Turkey Has Reportedly Banned Google 531
oxide7 and a number of other readers sent word (from mostly non-authoritative sources as yet) that Turkey had imposed an indefinite ban on some Google properties. "Turkey's Telecommunications Presidency said it has banned access to many of Google IP addresses without assigning clear reasons. The statement did not confirm if the ban is temporary or permanent. Google's translation and document sharing sites have also been banned indefinitely along with YouTube and Facebook in the country. Other services such as AppEngine, FeedBurner, Analytics, etc., have also been reportedly banned." Some real-time commentary (much of it in Turkish) can be found at Twitter hashtag #TurkeyCensoringGoogle. We have noted in past years the censorious ways of Turkish courts.
Who's surprised? (Score:5, Informative)
The Turks don't want anyone to talk, write or even think about Armenians or Kurds. And they don't care for Jews all that much either.
Oh yes they did. (Score:5, Informative)
despite the cause on the surface is shown deragotary videos of kemal ataturk on youtube, nothing could justify banning analytics ips. so, in the end one of the ministers slipped the real reason - google doesnt pay tax to turkey.
there is no reason why it should either. google is a corp that is centered in america, and according to treaty to prevent double taxation, it should not pay tax here, since it pays tax in usa. so there is no legal justification for trying to tax them.
but then again, you cant expect reasoning, or, abiding by laws, from an islamist government.
Re:Flow of Information (Score:1, Informative)
Shut up, douchebag. It's the same gov't that kept military "deep state" in check, implemented many "Western" policies that EU asked for, and managed to bring the crazy inflation under control.
The recent anti-Jew theatre is getting out of hand, though. Turkey and Israel have been close trading and military allies for many years.
As Someone from Turkey there is more to it (Score:5, Informative)
Unfortunately this kind of thing happens all the time, and the government cannot do anything about it. Even the president has criticized the ban last week, but it's all up to the courts.
According to Turkish law, *any* PA can ask for a preliminary injunction to ban *any* web site. The web site has to comply within a month, otherwise TK (which is the telecomunnication authority) will have to block the web site in question. Nobody (including prime minister, or the president) cannot stop the ban (unless the website complies).
So if a person from a small town complains about a web site (for example Youtube, or Blogger), and the PA for that town finds the case worthy, he/she request a court order for the ban. This has actually happened (Blogger was banned since some bloggers published world cup matches, and the local TV stations which bought WC rights have complained).
The Google ban comes from Youtube ban. Previously they only removed youtube.com from DNS servers, but people have installed alternate DNS servers, and all was fine. Now they decided to block based on server IP, which is probably shared with other Google services as well.
Anyways they are trying to amend the law, so that this kinds of bans will be restricted (not just any random PA in any random town), but the best would be abolishing the law altogether.
Critical Thought. (Score:5, Informative)
As the Americans learned so painfully in Earth's final century...
Anyone who is thinking as they read instead of blindly ploughing through the words would have realized that Earth has not reached it's final century yet?
And it was fully sourced too..
Re:You Turkey! (Score:2, Informative)
I was going to reply that they have Eagles, but it seems they don't. They do have a fleet of Falcons [wikipedia.org] though.
Re:Correct use of "censorious?" (Score:3, Informative)
I'm not sure that's what the word means...
M-W to the rescue [merriam-webster.com]... seems to be a perfectly cromulent word :-)
Re:Connect the dots... (Score:3, Informative)
I can Karma-Whore and google for you, but you'll need to do the actual reading:
GP's Point 1 - http://news.smh.com.au/breaking-news-world/iran-inks-deal-to-send-enriched-uranium-to-turkey-20100517-v8uc.html [smh.com.au] /. post.
GP's Point 2 -
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JaiMjAULWn0&feature=player_embedded# [youtube.com]!
