The Net Routes Around Censorship In Turkey

lpress writes: "Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who has been embarrassed by social media over corruption, vowed yesterday to 'eradicate Twitter.' He followed through by cutting off access, but users soon found work-arounds like posting by email and using VPNs. The hashtag #TwitterOlmadanYaayamam (I can't live without Twitter) quickly rose to the top of Twitter's worldwide trending topics."

Comments

"I can't live without Twitter"

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes We Can!

What a fool.

[Obijon70]

Haven't these tin pot dictators learned you cant "abolish" the internet? people that want to communicate with each other WILL find a way.

Re:What a fool.

[Anonymous Coward]

If your regime is that sensitive to 140 characters perhaps the problem is not twitter?

Re:What a fool.

[Obijon70]

Same thing we do every night Pinky. Take over the internet BWAH-HAHAHA..

Re:What a fool.

[WaffleMonster]

If your regime is that sensitive to 140 characters perhaps the problem is not twitter?

If you write in Turkish is it more like 70 characters after Unicode conversion or does everyone get 140 characters?

Re:What a fool.

[TopSpin]

or does everyone get 140 characters?

Everyone gets 140 NCF normalized UTF-8 Unicode code points. Characters, iow.

Re:What a fool.

[PolygamousRanchKid]

Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, ... vowed yesterday to 'eradicate Twitter.'

"In democratic Turkey, Twitter eradicates you, Mr Erdogan!

I really hope he fails to turn Turkey into an Islamic North Korea.

Re:What a fool.

[wiredlogic]

It would be pretty difficult since there are constitutional prohibitions on religious extremists and they worship Ataturk far more than Americans do for George Washington.

Re:What a fool.

[iNaya]

It's 140 characters, not 140 bytes.

Re:What a fool.

[shutdown -p now]

Turkish uses the Latin alphabet, so even in UTF-8 it's mostly single-byte (the letters with diacritics and dotless I are two-byte).

Re:What a fool.

[wiredlogic]

That's Saint Reagan to you liberal scum.

Re:What a fool.

[Anonymous Coward]

You're being overly optimistic. (Or naive. Or an apologist for Turkey.)

Over the past decade Turkey has seen a steady revival of Islam in their political sphere. And remember, constitutions are open to "interpretation".

As long as they remain friendly to the West (availability of land in the south & east for US / UK military bases, guaranteed supply of gas from pipelines that cross their territory) there's no one to stop them.

Re:What a fool.

[sysrammer]

70. From the wiki...
"...whose payload length is limited by the constraints of the signaling protocol to precisely 140 octets (140 octets * 8 bits / octet = 1120 bits). Short messages can be encoded using a variety of alphabets: the default GSM 7-bit alphabet, the 8-bit data alphabet, and the 16-bit UCS-2 alphabet.[40] Depending on which alphabet the subscriber has configured in the handset, this leads to the maximum individual short message sizes of 160 7-bit characters, 140 8-bit characters, or 70 16-bit characters. GSM 7-bit alphabet support is mandatory for GSM handsets and network elements,[40] but characters in languages such as Arabic, Chinese, Korean, Japanese, or Cyrillic alphabet languages (e.g., Russian, Serbian, Bulgarian, etc.) must be encoded using the 16-bit UCS-2 character encoding (see Unicode)."

Re:What a fool.

[shutdown -p now]

Actually, half of the Turkish letters with diacritics (öüç) are also in ISO-8859-1

True.

which means that they have a 1-byte UTF-8 representation

Not true. Most of those letters have codepoints between U+0080 and U+00FF, and UTF-8 is only single-byte for codepoints below U+0080 (i.e. ASCII).

Subverting censorship.

[Forbo]

People ask why I would ever want to run a Tor exit node, this is a perfect example.

A Success of the Internet

[Oysterville]

One of the places where the Internet truly succeeds is by giving everyone a voice, thereby creating a watchdog effect that mass media has failed at themselves. Granted, not many use their "voice" for a worthy purpose, but those that do may never have been heard if it weren't for this medium.

Streisand effect

[samuel.progin]

I was not following up closely what was going on in Turkey... The move of trying to cover these allegations brought them up in the spotlight. Wonderful.

Re:Streisand effect

[nomad63]

In Turkish, there is a saying:

In Turkish, "Eceli gelen it, cami duvarina iser." which can roughly be translated as, "The dog, whose time to die come, goes and pees on the wall of the mosque (desecrates the holy grounds, punishable by death in sharia law or something like that).

