Turkey Heightens Twitter Censorship with Mandated IP Blocking 102
The Net may have briefly routed around Turkish prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdoan's DNS-based anti-Twitter censorship, but the minister's next move has been to mandate that Turkish ISPs block Twitter's assigned IP addresses. Reports Ars Technica: " This move essentially erases Twitter from the Internet within Turkey—at least to those people who don’t have access to SMS messaging, a foreign virtual private network or Web proxy service, or the Tor anonymizing network.
'We can confirm that Turkey is now blocking the IP addresses of Twitter after the previous DNS blocking technique proved ineffective,' said Doug Madory, of the Internet monitoring company Renesys, in an e-mail to Ars. A Turkish government webpage shows that there is an IP address block order in effect for 199.16.156.6, the primary IP address for twitter.com."
Re:Gee.. Dadaist Reprise (Score:1)
Turkey heightens your desire to sleep in your armchair Thanksgiving afternoon, overdone, it can be colon blocking.
L-tryptophan may have briefly routed around your uvula in a gravy basted MSG based anti-somniferal sponsorship but the
gizzards next move has been to marinate with the Turkeys DNA to block carbohydrates assigned synaptic addresses. Reports Gordon Ramsay.
This move essentially erases the nutritional value from the gizzard within Turkey at least to those p
Whack-a-mole (Score:4, Interesting)
And now, if Twitter wants to, it can make Turkey play whack-a-mole by moving IPs every time one gets blocked...
Re:Whack-a-mole (Score:5, Insightful)
And now, if Twitter wants to, it can make Turkey play whack-a-mole by moving IPs every time one gets blocked...
Perhaps someone can persuade Twitter to get a cloudflare account, and use GeoDNS to send Turkey users to some IP addresses shared by a large number of legitimate websites, in order to maximize the amount of collateral damage Turkey will inflict if it keeps attempting to ban Twitter by blocking IP addresses.
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How much the cloudflare folks are paying you ??
Nothing. I just happen to know that Cloudflare run a freemium proxy-based CDN service. There are of course other proxy-based CDNs they could use, where their site would share IP addresses with hundreds or thousands of other major websites such as CNN, Disney, etc.
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I don't think Erdogan cares about collateral damage.
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Erdogan doesn't really give a fuck if you block cnn, bbc and others.
for him it would be a benefit.
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I am not an expert, but my understanding of GeoDNS is that you would still have to own those IP addresses (at least in Turkey) to make that feasible. It doesn't seem like it would be that easy to clobber legitimate website's IP address.
They'll get right on that, I'm sure (Score:2)
Paying to evade political censorship is every corporation's favorite thing to do.
Good luck with that. (Score:3)
Remember, if they outlaw Twitter, only outlaws (and the Turkish President... And... Okay, just about everyone) will have Tweets!
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Those who refuse to learn (Score:5, Insightful)
Cue the reverse proxy mirror sites in 3...2...1
Re:Those who refuse to learn (Score:4, Informative)
The Turkish PM is a fucking imbecile (Score:5, Informative)
As well as being corrupt as all hell hes trying to stop people talking about it in the most clown-fuck stupid way. Mr. Recep Tayyip Erdogan I am embarrassed to be a part of the same species as you.
Re:The Turkish PM is a fucking imbecile (Score:5, Interesting)
And he rules the most advanced part of the Middle East. Besides tour groups carefully shepherded around the Valley of Kings by Egyptian soldiers Turkey is the one part of the area that tourists actually want to go to. Great job destroying your one decent source of revenue. Erdogan seems intent on undoing the work of Kemal Ataturk and bringing back the seventh century.
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no one would invite you anyways heebrewstein.
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You could pay me to want to do pretty much anything as long as I don't have to actually do them to prove I want to do them.
Re:The Turkish PM is a fucking imbecile (Score:4, Insightful)
Erh... no. Turkey was way more "western" shortly after Ataturk turned it towards the west than it is now after a few years of rule from this old, backwards man. He pretty much did everything in his power to turn back time in Turkey, undoing so much progress that it hurts to watch how this beautiful and so promising country has to suffer from that regime.
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What's a "real Turk"? The Bosporus version of a "real Scotsman"?
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Communist, Islamist... there is no difference in practical terms. They pray (or not) to different gods and they talk about different things but the end result for the "citizen" is pretty much indistinguishable.
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That may be, but he is PM, isn't he? And don't be surprised if he gets reelected. He has plenty of supporters. There are growing numbers of people in Europe with views similar to his.
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Communism is the dictatorship of the proletariat, democracy is the dictatorship of the proles.
Sadly I don't really have a better idea for a government. Except maybe that we should put "you have to be at least THIS intelligent to vote" signs in front of election booths, similar to amusement rides and height.
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I'm a human being and I resent being lumped together with something like that! I kindly ask you to take that statement back!
