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Wikipedia blocked in Turkey

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Re: Wikipedia blocked in Turkey

#51

Post by throwaway290417 »

StavrosK wrote: post #23

I'm assuming Tor circumvents the ban, correct? I'm going to tell all my Turkish friends to install Tor and signal, and be sad that Turkey has reached this point.

AFAIK, Tor is blockable because the list of relays is public, and accesses may invite scrutiny from the authorities. This is a dictator who's reportedly already imprisoned thousands of common people.

What I do is buy inexpensive server time from common providers in US or Europe, run a SOCKS tunnel over ssh to that server, and bypass blocks. It'll appear to be like any other SSH access.

If I need to post something to a website that should not be tracked back to my own address or my server address, I run tor daemon on the server and use it as a second SOCKS proxy to proxy the requests the server is forwarding.

I'm not in Turkey but I'm in a country that's taking an authoritarian turn and may become like Turkey in 5 to 10 years. Good idea to keep all the tools and know-how ready now, and start covering tracks early.

Re: Wikipedia blocked in Turkey

#52

Post by briandear »

RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote: post #7

I think 2016 will go down as the high water mark for a global Internet. I see a lot of countries looking at the success of China in keeping political control, and the failure of Egypt, Tunisia, etc where the open Internet was used to overthrow the regime and deciding that allowing an open, free internet is not in their best interests. If you think that Western, liberal democracies are exempt from this, just look at t…

I think it's cyclical-- remember the original consumer internet was based on portals such as MiniTel, CompuServe, AOL, Prodigy, then the portal concept shifted to a search/Google based "portal" as people wanted content access outside of the curated portal content.

Walled garden devices are pretty irrelevant though because unless that wall blocks the internet, there is little effect. Current walled gardens are about application security and not about actual content-- the most locked down iPhone can still access the open internet -- so device walled gardening has nothing to do with information access generally.

Also the obsession with "stopping fake news" coming from the American left is what's causing Google and Facebook to respond -- they couldn't care less about fake news -- they are responding to market pressures. Google and Facebook aren't leading the charge against fake news in the US -- leftist activists are the ones screaming the loudest because they are still fuming about Trump.

In Europe, its governments that are pressuring companies to censor things -- for example the so-called right to be forgotten. Governments are the problem not the companies -- at least in Europe.

Why would Facebook or Google care about fake news? They don't -- until a major portion of their constituencies start howling about it. Fakebook and Google weren't unilaterally concerned about content veracity -- until a large segment of people started complaining about it.

Re: Wikipedia blocked in Turkey

#53

Post by a3_nm »

adtac wrote: post #10

https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Data_dump_torrents#English_W... A data dump of all English Wikipedia articles as a torrent. In case you are not able to access that, here's the direct link: https://itorrents.org/torrent/6434C646E33D02F3CDCB9C15F9DF11... On a side note, I think it's fantastic that we have the entire Wikipedia, possibly the greatest effort towards organizing the world's information, at our fingertips.

Further, there are good open-source solutions to read these dumps offline. For instance Kiwix http://www.kiwix.org/ which has a dedicated reader application but also an HTTP server (very useful if you want to run a local mirror), and Aard Dict on Android http://aarddict.org/

Re: Wikipedia blocked in Turkey

#54

Post by rectang »

thinknot wrote: post #49

>People in the West need to wake up and do their due diligence on Erdogan's regime. There's some seriously scary stuff happening because of this guy. Honest question, why should the west care about every single problem that happens anywhere in the world? Why should we spend billions in wars, shed lots of our own blood, etc? Haven't we had enough of that?

We can "care" yet not "shed lots of our own blood".

Military-intervention-yes-or-no is a completely inappropriate model for the relationship between any given western country and Turkey.

Re: Wikipedia blocked in Turkey

#55

Post by pizza »

beloch wrote: post #31

I'm a canuck who has worked with Turks and has visited Turkey. They're a wonderful people from a beautiful country with a real problem of a person in power. Turkey is almost entirely Muslim, yet they produce alcohol and tolerate its consumption within their borders, even by their own people. Let that fact sink in for a moment. Erdogan is subverting the premier secular democracy of the Islamic world, but nobody seems…

FWIW, here is a map of US military bases in the region https://www.antiwar.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/1.-u...

