can find out the address of the requested page and check against the list of "forbidden" keywords. If there is a match, the program redirects the user to the stub page.
• Batch filtering. This is an advanced blocking, which takes into account not only the headers containing the URL, but also the entire content of the site, email, messages, etc. The method is expensive, and affects the speed of the Internet.
• Partial or complete disconnection of the Internet. It is used only in emergency cases - mainly with the threat of riots.
• Filtering search results. Search engines exclude prohibited sites from the list of links found. Google publishes requests to remove links from search on the sitechillingeffects.org . Last year alone, about 250 million links were removed from Google search.

What problems does Hola solve?

Today, Hola does a good job of filtering content (works as a VPN or proxy), this is the main use case.

Obviously, we cannot solve the problem of completely turning off the Internet and filtering Google search results. But work is underway to bypass locks at the state level: IP locks, packet filtering, etc. While this does not always work, but in the near future you will see changes for the better.

Hola products are being developed mainly through beta testers. Feel free to tell us about the problems - we will try to solve them and make the Internet more open to everyone.