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Access to Wikipedia restored in Turkey after more than two and a half years

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Re: Access to Wikipedia restored in Turkey after more than two and a half years

#141

Post by insomniacity »

decafbad wrote: post #135
kitteh wrote: post #82

Turkey is an interesting country to deal with. For example let's say you are a hosting company in the US and one of your customers is rebroadcasting Turkey television. A turkey govt agency would reach out to you and ask that you terminate that customer. If you refused, they go to the domestic incumbent Telecom (Turk Telecom) and null route your entire company ip addr space. Basically all of turkey won't be able to hi…

That's not the case anymore. They built an application level filter. For example, Wikipedia block was due to http header reading. https wasn't also a solution because of hand-shaking part. Even TOR can be blocked this way but it's reachable through obfs4proxy. Besides that, DNS queries to all servers are blocked if you try to get a blocked site's IP. No hijacking attempt here, as far as I can see. I routed only Wikip…

“DNS queries to all servers are blocked if you try to get a blocked site's IP”

Wait, so if I was in Turkey, a request for wikipedia.org to my ISP DNS server would not only have failed, but caused all my other queries to fail as well? For how long?

Re: Access to Wikipedia restored in Turkey after more than two and a half years

#142

Post by adventured »

TheNorthman wrote: post #121
jacquesm wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It depends on whose perception. Common as in 'the world' is something that we don't really have so you are always going to have to go by some locally colored version of events. The US eventually did win the space race, but they lost Rounds 1 and 2 to Russia. The United States getting involved in WW2 when they could no longer ignore it ended up getting the formidable American industrial engine engaged in ways that had…

> The US eventually did win the space race They did _because they started a new round_. What the US did is equivalent to losing badly and then screaming "Last goal wins" repeatedly until you score the last goal. Yes, US sources claim a US victory. That doesn't mean they actually won. > The US view is that they did all the heavy lifting, The Soviet Union was responsible for ~80% of german casualties. The Soviets made…

> The Soviet Union was responsible for ~80% of german casualties.

None of which would have been possible without the extraordinary industrial might of the US that kept the USSR supplied. They had no capacity to fight minus being supplied.

Do you know how much territory the European allies had reclaimed in the years of fighting prior to the US invasion of Europe? None. There is no scenario where Nazi Germany gets defeated without the US supplies and invasion and the USSR leadership openly admitted exactly that privately.

Here's a map at the time of Normandy in 1944 (WW2 of course began in 1939):

https://omniatlas.com/assets/img/articles/complete/europe/eu...

Notice anything interesting? The Germans hadn't lost any territory in nearly five years of war.

The US was a liberator of Europe. It didn't keep half of Western Europe for itself. Do you know what the Soviets were by comparison? It was the 1,900,000 US soldiers, backed with US supplies and nukes (to stand off the Soviet conquerors in the East), that enabled Western Europe to become free after the war.

The USSR would not have even been able to keep its trains functioning without the US supplies. The US gave them nearly 2,000 locomotives.

It included 12,000+ airplanes. 1,911 steam locomotives, 66 diesel locomotives, 9,920 flat cars, 1,000 dump cars, 120 tank cars, and 35 heavy machinery cars. 400,000 jeeps and cargo trucks. 8,000 tractors. 12,000 armored vehicles, including 7,000 tanks. 35,000 motorcycles. 1.5 million blankets. 15 million pairs of boots. Four million tons of food supplies. And a vast amount of energy supplies.

Between Dec 1941 and August 1945, the allies consumed seven billion barrels of oil. The US supplied six billion of those barrels.

So the US kept the USSR in the war with its industry, while fighting two massive war fronts simultaneously in Europe and the Pacific.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lend-Lease

Re: Access to Wikipedia restored in Turkey after more than two and a half years

#143

Post by Ruthalas »

decafbad wrote: post #135
kitteh wrote: post #82

Turkey is an interesting country to deal with. For example let's say you are a hosting company in the US and one of your customers is rebroadcasting Turkey television. A turkey govt agency would reach out to you and ask that you terminate that customer. If you refused, they go to the domestic incumbent Telecom (Turk Telecom) and null route your entire company ip addr space. Basically all of turkey won't be able to hi…

That's not the case anymore. They built an application level filter. For example, Wikipedia block was due to http header reading. https wasn't also a solution because of hand-shaking part. Even TOR can be blocked this way but it's reachable through obfs4proxy. Besides that, DNS queries to all servers are blocked if you try to get a blocked site's IP. No hijacking attempt here, as far as I can see. I routed only Wikip…

If you don't mind sharing, what browser extension was that?

Re: Access to Wikipedia restored in Turkey after more than two and a half years

#144

Post by cft »

AdamJacobMuller wrote: post #124
walrus01 wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm really disappointed when I see this sort of response. Somebody in a foreign country is hosting content on their own servers that offends you, or violates one of your local laws, so your best possible response is to null route an entire block of their IP space? Please tell us which ASNs you do network engineering for...

> hosting content on their own servers that offends you It's not about offense in the parent comment, it's about theft. I see this as a reasonable response, given no additional context.

When you steal something it means the owner doesn't have it anymore. How is this theft?

