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Blogger.com Banned In Turkey
petermp writes "A Turkish court has blocked access to the popular blog hosting service Blogger (Blogger.com and Blogspot.com, owned by Google), since Friday, October 24th, 2008. According to BasBasBas.com, a Dutch blogger based in Istanbul, who alerted readers about the issue: 'It is suspected that the reason for this has something to do with Adnan Oktar, by some considered the leading Muslim advocate for creationism, who has in the past managed to get Wordpress, Google Groups, as well as Richard Dawkins' website [banned].'"
I'm from Turkey. As far as I know bans happen this way: If court decides that the content is illegal (attacking personal rights, advertising drugs etc.) they contact the owner of the site and demand the content to be removed. If the owner doesn't comply they ban the site. Previously bans happened by modifying DNS data of the de facto ISP monopoly in Turkey and redirecting sites to another page with legal information. This was easily circumvented by using another DNS. Then they started blocking IP addresses. Interesting thing is they don't block IP addresses of all banned sites. They only do this to popular sites and I believe courts are not deciding this. Someone outside courts decides that they must do IP blocking or not.
The law which orders bans also have a precaution clause which permits getting a site banned before court decides that the content is illegal or not. Bad guys uses this legal loophole to ban web sites easily.
As a Turkey citizen all I can say is this sucks a lot, but does not surprise me a little. YouTube is banned for months and the ban won't seem to be lifted soon.
Never learn by your mistakes, if you do you may never dare to try again
btw the image is taken from this comment is free article
the article and the comments that followed make for an interesting sunday read
The modern western turkey was founded by Ataturk and is currently enforced by the military. The democracy part of Turkey ONLY exists as long as it does what the military wants and in the past the military HAS intefened several times when the elected leaders did NOT do what it wants.
The sad and confusing thing is that from a WESTERN point of view it is the MILITARY that is right and the public/voter/elected leaders who are wrong. It is the MILITARY that wants a STRICT seperation of church and state, even going so far that Turkey is NOT an islamic nation. It has NO STATE RELIGION. There is equality, press freedom etc etc. Because the military says so.
The voter however in recent years has been increasingly voting for religious parties. The reasons for this are complex. Part of the problem is that the current system works to well. In those cases people tend to forget what brings them their current prosperity. Turkey is doing amazingly well but it is a bit like the US where places like New York and LA are being outvoted by the people from the bible belt. So, right now the country is being torn. If the voter is allowed to elect religious leaders then that is the democracy that the EU wants in its members BUT it would also mean Turkey slides into an islamic nation the EU does NOT want on its borders. Allow the military to keep the current system and Turkey is dictatorship in all but name, something the EU could never allow a member to be.
As for the individual Turk, well, there is of course no such thing. You might as well label all US slashdotters along with that comment in Oprah story yesterday where she was considered new age because she said there might be more then one way to heaven then through jesus. The religious right is on the rise. Turkey is struggling with its desire to be a democracy and the risk this would cause it to slide into a islamic dictatorship.
It does raise the intresting question, if people elected their dictators, is it still a dictatorship? Make no mistake, the people who protest this bloggers ban are NOT intrested in democracy. They want to turn Turkey into an Islamic state where the islamic law rules. They just know that their best bet to get this is through the voting booth because any violent means to do this would be opposed harshly by the military.
Westerners find this hard to understand. We are used to thinking of the military as the opressors. Not the guardians of freedom.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Hi,
As far i know,this has nothing to do with religious or scientific matters.
Blogger was shut down due to copyright infrigement;Digiturk, a satellite tv provider, asked some blogs to remove their content but when this did not happen,they chose to shut down all the blogs.
Which is admittedly an idiotic move...
BTw,people please stop bringing up Eu at every subject about Turkey.
There must be two Indonesias, because the one you describe is very different to this one.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
No it's not about Adnan Oktar, suprisingly. It's all about streaming soccer games and corporate stupidity. Some blogger blogs offer links to streaming media, so the corporation which has a monopoly on soccer game viewing access (yeah, bravo sierra is written all over it) gets pissed off and blocks whole nine yards of blogger. Greed is evil, wherever whenever.
Electronic Liberties must be defended at all costs!
http://counterknowledge.com/?p=223
http://counterknowledge.com/?p=157
http://counterknowledge.com/?p=72
He seems to have a stranglehold over the Turkish courts, and is gradually silencing any and all outlets of dissent under flawed defamation and libel law.
Man wird am besten für seine Tugenden bestraft.
It was also wrong, because it refers to Turkey as a muslim country, whereas (despite the alleged reason for this ruling) Turkey is actually a secular state.
Quidnam Latine loqui modo coepi?
