KARACHI, July 19: The Pakistan Telecommunication Company continues its ban on websites containing “objectionable material”, including pornographic content. A senior official of the phone utility told Dawn on Tuesday that though the PTCL ban on certain websites continued, lists of proscribed websites were not updated regularly. “Yes, the ban on websites thought to contain objectionable material, including pornographic content, is still on. But we are not adding new websites to the list of proscribed websites,” he explained.

He added that the PTCL had started to block those proxy servers which were increasingly being employed by the Internet users to access proscribed websites.

Internet users in the country turn to proxy servers, thousands of which are available on the World Wide Web, to access websites which have been banned and blocked by the government.

Internet access to these proscribed websites is blocked by the Pakistan Internet Exchange (PIE), the Internet backbone provider for the country. PIE, which is a PTCL subsidiary, has been blocking sites offering pornographic and other objectionable content since Jan 2003.

The source said that in technical parlance proxy servers employed a technique in which one host, usually a router, answered address resolution protocol requests intended for another machine. “By faking its identity, the router accepts responsibility for routing packets to the real destination. The proxy ARP allows a site to use a single IP address with two physical networks,” he said.

He explained that a proxy was a server that would act as a “middle-man” between a user and whatever else the user connected to. “It is most commonly used as a ‘safety net’ for your connection. Using a proxy usually hides the true identity of the person using it,” he said.

The secretary of the Internet Service Producers Association of Pakistan, V.A. Abidi, told Dawn that the blocking of websites by the PTCL had slightly slowed down the speed of the Internet in the country.

“The addresses of those websites which have been banned have to be listed on the PTCL router. Whenever a user makes a request, the system looks up the list to determine whether it contains the request or not. This tedious process naturally takes up some time”, he said.

He recalled that PIE had been established with the sole idea of keeping a check on the Internet traffic.

Analysts say that using a proxy server is a simple process. “All a user needs to do is find a list of free proxy servers by using an Internet search engine, such as Google. Free proxy servers allow users to access all sorts of websites, even those which have been banned by the government in Pakistan.”

They recall that a couple of years ago India had blocked Dawn’s website. “Hundreds of thousands of Internet users in India had employed proxy servers to access Dawn’s website. Likewise, the government in Pakistan recently blocked a Washington-based website which can also be accessed using a proxy server.”