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.
Crossroads (Score:4, Interesting)
This is very worrisome given that it is coming from what is supposed to be the crossroads country between the west and the middle east. If a country like Turkey is engaging in acts like this, what hope does the rest of the Middle East have?
This is not a court order by the way (Score:5, Interesting)
now, this board, which is under islamist govt's control, decided to try to tax youtube. therefore, they are trying to blackmail google by banning the ips too. the court orders are just an excuse.
im wondering which is the idiot that modded me dow (Score:3, Interesting)
im in turkey. we have an islamist government which clearly stated they are islamist, on top of us. they are engaging in innumerable ways of censorship, of this google thing, is only one of them.
their main censorship tool is attacking the media outlets which do not publish in the manner they like, with the finance ministry, which is the ministry that governs taxes. if you are such a media company, suddenly finance ministry starts to review your previous tax payments, and, without fail, comes up with a lot of fines to fine you. so high that you cant pay, and they confiscate your company. approximately 2 major media groups consisting of 2-3 major newspapers and a television channel each, have been foreclosed in this way, and have been sold to their backers by zero interest loans from government banks.
google is an outside company. they were not able to do the same thing to google. therefore, they are trying the method of banning, to subdue google.
and, to the idiot - dont use your mod points in subjects you dont know about.
Re:Flow of Information (Score:5, Interesting)
This situation is quite interesting as the majority has repeatedly elected, what is basically, an Islamist party into power. The west has made it clear they dont want the army to intervene this time, but that is the only thing that can save Turkey from the Islamists. What the hell are you supposed to do if you believe in democracy but democracy spawns people who bring it down?
Re:Flow of Information (Score:5, Interesting)
Well, the attribution for the quote was to Commissioner Pravin Lal of the UN. That position indicates someone who has earned respect of world leaders, and in that is himself a world leader.
Myself, I don't know all the members of the UN, nor all the titles within the UN. I strongly suspect most of us wouldn't. It would be easy to confuse a well written game quote, for a well written quote of a world leader. Likewise, there should be no expectation that we would all recognize every character from every video game.
Or as NATO Intelligence Chief Henry Schmit once said, "There's only a fine line between information and disinformation. We must remain diligent to the factuality of any information presented."
Re:Seriously (Score:4, Interesting)
One thing was clear though, even at that point, and that was Soviet communism was bad. You speak of Russia's allies, but many of Russia's allies didn't have a choice, they were only puppet governments for Russia. As far as dictators who kill their people go, only Hitler came close to the numbers that Stalin reached. Stalinism/Leninism was worth opposing, it was far worse than your average dictatorship. It is also understandable that NATO's main policy was to oppose the Soviets.
Re:Flow of Information (Score:0, Interesting)
Re:Or, put another way... (Score:1, Interesting)
"just sayin"
what are you "just sayinjg".
When is the last time you heard anyone calling for murder of Jews, or demonstrating to kill a book author, a colmunist or a cartoonist?
Ok, let's make fair and less islamaphobic question.
name the last 15 times you have heard anyone calling for murder of Jews, demonstrating to kill a book author, a columnist or a cartoonist?
Like you suggested, no one has that area cornered completely, but some have pretty big chunk of that corner and feel very comfortable with it.
You know, I am 'just sayin'
Cheers,
Re:Who's surprised? (Score:0, Interesting)
Turkey the police state. (Score:4, Interesting)
I thought I'd share an account of what hapened to me a couple of years ago, in Istanbul, arguably the most westernized of all of Turkey: my friend and I decided to stay at this hotel outside the center of the city, and had to take separate rooms, since we were not married. In the evening, I went to her room for a chat. After about half an hour she gets a phonecall: some guy tells her that she is not to have male visitors in her room! That's right. They have cameras in each room. Even more sadly, my turkish friend told me this as a matter of fact, "nothing to see here".
I'm not saying every hotel in Turkey is like that, but I will say this: Turkey is bad news, very fucking bad news.
IIRC, military Constitutionally allowed to coup (Score:1, Interesting)
IIRC, from my Turkish roommate in college, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk the founder of the modern Turkish state (vs. the old WWI Ottoman Empire) setup the Turkish Constitution so that the military had a right to go in and establish a coup whenever the civil government got too Islamic. Then after a reasonable amount of time the military ceded power back to a newly formed civil government. This has happened many many times in Turkish history.
This is not some South/Central American junta. No-one is electing the Generals "President for Life". The military invokes their Constitutional rights. They de-radicalize the government ("put the train back on the tracks"), and then give the government back ("let the model train run again").
Cut The Crap Please (Score:2, Interesting)
This wasn't something about, Turkish yada yada...
This something about, abusing Law for profit.
YouTube consumes too much Bandwidth.
And Privatized Turkish Telekom new owner dont' want to spend too much to increase bandwidth.
So ?
Abuse the law...
And yes. We need improved Law about issue.
And those politics.
Wake up Western, you can't always right, you can't always win....
Re:This happened before (Score:3, Interesting)
[quote]Your description of that part of the world in the 15th century is generally correct, but it would also be valid for the centuries before when it was the center of Christendom.[/quote]
Norman Davies writes in "Europe: a History" (ISBN 0-19-820171-0) about leadership of Islamic countries in all spheres of science and technology just up to 1450, when Johannes Guttenberg http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johannes_Gutenberg [wikipedia.org] invented the movable type printing.
Before this some peasants in Europe sometimes could not even find their village after selling farm products in a remote town market and had to start a new life in a new place. There were no maps on hands, they had been too expensive before printing press.
But after 1450 books, maps, pictures, etc. were sold em mass on all sorts of markets, even along roads. It was an explosion of printing.
There were negative aspects too: "adult" materials, terrible reformation wars, which were in a way a result of the best-selling Martin Luther's essays http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Luther [wikipedia.org] , etc.
But all in all it was the movable type printing Revolution, which catapulted Europe into the leadership role in the whole world.
And it is exactly what societies in such countries as Turkey, Iran, China, former USSR (partly), do not get, by prohibiting a global access to the information.
Re:Flow of Information (Score:4, Interesting)
OK, let's play!
57.4 + 46.6 = 104%. Well, what's 4% here or there? Only Allah is perfect.
Their platform is that everyone will get rich. That's not politics, that's marketing.
Wait - the largest party has the most female representatives? It's a miracle! Say... can you name any of these female representatives? What "power" do they actually wield?
Economic, yes: it's part of the "everybody gets rich" scheme. Cultural? I have no idea where you're getting that from. They tried to lift the ban on the hijab, remember? Is that the act of a party who wants the populace (not the legal system, the culture) to become less or more Islamic?
Uh... they supported the US action to depose the famously secular Saddam. Just because Bush was crazy enough to believe that a secular democracy would fill the vacuum doesn't mean anyone else was that deluded.
Uh... it's proselytising [wikipedia.org]. Thanks for asking!
You get that the AKP has to deny being a religious party so that it doesn't get banned, right? That the Constitutional Court voted 6 to 5 (1 short of the 7 needed) to disband them on that basis?
And lastly, are you familiar with the concept of taqiyya [wikipedia.org]? If not, I'd read up on it. And pay less attention to what the supporters of AKP tell you (especially in pubs) and more on what the AKP actually do.
Like, for example, what they've just done.
It happens again today (Score:4, Interesting)
Quite true. But since the invention of Copyright, Europe and most of the West have started banning the free copying and sharing of information as well.. And with the successive extensions of Copyright terms (how long until we have Perpetual Copyright?), we're caught in the same downward spiral than those countries.