About website blocking

As promised, let's talk about site blocking technologies.

First, the political methods

Which differ little from the methods of dealing with unwanted 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 passing 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 everywhere, regardless of the political or religious affiliation of the country.
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In developed countries, due to this prohibition, self-censorship is quite developed. That is, self-respecting resources themselves monitor questionable content, and do not post, or remove on demand. Some international sites take into account the situation in the country, and despite the fact that they do not formally come under someone else’s jurisdiction, they still filter the content, taking into account the wishes of the government. Leaving it open in other, more liberal, countries. For example, appreciating the developing Chinese market, most companies voluntarily take into account intra-Chinese restrictions.

In addition to the "legitimate", the practice of physical pressure on providers and site owners is widespread in the world. Measures include deprivation of a license or domain name, fines, arrest of servers and equipment, and even businessmen themselves. In countries where laws are not clear, and any text can be classified as a “call to violence,” this works fine.

The following are technical methods:

• Content filtering. Refers to self-censorship: users from some countries receive the full content of the site, users from others receive a reduced version or an error message.
• Block by IP address. The server is not available for users from certain countries. If there is more than one site at the same address, all of them will be unavailable. Often, because of one violator, "hundreds of other sites fall under the distribution".
• Distortion of DNS records. The user requests the name of the site, the computer sends a request to the DNS server and converts the domain name into an IP address. If the DNS server is corrupted, it returns an incorrect address, and the site becomes unavailable for the user.
• Block by URL. Analyzing HTTP traffic, the provider can find out the address of the requested page and check with the list of "forbidden" keywords. If there is a match, the program will redirect the user to the stub page.
• Packet filtering. This is an advanced blocking that takes into account not only the headers containing the URL, but also all of the site content, email, messages, etc. The method is expensive, and affects the speed of the Internet.
• Partial or complete shutdown of the Internet. It is used only in emergency cases - mainly with the threat of riots.
• Filter search results. Search engines exclude banned sites from the list of found links. Google publishes requests to remove links from a search on chillingeffects.org . Last year alone, about 250 million links were removed from Google search.

What problems solves Hola

Today, Hola does a good job with content filtering (works like a VPN or proxy), this is the main usage scenario.

Obviously, the problem of completely turning off the Internet and filtering Google search results is not for us to solve. But we are working on bypassing locks at the state level: blocking by IP, packet filtering, etc. While this does not always work, but in the near future you will see a change 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 all.