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Turkey Bans Pastebin and Tinyurl
New submitter anonimim writes "Pastebin and Tinyurl have been blocked in Turkey. Pastebin was blocked last week by a court after the hacking of Turkish Information and Communications Technologies Authority (BTK). Four databases including email addresses and plain-text passwords stolen from BTK were posted to Pastebin last month, in retaliation for the blocking of Blogspot, Incisozluk (a popular Turkish community dictionary) and thousands of other websites. The more shocking ban was that of Tinyurl, a URL shortening service. Turkey currently blocks thousands of websites and is classified as one of the countries under surveillance by the 2012 Internet Enemies report (PDF) published last week by the Reporters Without Borders."
So, while I gotta respect your unique position at the nexus between cultures, you really don't know what you're doing, do you?
It's shit like this, Turkey. Just... shit like this.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accession_of_Turkey_to_the_European_Union
Yeah, even 2021 is a bit optimistic.
This its really playing whack-a-mole from the moles perspective. It might get your head above ground for a while, but ultimately that hammer will hit you smack on the head.
The problem really is Turkey is not acting like the modern liberal democracy it claims to be, and I think it really needs to be called out on that fact.
That said, I think we all should treat this sort of thing as the canary in the coal mine of democracy. If turkey can pull this garbage off and get away with it, then so can America, Europe, UK and Australia, because after all, turkey is just another liberal democracy right? The enemys of of our democracy, conservatives and pseudo-progressive alike at home are taking notes as we speak.
Excuse the Unicode crap in my posts. That's an apostrophe, and slashdot is busted.
Turkey has a governmental department that regulates what the imams will preach in the mosques.
The military forced out the government four times in the last sixty years, the last time was fifteen years ago.
There's literally hundreds of judgements by the European Court of Human Rights against Turkey.
There's still ongoing concerns about torture in the judicial system.
For fuck's sake, this is a country that once executed a guy for opposing a ban on a certain type of HAT.
So no, Turkey isn't "just another liberal democracy right".
Norway may be granted entry before Turkey but not both. Already too many 3rd-world 'countries' in Eu as it is so a Norway AND a Turkey won't fly (ask one Arthur Carlson). Any more and it would be PU.
lol. norway could join tomorrow if they wanted. no one in EU would say no to that, their human rights situation etc are more in compliance with eu rules than most eu countries. Norway isn't in EU because they're swimming in cash and they don't hate their government. Norway just happens to be getting what it wants from eu anyways. and fyi you can just walk over from eu to norway - if you're prepared to pay 8 bucks for a beer at a discount store and more for tobacco than in nyc.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.