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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

#101

Post by jacquesm »

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.

Well, witness North Korea in the present day, and many other dictatorships besides, they usually lose their ability to innovate about as fast as they bury their dissidents.

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

#102

Post by monadic2 »

blattimwind wrote: post #81
blfr wrote: 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.

Common perception about soviet anything is generally wrong, at least in the us.

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

#103

Post by diminish »

milankragujevic wrote: post #67

Wikipedia is down for me today, as well as a large part of Europe. Their tweet: https://twitter.com/Wikipedia/status/1221513346781982722 Could it be the Turkish regime DDoS-ing their servers?

Wikipedia is up in Turkey for already a week I guess. So no.

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

#104

Post by analognoise »

kitteh wrote: post #94
lopmotr wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be honest, that sounds like the reasonable and fair thing to do when a foreign company is violating your laws on the internet. First tell them to stop, then block them. Not every country has this "safe harbor" concept that the US does, so you may have to take responsibility for the content you host if you want access to those markets.

It'd be better if they were transparent about it and you could see these actions clearly instead of having to glean it from a looking glass or from in country probes.

Getting direct contact about the issue directly seems very transparent to me?

If you just suddenly disappeared without a note, that's one thing. "Please stop action X occurring on your network" sounds very clear and direct.

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

#105

Post by jasonzemos »

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.

That's because they stole it. When you stand on the shoulders of giants it's not difficult to take the next step. In cases where the Soviets outpaced the west, most notably in the space race, they did so for lack of prudence. The US could only tolerate at most one accident (Apollo 1) else the entire endeavor would have been jeopardized. Rigorous testing, empirical investigation, and redundancy all imposed costs on the US. The Soviets instead just devalued human life and kept all their failures secret, lowering their cost to gain agility for progress.

In the end the Soviets produced a very small amount of organic peer-reviewed cutting edge research in contrast to the west. Worse, the politics impressed on its academics lead to Lysenkoism.

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

#106

Post by monadic2 »

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.

I’m not sure I buy this. Sure you can have access to the “truth” in the west, but you also see a staggering amount of propaganda/mass manipulation/willful distraction and no easy way of differentiating the two.

That said, wikipedia specifically would be a massive loss to anyone.

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

#107

Post by [deleted] »

parsimo2010 wrote: post #60
gruez wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there even a need for this when existing technological measures work? There's alternate DNS servers, VPN services, TOR bridges, obfsproxy, and shadowsocks. I've even heard that you could get pass the gfw by using a roaming sim card from hong kong.

These solutions take technical know-how to implement. And often times instructional sites, VPNs, and such solutions are also blocked because they help people engage in "cyber-crime." So the censorship is effective for >99% of the population, and if you've got one friend that knows how to get around the censorship and starts blabbing about coverups going on in your country, then they sound a lot like a nutjob. And the…

[deleted]

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

#108

Post by pintxo »

TheNorthman wrote: post #90
blattimwind wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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

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

#109

Post by [deleted] »

parsimo2010 wrote: post #60
gruez wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there even a need for this when existing technological measures work? There's alternate DNS servers, VPN services, TOR bridges, obfsproxy, and shadowsocks. I've even heard that you could get pass the gfw by using a roaming sim card from hong kong.

These solutions take technical know-how to implement. And often times instructional sites, VPNs, and such solutions are also blocked because they help people engage in "cyber-crime." So the censorship is effective for >99% of the population, and if you've got one friend that knows how to get around the censorship and starts blabbing about coverups going on in your country, then they sound a lot like a nutjob. And the…

[deleted]

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

#110

Post by kitteh »

analognoise wrote: post #104
kitteh wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It'd be better if they were transparent about it and you could see these actions clearly instead of having to glean it from a looking glass or from in country probes.

Getting direct contact about the issue directly seems very transparent to me? If you just suddenly disappeared without a note, that's one thing. "Please stop action X occurring on your network" sounds very clear and direct.

I meant why doesn't the government publish a list of IPs blocked, when it started and the reason why.

Edit: I see I'm getting downvoted here but I want to explain why I am passionate about this topic. As someone who supports network infrastructure and it's operation I'm on the hook to find out why x can't talk to y. It's a challenge when dealing with ISP/country level blocks or packet manipulation. Proving that this is something deliberate versus a legitimate broken thing is a process to go through. Not being able to tell a customer why is not a great story. Different countries have different techniques for this and over time you learn them. Seeing your packets in a traceroute going to a hop that has a DNS PTR record that says "DPI" in the name is a nice heads up to an operator to give you that sort of indication of what you're dealing with. I am aware that basically no country publishes such blocks today and ISPs that are forced to implement such blocks are usually instructed to not tell you anything about it (sometimes off the record, if you're lucky).

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