The ban is not about Adnan Oktar or some religious subject but simply is about Digiturk which holds the right to broadcast the Turkish Football Super League.
Digiturk claims that the bloggers illegally streams the matches (you have to buy a receiver and a special card in order to view the Turkish Super League) from internet via their blogs.
Therefore they appeal to court and court bans the whole sites ending with ...blogspot.com abd blogger.com. Therefore the complete blogger has
been banned.
I admit that this is totally bullshit but not everything in Turkey is not about religion etc.
Best regards,
"anonymous coward".
It's not a government ban, but actually caused vy a loophole in the law. (It has never been a government ban, nevertheless it's embarrassing).
*Any* court can order the ban of *any* website in Turkey. It only takes a single prosecutor deeming the case worthy, and a judge accepting it.
So for example, you can complain "google is infringing on my intellectual property", and if the prosecutor buys it, the judge can put in a preliminary motion to ban google. The ISPs can not do anything about it (except for going for an appeal).
The related law is being questioned, and will probably be replaced soon. (Hopefully).
It can't be punishable in the United States. It would fall against any sort of first amendment scrutiny. Other countries have laws against denying the holocaust, genocides, etc, but the US doesn't.
I am wrong indeed on this. Noted.
Not True: publicly refusing the Armenian genocide is only illegal in France, not in the U.S.A.
military has never been dictatorial in turkey. in ALL the coups that have taken place in the last 40 years, military have acted to prevent country from going to an islamist or totalitarian dictatorship.
first major coup was in 1960, against adnan menderes (who is, curiously and coincidentally, the first islamist leaning leader in turkish republic's history - the current islamist party comes from his party's roots). adnan menderes had increasingly become dictatorial in the late years of his reign -> he first censored all opposing papers, and then shut them down. then he shut down the opposition party. then his party moved to create a party organization called 'vatan cephesi' (motherland front) that you had to join. even so, they were naming people out of census registry in the radios each night, saying that these people joined the motherland front. situation was going out of hand. so, military intervened, and hanged the 3 political leaders of that party. that has set an example for all extremists in turkey -> they havent been able to find the courage to radically change the secular modern republic for 20 years.
in 1980, things were out of hand again. extremism was abound, and extreme right and left organizations were killing each other, bystanders, anyone daily. the daily average death toll in the country was 200. yea, you heard that right, 200 people a day.
politicians of the time were doing NOTHING. just bickering. a moderate party, an islamist party, a nationalist party, and a social democrat party. all bickering and nothing.
things were going this way for the last 5 years. and military was warning about deteriorating security situation within the country for those last 5 years.
all political leaders of that time were saying was 'it will be democratically solved, democracy is strong blah this bleh that'.
nothing happened. they did nothing.
and when in 1980, a huge throng of islamists have sat down during the national anthem and booed the national anthem in konya in 1980, declaring that they wanted an iranian style islamist government, within 2-3 weeks' time military had taken control of the country and locked up the extremist leaders, and put an interim government and called a group of experts to prepare a new constitution to prevent extremism from being able to change anything.
1982 constituton was put to vote of the people. people were SO fed up with extremism and the chaos environment that it got a whopping 80% approval rate and was ratified. this is the constitution we have today, and this is the constitution that islamist party is trying to change so they can move ahead with islamist proceedings.
just 1 years later, in 1983, elections were held and a technocrat, turgut ozal, a western style free market evangelist was elected with a whopping vote total. and he furthered the country until islamist elements got rise again.
so today here we are. the islamist party is trying to get rid of the elements in constitution that prevent them from establishing islamist and pro-religion laws, saying that 'it is the will of the people' (only 38% first election, only 42% last, a lot of reactionary votes and a lot of election fraud).
what is stupefying is that, european union SUPPORTS them. they are in the delusion that, if you let everything be in turkey, it will just become a country like belgium. but the last 40 years' history of turkey says otherwise.
the going is not good. it is a cosmic joke that european union is supporting and harboring a party that wants to break turkey from all modern values and enlightenment ideals. leave aside being contradictory, its self damaging.
Read radical news here
Heres the update on the situation: Itâ(TM)s now reported that it is not Oktar that got Blogger banned, but Digiturk, a subscription based digital TV platform that owns the rights to the live broadcasting of Turkish football league games. Apparently, Digiturk asked Blogger to take several blogs or blog entries down containing links to pirated transmissions of the live games. Blogger did nothing, Digiturk went to court and under Turkish intellectual property law, they managed to get Blogger banned completely, effectively banning millions of websites that have nothing to do with Turkish football or pirating. Leave it to turkey to ban an entire site becuase of soccer. *sigh
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It was also wrong, because it refers to Turkey as a muslim country
99% of Turks are Muslims.
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