http://libertypundits.net/article/paid-mercenaries-on-turkish-flotilla-ship-and-more-censored-footage-of-violence/ [libertypundits.net]
http://www.haaretz.com/news/diplomacy-defense/turkish-paper-releases-censored-photos-of-beaten-israeli-commandos-1.294443 [haaretz.com]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenneth_O'Keefe [wikipedia.org]
http://trueslant.com/charlesjohnson/2010/06/06/another-cropped-reuters-photo-deletes-another-knife-and-a-pool-of-blood/ [trueslant.com]
GP's Point 3 - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israel%E2%80%93Turkey_relations [wikipedia.org]
GP's Point 4 - http://www.todayszaman.com/tz-web/columnists-164310-turkey-hamas-relations.html [todayszaman.com]
GP's Point 5 - RTFA, what we're discussing in this
If you don't see Turkish Islamist policy driving this and the bigger picture this fits into (radical Islam, oppressive regimes vs new-internet-driven-world-order, middle-east mentality and its differences from western mentality, arab nation politics, Turkey's NATO/european membership, Turkish internal right-left struggle and dirty laundry, Turkish history (murder/slaughter of 1,000,000 armenians last decade, try mentioning that on Turkish media), you're just another one of those people who just can't get geopolitics and need an oversimplified model - namely, a little demonizing circle drawn around one of the participants of an equation (typically ends being one of Iran, Al-qaeda, USA, Israel, George W, etc) with an "evil" sign pointed at it. If only the world were that simple. Fox and Al-jazeera do it equally well, depending on direction the guys with the remote wants the arrow pointed in.
I have a demonizing-circle detector. Every time I get someone draw me one (whether Erdogan from Turkey, Benjamin Netanyahu from Israel, Ismail Hanniyeh from Hammas, Al Jazeera or Fox, I immediately know I'm being told a half-truth. Big problems don't fit in little circles, and the root causes are way more complex and way more distributed.
If complexity can be equated to pain with people who can't grasp it, I'll invoke the following:
"Life is pain, your highness. Anyone who says otherwise is selling something."
Re:Flow of Information (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Flow of Information (Score:2, Informative)
Hi, I am from Turkey...
I just could not stop myself, but say that I found this comment as trolling. In almost any news I see that relates to Turkey, I see these kind of political comments that never really touch the problem mentioned in the original news. I wonder how they become 5 score comments in the end. Is Slashdot really that biased against Turkey? Or is Slashdot full of people who can't distinguish what is trolling or not?
Thanks to those posters who wrote how the legal system works in Turkey, which is the real explanation for this ban. Not the conspiracy trolling theory voted 5-score above...
Re:Flow of Information (Score:4, Informative)
Re:As Someone from Turkey there is more to it (Score:3, Informative)
Re:As Someone from Turkey there is more to it (Score:1, Informative)
I would like to confirm what stikves already mentioned: http://ekonomi.haberturk.com/teknoloji/haber/520422-google-yasaklandi-mi
In short, they have recently moved from a DNS based blocking of YouTube to an IP-based blocking. However since YouTube is sharing many of its IPs with other google services, they are running slowly or not running at all.
While I am absolutely disgusted with and ashamed of the YouTube ban, I am now also disgusted to see so many slashdotters jump onto suggesting nonsense like expelling a country from NATO/UN etc. without reading/researching properly.
As for the rise of religious fundamentalism, this is unfortunately a world-wide phenomenon. I was in the U.S. when intelligent design started to creep into school curricula. Likewise for my first few months in the U.S., I was also dumbfounded to watch the televangelists on the TV every night. The worst thing to do now is to point fingers with sensationalist news like this and jump to conclusions. It will empower the fundamentalists everywhere in the world.
Re: Turkey reportedly.... (Score:1, Informative)
I tried to read whole conversation but couldn't make it to the end because it is funny how most of you guys talk about things that you do not really know. Mostly blabbering and gossip. None of the posts related to topic of the thread and none of you even asked "why Google is censored" or contributed any thoughts.
I am Turkish and I don't support current ruling party (actually hate them for what they did to my country) but not because of reasons mentioned here. The things mentioned here are coming from biased and ignorant people in my opinion. You guys hear something from someone and believe it unconditionally. I am sure most of you think because most of the Turks are muslim, they must be Arab.
About the Google thing; a while ago, YouTube is banned in Turkey because of several videos about founder of modern Turkey posted on it. Censorship is one of many bad things done by Turkish governments in last 40 years but this last one is interesting because it is coming from a party which does not really like the founder of the secular state but they went ahead and did it because of constitution. They tried to ask Youtube to remove the videos but since Google and Youtube has no rerpresentative in Turkey so no Youtube Turks (unless if you know how to do DNS hacks).
So Google is not banned, this latest incident is completely related to this YouTube ban, communication ministry tried to make it harder to access YouTube.
