Security News > 2022 > August > Russia's 'Oculus' to use AI to scan sites for banned information
Russia's internet watchdog Roskomnadzor is developing a neural network that will use artificial intelligence to scan websites for prohibited information.
Examples of information targeted by Oculus include homosexuality "Propaganda," instructions on manufacturing weapons or drugs, and misinformation that discredits official state and army sources.
The real-time scanning capacity of Oculus will be 200,000 images per day, or about 2.3 images per second, for which the vendor, Eksikyushn RDC LLC, will use 48 servers with powerful GPUs.
Oculus will be integrated onto the Unified Analysis Module, a network of monitoring systems currently under development, aiming to give the government a firm grip on controlling information flow.
According to Kommersant, that got to look into the contract terms, Oculus must be completed by December 12, 2022, and it will cost Russia 57.7 million rubles.
The natural result of introducing Oculus will be for users to either give up taking part in online discussions or use anonymization tools like VPNs, the Tor network, and chat apps that don't require PII when registering and don't log user data.