Thousands of Turks accused of using Bylock app despite never having used it
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Re: Thousands of Turks accused of using Bylock app despite never having used it
#2I’m pretty sure that it was the Turkish government who put hundreds of thousands of innocent Turks in jail. Installing chat software shouldn’t be a crime.
Re: Thousands of Turks accused of using Bylock app despite never having used it
#3FTFY: a shitty government is putting people in jail.
Even if we ignore the horrible government and bullshit reasons why they're considering installing an encrypted chat app a "crime", they should at least use proper evidence for the convictions, like a dump of the phone's memory with the chat app installed on it, and not a simple DNS lookup/HTTP request to the chat app's domain.
Re: Thousands of Turks accused of using Bylock app despite never having used it
#4Everybody hears the echos of this behavior throughout history.
I wonder if Erdogan thinks he'll be the one who escapes the universal fate of tyrants.
As Turkey becomes increasingly alienated from the EU, Putin looks to gain another monster.
Re: Thousands of Turks accused of using Bylock app despite never having used it
#5I find it very frustrating to read about such oppressive regimes. It fills me with anger, I cannot help myself, I just hate injustice.
Re: Thousands of Turks accused of using Bylock app despite never having used it
#6FTFY: a shitty government is putting people in jail. Even if we ignore the horrible government and bullshit reasons why they're considering installing an encrypted chat app a "crime", they should at least use proper evidence for the convictions, like a dump of the phone's memory with the chat app installed on it, and not a simple DNS lookup/HTTP request to the chat app's domain.
No, it was a single line of code. We should ban codes like this.
Re: Thousands of Turks accused of using Bylock app despite never having used it
#7The code in question had nothing to do with it. Once you're putting people in jail for network activity on the same wifi network, it's way beyond pretending you were just confused by an iframe.
Re: Thousands of Turks accused of using Bylock app despite never having used it
#8Strange...the "bad" chat app is named Bylock, and downloading/installing it is apparently evidence that you are part of an treasonous political group. But the "single line" of code that the headline appears to refer to is code that causes you to access Bylock.net, kind of like an email image ping:
> Beşikçi said it was due to a single line of code, which created a window "one pixel high, one pixel wide" — essentially invisible to the human eye — to Bylock.net. Hypothetically, people could be accused of accessing the site without having knowingly viewed it.
This Bylock.net-accessing code was apparently packaged into other applications, causing people who weren't using the actual secretive chat app to be associated with the group:
> Akif Demir, a self-described conservative nationalist, wished the worst on people accused of using Bylock and being associated with the Gülenists. That is, until authorities said he was one of them...In October 2016, when his wife was pregnant with their first child, Demir was called into his principal's office. He wouldn't be allowed to work at the school — or anywhere else for that matter — anymore. He had been deemed a Bylock user.
The headline isn't inaccurate, but the main problem, or "bug", seems to be the government's hyper-willingness to throw people in jail for having accessed, even pinged, a forbidden server. And it wouldn't be surprising if this "bug" were being exploited by the purported outlaw group behind Bylock to mock the government's oppressive surveillance policies.
edit:
FWIW, previous coverage of "Bylock" focused on how the app itself was cracked in 2015:
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/aug/03/turkey-co...
> Starting in May 2015, Turkey’s intelligence agency was able to identify close to 40,000 undercover Gülenist operatives, including 600 ranking military personnel, by mapping connections between ByLock users, the Turkish official said.
Visiting "bylock.net" currently yields an empty page:
$ curl -IL bylock.net
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Content-Length: 0
Content-Type: text/html
Last-Modified: Fri, 03 Nov 2017 22:47:45 GMT
Accept-Ranges: bytes
ETag: "4c5039c4f554d31:0"
Server: Microsoft-IIS/7.5
X-Powered-By: ASP.NET
Date: Mon, 22 Jan 2018 13:35:36 GMT
edit 2: Googling around for "bylock.net", it appears an IT company (Fox-IT) was asked by Turkish lawyers to analyze the government's methodology. They published a report on Sept 2017 basically saying the government's "argumentation is seriously flawed"
https://foxitsecurity.files.wordpress.com/2017/09/bylock-fox...
Re: Thousands of Turks accused of using Bylock app despite never having used it
#9FTFY: a shitty government is putting people in jail. Even if we ignore the horrible government and bullshit reasons why they're considering installing an encrypted chat app a "crime", they should at least use proper evidence for the convictions, like a dump of the phone's memory with the chat app installed on it, and not a simple DNS lookup/HTTP request to the chat app's domain.
No, it was a single line of code. We should ban codes like this.
Do you want to throw people in jail if they use code that is banned too?
Re: Thousands of Turks accused of using Bylock app despite never having used it
#10As bad as this is, it does seem seem to be the status quo when it comes to forensic "science." I don't have any stats on hand, but it seems like more people are more worried about closing/winning cases than making sure they are not sending innocent people to jail.