Re: Access to Wikipedia restored in Turkey after more than two and a half years

#145

Post by rolleiflex »

agumonkey wrote: post #138
rdiddly wrote: post #132

"... a 26 December 2019 ruling by the Constitutional Court of Turkey that the more than two and a half year block imposed by the Turkish government was unconstitutional." Your takeaways: 1) Turkey has a Constitutional Court. 2) Turkey has a constitution. 3) The court makes rulings and they are carried out. 4) Erdogan did something and it was "checked" and "balanced." Sounds an awful lot like a nation of laws, ruled b…

honest question: is it a first / new or was it already the case before ?

This is neither new nor first. Turkey has a court tradition that spans, at this point, more than seven hundred years (excluding Eastern Roman law with Corpus Iuris Civilis, which if included would bring it to 2500, an unbroken chain from whence it came, Rome) - to the point that it customarily allowed every sub-nation of the Ottoman Empire to have their own court and apply their own laws. For example, if you were Christian, you would get Christian judges, a Muslim would get the Muslim court and a Jewish person would likewise. It worked well for a long time, and when it didn’t, the modern, current court system was put in place.

The general point here is that, no, Turkey is not, in fact, a banana republic, but ultimately a pretty normal enlightenment-ideas-based country which is dealing with a leader that tries to stretch everything it can find to give himself more unrestrained power. That should unfortunately be pretty familiar to people who live in the US at this point.

Re: Access to Wikipedia restored in Turkey after more than two and a half years

#146

Post by decafbad »

lostlogin wrote: post #22
tomerbd wrote: post #17

The people of Turkey have voted for him right? He improved their economic situation enormously, this is democracy, you get who you vote for.

It’s not clear. The elections were widely reported to be fraudulent and voter intimidation and violence were widely reported. A meaningful portion of the world’s imprisoned reporters are in Turkey. It is trivial to find articles and reports on this.

He has half of the country's full support. I can easily see that.

Re: Access to Wikipedia restored in Turkey after more than two and a half years

#147

Post by decafbad »

Ruthalas wrote: post #143
decafbad wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not the case anymore. They built an application level filter. For example, Wikipedia block was due to http header reading. https wasn't also a solution because of hand-shaking part. Even TOR can be blocked this way but it's reachable through obfs4proxy. Besides that, DNS queries to all servers are blocked if you try to get a blocked site's IP. No hijacking attempt here, as far as I can see. I routed only Wikip…

If you don't mind sharing, what browser extension was that?

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/proxy-switchyomega...

Re: Access to Wikipedia restored in Turkey after more than two and a half years

#148

Post by hinkley »

rdiddly wrote: post #132

"... a 26 December 2019 ruling by the Constitutional Court of Turkey that the more than two and a half year block imposed by the Turkish government was unconstitutional." Your takeaways: 1) Turkey has a Constitutional Court. 2) Turkey has a constitution. 3) The court makes rulings and they are carried out. 4) Erdogan did something and it was "checked" and "balanced." Sounds an awful lot like a nation of laws, ruled b…

I'm just relieved it was due to a legal maneuver within Turkey instead of a concession from the WikiMedia Foundation.

Re: Access to Wikipedia restored in Turkey after more than two and a half years

#149

Post by jacobush »

blfr wrote: post #69
jacquesm wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The real effect is that Turkey will get more and more behind the rest of the world because its citizens do not have access to information. Regimes that block access to the truth are structurally disadvantaging themselves and their citizens in the long run.

It doesn't work like that. The Soviet Union which had some of the most tightly controlled access to information, and didn't have to worry about the Internet, managed to stay at the cutting edge of science and technology, even sometimes outpacing the west. The communist economy couldn't support it but that's a different problem.

They were substantially large, which must be accounted for. Large enough to be a mirror universe, sort of. Turkey is not. Maybe China will be.

Re: Access to Wikipedia restored in Turkey after more than two and a half years

#150

Post by elfexec »

jacquesm wrote: post #55
muznar wrote: post #54

I always wonder what the real effects of these kind of blocks. For even average users of the internet, it was easy to overcome this block by just putting a "0" in front of the domain name. 0wikipedia.org is a clone of wikipedia and it was accessible. WHOIS search shows 0wikipedia domain name was created on 4 May 2017, just five days after the block. I am a Turkish grad student in the US. Whenever I visited Turkey, I…

The real effect is that Turkey will get more and more behind the rest of the world because its citizens do not have access to information. Regimes that block access to the truth are structurally disadvantaging themselves and their citizens in the long run.

> The real effect is that Turkey will get more and more behind the rest of the world because its citizens do not have access to information

Considering the censorship that goes on in Britain, Germany, Japan, Singapore, Taiwan, etc, I'm not so sure about your claim.

> Regimes that block access to the truth

Lets not kid ourselves and pretend wikipedia is the "truth". Jimmy Wales has come out as being partisan and agenda-driven like much of tech. Wales/Wikipedia represents "truth" no more than Google or Facebook does. Not only that we know that there are unsavory actors ( including government, ngos and especially PR groups ) who are manipulating wikipedia articles.

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