Re: Wikipedia blocked in Turkey

#56

Post by candiodari »

kakamba wrote: post #22

As suggested by others, it's a court order. Turkish officials demanded a few things from wikipedia. The main item was to remove all content where Turkey is shown supporting ISIS, but they didn't receive a response, and the repercussion was blocking access nationwide.

In case anyone doesn't know, Erdogan is enriching himself and his family by having Daesh/ISIS/Islamic state deliver oil to him at bargain prices and selling it, mostly within Turkey:

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/wikileak...

(and Google for it, there is a lot of proof of this)

So let's stop pretending that this is done due to justice or even legal "right". This is being done to hide the crimes of the people in power. In this case, yes, crimes, specifically the government selectively applying the laws, corruption, and the like.

It is not being done for justice, to protect anyone's reputation from falsehoods, or ... it's just being done to hide crimes by the government.

Re: Wikipedia blocked in Turkey

#57

Post by politicalthrow »

Curnee wrote: post #43
beloch wrote: post #31

I'm a canuck who has worked with Turks and has visited Turkey. They're a wonderful people from a beautiful country with a real problem of a person in power. Turkey is almost entirely Muslim, yet they produce alcohol and tolerate its consumption within their borders, even by their own people. Let that fact sink in for a moment. Erdogan is subverting the premier secular democracy of the Islamic world, but nobody seems…

I play video games from a young Turkish woman. She goes to gigs, nightclubs, drinks and socialises. She hits on guys and they hit on her. She is indistinguishable from any western 20something. I was on a voice call with her the night of the supposed coup, and listened to her and her family angrily lemmenting the administration. It seemed even on the night of they knew something was fishy. She lives in Istanbul, and i…

Let me see if I can follow the logic.

There are people in turkey that are more western.

These people would leave turkey if possible, but they can't.

This is making turkey less western?

Wouldn't that have the opposite effect? The west is generally responsible for the brain drain in less successful countries. Throwing borders up will keep those people who share our views in those countries. It's a fair bet that those people will be the force for good change in their governments more likely within their country than outside it.

Re: Wikipedia blocked in Turkey

#58

Post by jerheinze »

ykler wrote: post #38
jerheinze wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yup, censorship is now a global trend. We shouldn't forget that it also happens in many Western countries such as Denmark, Finland, France, ... https://explorer.ooni.torproject.org/world/ And if we look in particular at government censorship of Wikipedia or some articles in it we find quiet a few Western countries https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_censorship_of_Wikip...

I don't understand what the "anomalies" this site detects in Denmark, Finland, and France represent, but the site itself says that they don't necessarily represent censorship and that it has only confirmed censorship in the following 12 countries: Russia, China, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, India, Indonesia, Greece, Sudan, Belgium, Cyprus and Korea.

The map has "Confirmed censorship cases" and Denmark, Finland and France, ... all fit there. For Denmark for example:

https://explorer.ooni.torproject.org/country/DK

They're blocking http://thepiratebay.org, that's straight up censorship.

Re: Wikipedia blocked in Turkey

#59

Post by lubonay »

beloch wrote: post #31

I'm a canuck who has worked with Turks and has visited Turkey. They're a wonderful people from a beautiful country with a real problem of a person in power. Turkey is almost entirely Muslim, yet they produce alcohol and tolerate its consumption within their borders, even by their own people. Let that fact sink in for a moment. Erdogan is subverting the premier secular democracy of the Islamic world, but nobody seems…

Isn't it kinda undemocratic for "the West" to go in and overthrow an, ironically enough, democratically elected dictator?

Re: Wikipedia blocked in Turkey

#60

Post by StavrosK »

throwaway290417 wrote: post #51
StavrosK wrote: post #23

I'm assuming Tor circumvents the ban, correct? I'm going to tell all my Turkish friends to install Tor and signal, and be sad that Turkey has reached this point.

AFAIK, Tor is blockable because the list of relays is public, and accesses may invite scrutiny from the authorities. This is a dictator who's reportedly already imprisoned thousands of common people. What I do is buy inexpensive server time from common providers in US or Europe, run a SOCKS tunnel over ssh to that server, and bypass blocks. It'll appear to be like any other SSH access. If I need to post something to…

That's good, but it's way beyond the reach of the average user :/ It's terrible that the world is moving to that direction of complete censorship, but it doesn't look like there's much technologists can do. Politicians only do what people tolerate, and it looks like people will tolerate a lot of censorship for even the illusion of security...
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