On a side note, current party is elected with about 35 percent vote of the population and many of those voters did not vote for them to bring sharia, they voted because Ak Party tricked them by playing with their belief and faith. And for example USA is not more secular than Turkey because in Turkey leaders don’t have to visit bishops in church to make people believe that they are Christian (as Obama did). Oh imam and mosque in this case.
This happened before (Score:4, Informative)
Turkey was a world leading country by 15th century in mathematics, medicine, architecture, etc.
But while Europe experienced the movable type printing revolution in 15th - 16th centuries, in Muslim countries the movable type print was banned for 200 years for "moral" reason.
Certainly, as any human invention, printing was also used for producing "adult" materials. But it was also used to produce maps, textbooks, literature, etc.
So as a result the Europe moved into a modernity, but the countries, where printing was banned, stayed behind. The "moral" reasons were rather an attempt of the patriarchal leaders of society to guard their power.
In the long run this ban did not benefit the society. Nowadays many Turks have to move to Germany, Austria, etc. to find a job. This is a result of the error, which was made by the Islamic countries' society five hundred years ago.
Many medieval churches in Europe were build by architects, who learned architecture from Islam mosques' builders. We still use Arabic numerals for mathematics. But now the Islam world is well behind in technology and science, including human science.
Unfortunately they step on the same rake again, because it is not possible for culture to develop without free discussions, without free access to information.
Re:Or, put another way... (Score:3, Informative)
"And I have this terrible dread the real number who would prefer to see Islam exported by the sword is a lot closer to 50% than 1%."
That's because you're an ignorant paranoid kook, whose probably never even ventured more than a short distance away from his home town judging by the level of ignorance of the world shown.
Try travelling the world a bit, try going to some of these muslim countries, you'll soon find that there's hundreds of millions of them who are even more reasonable than you are.
You really believe that say, the US was more justified in causing the death of thousands of Iraqis than those Iraqis were killing US soldiers defending their country?
Look how it ended, the US was only able to finally cut back it's troop deployments in Iraq, when the US finally clued into the fact that the solution was to court moderate muslims to help fix their country- sure there are still attacks now, but compare Iraq now to Iraq a few years ago.
Murdering civilians doesn't work, it never has, and it never will. The only way of winning is to win the support of the general population against extremist elements, this wont work if the extremist elements are less morally corrupt than you are though and are in fact the reasonable ones.
I don't know what this coming war you're on about is, a skirmish with Iran perhaps but that's about it. You'd be better off looking to your South where Chavez is talking up the idea of building a south-south anti-Western alliance with South American and South African nations, but unfortunately I suppose that doesn't slot well into your ignorant world view, because it involves Christian, not muslim nations.
For what it's worth, here in the UK we had no problem with religious extremists either until we joined America's war, and really the only reason America had problems (i.e. 9/11) was because of it's meddling overseas in muslim nations. So much for them being interested in expansionism, they didn't actually harass Western shores until long after they got fed up of Western nations meddling on theirs. We did and still do however have a problem with Catholic extremists in the UK though- you might have heard of them, the IRA, but again, I suppose the idea of non-muslim extremists being a bigger, longer running problem hurts your world view. Those were the same Catholic extremists that your America gave refuge too and somewhat supported in their terrorist activities too by the way, all for the sake of winning votes from your Irish population.
You know, I don't disagree with your comments about political correctness often being taken too far, I agree that perhaps military action is the only solution in nations that are too far gone, and the moderates have too small amount of power to do anything as in Iran, but the rest of your viewpoint is simply based on ignorance, a lack of understanding about the world, and perhaps a bit of patriotism that blinds you to the fact that the religious majority in your nation are equally dangerous, and that your nation itself has supported extremism in Islam, Christianity and so forth over the years too.
You really want to know the best way to deal with Islam if you're still scared shitless of it despite everything I've said? Look to alternative energy, and stop consuming their oil, and watch as their oil based economies plummet such that they can't even afford to arm themselves anymore even if they wanted to. That trick will solve the old Venezuela problem for you too whilst you're at it, sorry if it doesn't involve the heavy metal and pretty explosions you were hoping for though.
Re:Flow of Information (Score:4, Informative)
No, but you're missing the point. If you're quoting Shakespeare, you would do the following
"To be or not to be..." --Hamlet, Hamlet by William Shakespeare
and not
"To be or not to be..." --Hamlet, Prince of Denmark
The first identifies it as a line said by a fictional character, and includes the actual author. The second places the fictional character of Hamlet in a non-fictional context.