Mullah tayyip is dropping plunkers in the middle of the prayer hall. But, don;t get your hopes too high, He will defect to US when he no longer is able to suppress all the people in Turkiye, as I feel, an uprising is coming very soon. I believe, him and his children, own property somewhere on the Northeastern part of United States.

Can't he just rent a boat?

[fustakrakich]

With a big anchor?

Doesn't this guy own the phone companies and stuff, like every other tinpot?

DNS block

[Berendho]

He said "I'm going to eradicate Twitter". Then he blocked twitter by changing the DNS on all official Turkey ISPs. I don't know if I should laugh or cry. I think that our own leadership has about the same knowledge of the internet. Any under 30 person could have seen the usefulness of their action. It actually increased traffic to twitter, they broke new user records: http://www.theguardian.com/wor...

Re:DNS block

[MtViewGuy]

Not going to work when you can use third-party DNS servers like OpenDNS and Google Public DNS. :-)

Hmm

[AlphaBro]

I'm not sure which I hate more: political corruption, or twitter. Probably twitter.

It is just a DNS block: Change your DNS to 8.8.8.8

[Anonymous Coward]

It is just a simple stupid DNS block.
Change to your DNS servers to Google DNS (8.8.8.8 or 8.8.4.4) or OpenDNS (208.67.222.222, 208.67.220.220, 208.67.222.220 or 208.67.220.222) and everything is back to normal.

People are painting 8.8.8.8 over Erdogans election posters all over Turkey :-)

Classic case of the Streisand effect !

Turkish president circumvented as well

[dutchwhizzman]

The president of Turkey tweeted after the block that it is wrong to block an entire website but that at the most single accounts should be blocked. Considering that the president is a member of the same political party as the prime minister that ordered this, that is about the biggest vote against confidence a prime minister can get.

"I don't care what the international community thi

[Phusion]

I loved reading the comment that whats-his-face was going to "wipe out" twitter and that he didn't care what the international community thought-- he was just asking to get circumvented. Oh well, hopefully we don't see a complete drop in Internet communications for the whole country, like we did in '11-'12. With any luck we'll get less oppressive/corrupt regime's when they learn they can't censor the Internet as well as they thought they could.

Re:This is what you get

[nomad63]

Your ignorance is blinding my eyes. Americans calling Turkiye as Turkey, doesn't necessarily equate the quality of those people to that of a stupid bird. Not untill too long ago, Beijing, the capitol of China was Peking.

Can't Stop the Packets

[wjcofkc]

Considering that the internet/darpanet/packet switching was designed to route it's way long distances through a post nuclear holocaust, with the tools we have now riding on it now, you can't stop the packets, not forever.

Re:Can't Stop the Packets

[allaunjsilverfox2]

Considering that the internet/darpanet/packet switching was designed to route it's way long distances through a post nuclear holocaust, with the tools we have now riding on it now, you can't stop the packets, not forever.

You could if you REALLY wanted to. Broad spectrum radio interference, cut physical lines through out the area, kill any messenger pidgins to prevent RFC 2549 usage, Ban drums to prevent tcp transmission.

Re:This is what you get

[Anonymous Coward]

Do you know what they call a turkey in Turkey? Hindi... their word for Indian. So, it seems ignorance is global.

Re:Turkey's corruption extends to the US

[sudo]

That's just politics. Most politicians do it ... smarter ones usually don't get caught and the more affluent the country the more sophisticated the corruption.

The U.S. Barely makes the top 20 in the Transparency International rankings list (http://www.transparency.org/cpi2013/results).
Turkey is 50th

Good luck Erdogan

[PPH]

We've been trying to eradicate Twitter for years. So far, no luck.

Re:Dictators will have more control in the future.

[mars-nl]

There is no logic in your statement.

US giving up control might stop censorship by US government, for example FBI taking down non-US servers.

Re:Hosts files override DNSBL easily... apk

[ComputersKai]

It apparently seems the only tech-savvy government officials work in the intelligence departments, where they illicitly perform tasks. But when it comes to designing public service websites, they fall short.

Still, I have to say, good luck with your censorship. It doesn't work and will only bring more publicity. People in China have been doing this for years.

Unfortunately...

[hyades1]

...this is just a nice little lab that will help the NSA figure out how to pick off the low-hanging fruit when THEY decide they want to put a stop to all that nasty free expression stuff.