Hello Recep, meet Tor (Score:3)
What does he think he's going to achieve with that? More people will get smarter on the internet and in the end, his state's ability to spy on its own citizens will suffer.
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WEll he's got to do something, hasn't he? Otherwise he'll be seen to be doing nothing.
Re:Hello Recep, meet Tor (Score:5, Insightful)
Well he's got to do something, hasn't he? Otherwise more people would hear the corruption allegations.
Because that's the actual reason for the twitter ban. Twitter has been used time and again to publish various recordings of phone calls Erdogan allegedly made concerning how to move money "out of the way". Of course he's not really fond of those being published and circulated.
Maybe he should ask Mrs. Streisand how trying to silence stuff worked for her.
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So if the people says we gotta kill dem jews then the government should refurnish some shower rooms and stock up on poison gas.
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Source [stargazete.com], google-translated:
The people asked for the ministry that on twitter, laws are broken (insults, privacy laws etc).
Twitter was contacted by the ministry and did nothing, so a court ordered that the only way to preserve Turkeys peoples right is to block twitter.
This is not how the internet works. You don't get to dictate what a service provided by a company located in another country does or does not offer. And the sooner your realise that your futile attempts to "erase" said service from "your internet" by various blocking methods, the faster you stop making a moron deserving utter humiliation out of yourself.
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"You don't get to dictate what a service provided by a company located in another country does or does not offer. "
This privilege is reserved for the French, who with much better technology have been equally unable to make Net censorship work.
Re:Censorship requested by people (Score:4, Funny)
This is not how the internet works. You don't get to dictate what a service provided by a company located in another country does or does not offer. And the sooner your realise that your futile attempts to "erase" said service from "your internet" by various blocking methods, the faster you stop making a moron deserving utter humiliation out of yourself.
Are you talking to the Turks, or US Media companies?
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When you control law enforcement, it's pretty easy to terminate any domestic sources. And as China has shown, it's not difficult at all to "erase a service from internet". The tiny minority that knows how to circumvent the measures is irrelevant, as your target is the masses.
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Developing IT infrastructure is and extensive process.
Cloning it after it's been developed is cheap and fast.
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It always is, though. Back in 30s, in Stalinist USSR, before some bigwig was dragged to Lubyanka cellars only to emerge with a hole in the back of his skull, there was usually a "letter from angered workers and peasants" posted on the title page of Pravda, which demanded that the Party show strength and determination by killing the traitorous vermin etc.
IPv6 needed (Score:3)
It is clear that twitter and other such websites need to move into IPv6 space to avoid censorship. Twitter is not on IPv6 today.
ping6 -c 4 twitter.com
unknown host
Re:IPv6 needed (Score:5, Insightful)
It is just as easy to block a host by the upper 64 bits of its IPv6 address as it is to block a host by its IPv4 address. You get a bazillion addresses with your IPv6 allocation, but it's actually easier to block you on IPv6, because all your addresses are contiguous, whereas it's not unusual to have multiple discontiguous allocations of IPv4 addresses. That is one of the reasons for the big address space: To be able to give everyone more addresses than they will ever need so that nobody needs to get a second allocation, thus keeping the routing tables small.
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While that is true to some extent. It is also the amount of IPv6 addresses out there. I doubt Turkey or anyone for that matter can block all of the IPv6 address all the time. The block file would be huge if it was to be done. I am also not sure if current censorship software supports IPv6 blocking. It might do so already, but I don't keep up with those things.
Twitter can get its own /32 range. That is a lot of IPv6 addresses to have. Even if you just use one /64 block at the time. Maybe we need 512-bit IP a
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I doubt Turkey or anyone for that matter can block all of the IPv6 address all the time. The block file would be huge if it was to be done.
I think you are unfamiliar with something called summary routes. https://learningnetwork.cisco.... [cisco.com]
Re:IPv6 needed (Score:4, Insightful)
Twitter can get its own /32 range.
And that whole range can be blocked in one go.
What matters for avoiding blocks is not merely having lots of addresses, it's having lots of addresses spread out through the address space so that people can't effectively block you without either causing massive collateral damage or painstakingly hunting down your addresses.
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That would not achieve anything. IPv6 addresses are not encrypted and they can still be blocked.
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No, IPsec is an end-to-end encryption scheme. To route any packet - whatever the protocol - there needs to be addresses. If you encrypt addresses then intermediate routers cannot send your packet anywhere. So even if you are tunneling with IPsec you have to wrap it all up in another IP packet - with addresses for the router.
Not sure how you got a score of 2.
