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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

#201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 defe…

How does it compare with domestic production? Best I can remember, USSR produced about as many tanks as the rest of the world combined during the period.

(Numbers from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_production_during_Wor...)

Yes, they produced a great many tanks. Of the 270,041 tanks and self-propelled guns made by the Allies, 120,000 of them were made by the Soviets. That's a very impressive number, Russian tanks were pretty good, and tanks in general are impressive machines, so this makes for a very good example if you want to boast about Soviet productivity.

What about other vehicles though? The Soviets got 400,000 good trucks and jeeps from America. Tanks alone won't win a war, you need to move men and supplies too otherwise those tanks won't get very far. Take a look at the "Other Vehicles" column on the land vehicles table.

Take a look at the aircraft table on that same page. The British alone made way more aircraft than the Soviets, and frankly the British aircraft were much better. Particularly the Lancaster, which was superb. The British gave thousands of combat aircraft to the Soviet Union, and trained many Soviet pilots as well.

If you look at the table for production of coal, iron, and oil, you'll find that the Soviet Union was lagging far behind Britain and America. And Canada deserves a special mention for producing most of the aluminum. Of course I don't say any of this to demean the contribution of the Soviet Union to the war effort. It's undeniable that the Soviet Union shed the most blood, paying for the war with tens of millions of lives. How many more would have died had Soviet resources been stretched even thinner? That's not a pleasant thing to consider.

The war was a team effort. That's my point.

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

#202
post #52

While talking about this, I think it's appropriate to at least mention what that block was about: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berat_Albayrak

For those that didn't pick up on the nuance, this article is about President Erdogan's son in law, and it discusses how he was a big player in selling/smuggling oil from ISIS, so he basically funded terrorism. It's kind of a bad look for the leader of a country that supposedly was fighting ISIS to have a close relative that is supporting them. So he blocked Wikipedia in his country instead of doing something honest,…

It seems that for Erdogan's government blocking websites has become a hammer. And when you have such a convenient hammer, everything looks like a nail.

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

#203

"... 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…

But court could have stayed the block till it finished arguing the case, but it didn't. It let the block be for 2.5 years, while it made up its mind. To my eye it is problematic that.

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

#204
post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Common perception is that Soviet electroncis were generally 10-15 years behind.

On the other hand Soviets were at par with the West in Mathematics, Control Theory, etc. I kind of feel there is a tendency to downplay their achievements, fuel by cold war era sentiments.

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

#205
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.

Well… There's this one example from the 1930s where the people got who they voted for and it turned out horribly… In an unprecedented way, really. So being elected does not automatically mean being a righteous ruler. Although of course in that case there's no other way as to campaign for righteousness. Coups sponsored from abroad rarely turn out well for the people.

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

#206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Common perception is that the US contributed the most to ending WW2 (Not the opinion at the time) Common perception is also that the US won the space race (Not the opinion at the time outside the US). Perhaps "common perception" isn't the right metric to go by.

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 two countries with the most casualties in the world war 2, were the Soviet Union and China, and their numbers dwarf that of all other combatants.

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

#207
post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Common perception is that the US contributed the most to ending WW2 (Not the opinion at the time) Common perception is also that the US won the space race (Not the opinion at the time outside the US). Perhaps "common perception" isn't the right metric to go by.

Given that the US currently I has no vehicle to bring people to the ISS, it look like they lost in the long(er) term. /s

There was almost 10 year gap I think from the last SkyLab mission to the first flight of the shuttle,when Americans had no capsule available for manned missions.

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

#208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Ch…

Modern Turkey is indeed built on sound "enlightenment-ideas-based". This doesn't mean it will continue to be so. The current regime works hard to change these principles. The fact that these principles are challenged in democracies world over should bother us. This is not the same as it ever was, it's a real threat for the liberties and rights humanity managed to bootstrap for it's individuals. We are watching the erosion of them in realtime. It's a slow process that's easy to miss or get used to. But, I believe we should be wary.

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

#209
post #187
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…

Twitter and Youtube occasionally blocked in Turkey for years. They have found their solution in region-locking the contents after court orders. This may not be feasible to small hosting companies though. For youtube and twitter, implementing that control system was the only option to access the Turkey's market.

How does "region locking" work with Twitter content? Don't have you to control the content to lock it to a certain region via GeoIP or similar?

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

#210
post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you explain why blocking old TLS versions is even necessary? Didn't all the browser vendors announced that they're disabling old TLS versions in their browsers in a few months now? Blocking poor people is the only thing that is accomplished by this policy employed by Wikipedia. It's very sad that everyone's celebrating all these actions, instead of calling Wikipedia out for widening the digital gap, and quite lit…

I never said it's necessary. But there are certain risks from supporting the old versions. Take a look at this table[1]. In the TLS 1.0 and TLS 1.1 columns not a single cipher is listed as secure. Some can be secure with mitigations, but I'm not familiar with the difficulty of those mitigations, and whether the mitigations would have to be serverside or clientside. If clientside, then by blocking old versions, they m…

That's all fine and dandy, but why does it matter? This is not some sort of personal messaging, banking or financial transactions that we're talking about; this is literally an online resource where any anonymous user can come and edit anything they please without any sort of authentication or peer review whatsoever — on English Wikipedia, all edits are immediately shown to all subsequent visitors/readers, even the vandalism made by anonymous users, which on some articles goes undetected for months or even years at a time, especially in cases where the vandalism is subtle-enough.

Put it simply, it's literally a big dump of unverified information, even if some of it appears to be relatively reliable and of good quality most of the time; how is preventing me from accessing it from my iPad or Android magically makes it so great and "secure"? Don't they have any bigger problems to worry about?

And what does PCI-DSS compliance has to do with an encyclopaedia? How does it benefit Wikipedia from being PCI-DSS compliant? What's next — is Wikipedia going to adopt EDD-KYC, too?

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