Help out their dissidents (Score:5, Informative)
Follow these directions to set up Tor obfuscated bridges and give them a path around the censorship:
https://www.torproject.org/pro... [torproject.org] (if you run Debian or Ubuntu)
https://www.torproject.org/pro... [torproject.org] (more generic instructions)
More information in this email the Tor project sent out last year, including how to make an unpublished bridge that's harder to censor:
https://lists.torproject.org/p... [torproject.org]
Democracy is like a bus trip for Erdogan (Score:5, Interesting)
King Abdullah of Jordan had this to say of Erdogan: “Erdoan once said that democracy, for him, is a bus ride,” King Abdullah said. “‘Once I get to my stop, I’m getting off,’ [Erdoan said].”
The King saw little difference between Erdogan and Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood and considered Erdogan to be a softer version of Morsi. Of Morsi, he said Morsi had no depth. Now it appears Erdogan has little depth as well, attempting to ban Twitter will only advertise it for Turks.
Right now, Erdogan is favored to win the next election, but how will the Turks feel in a few years when they realized they got off the democracy bus along with Erdogan.
Re:Democracy is like a bus trip for Erdogan (Score:4, Insightful)
but how will the Turks feel in a few years when they realized they got off the democracy bus along with Erdogan.
Sadly, they will elect him as the one who most represents their view of the world. It just shows how poorly democracy works when you have widespread ignorance. The same thing happens in the US, though we fell into a two-party system that forces people to get under the same tent.
RICH PEOPLE: Free, compulsory, quality education for the masses is for YOU, not them. Please stop fighting it. Thank you.
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You gonna cry?
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You appear to be under a naive misunderstanding that ignorant masses are something that elite does not want.
This opinion is in a direct conflict with all known human history.
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I'm suggesting that the elite are short-term thinkers and perhaps poor students of history. Thus my all-caps plea to rich people.
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Of course they aren't. Most Turks are rural people. Their main concerns are purity of Islam in Turkey and next crop season.
Euronews just aired a clip on pro-Erdogan demo, people were shown as saying to camera that Ergodan hasn't gone far enough, and that he should ban the entire internet in the country if "they continue to insult our prime minister".
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You seem really worried. Tell us why? Most Americans could give a shit.
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Erdogan's popularity is mostly due to a push back against previous governments and the tight military control of the governments, which have been repressing religious citizens and minorities. When you shake up the system seeking to reform a broken system there are a couple of results; you either get a reformer, or you get someone seeking power.
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I certainly wouldn't want to be in charge there. The past governments had a really tough task... it can't be easy to straddle the line between forcing a secular government on people and repressing them. Erdogan is no better for applying Islamic rules about speech to the entire society, even if it is what the masses demand. People forget that US "democracy" included only male landowners for the most part until much later on. It's a tough mentality to get established.
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It's not in Europe, thankfully.
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Kemalists are morons.
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Kemalists were not under any such delusion - they were gradually moving the country into Europe, not assuming that they were already there.
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Won't that block the Phosphorus (or the Hesperus, whatever it's called)?
That'll make the Black Sea overflow.
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Kemalists were not under any such delusion - they were gradually moving the country into Europe, not assuming that they were already there.
So they're responsible for the North Anatolian Fault [wikipedia.org]? Much is explained.
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To be honest. Given what's going on within the EU I wouldn't be surprised if this had come from there.
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Now? Heh, the only reason the old man dares to have some balls is that he knows that his control of the Bosporus is in this climate surrounding the Crimea is more interesting to the western nations than ever before.
Conflicted (Score:5, Funny)
Honestly not sure what to think of the guy. On the one hand he's suppressing free speech, but on the other he's blocking Twitter.
Just 199.16.156.6 blocked? (Score:2)
How quaint (Score:3)
Still trying to silence the "rumors" (my lawyer said I should call them rumors instead of what I really think of them) concerning his corruption, embezzlement and money laundering with ancient means of the average tinpot dictator?
Well, when you're backwards oriented and stuck in the past, new media are probably not going to be your forte.
It won't work (Score:1)
twitter needs to go TOR (Hidden Service) (Score:2)
Why,
the connection is encrypted, the url identifies a certain cryptographic key specifically(now anonymous onion routing sounds phoney yeah?)
And TOR is extremly hard to censor (except for Chuck Norris and North Korea.)
Also slashdot should go TOR(.onion)
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Bomb them. (Score:2)
I can't resist. Sorry. It's a 15 year anniversary for me. So don't mod me to harshly.
Bomb them. I thought you guys(American gov and their European puppet states) go bombing oppressive governments(bringing democracy).. or at LEAST sanction them into economical submission. Make couple of thousands die of hunger, bomb couple of bridges, a hospital.. a school all with depleted uranium.
Oh yeah... silly me.
Wtf (Score:1)
Isn't Turkey a member of the EU? How can one man act as a dictator and order the shutting down of political opposition voices? Or in this case, their "printing press"?
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You're confusing EU with Eurovision.
However on that note I do think that Eurovision countries do have strict policies towards open Twitter access.
Has he started screaming about the Jews again? (Score:1)
And how this is all their fault? Don't worry, he will. He always does.