Turkey Bans Pastebin and Tinyurl

New submitter anonimim writes "Pastebin and Tinyurl have been blocked in Turkey. Pastebin was blocked last week by a court after the hacking of Turkish Information and Communications Technologies Authority (BTK). Four databases including email addresses and plain-text passwords stolen from BTK were posted to Pastebin last month, in retaliation for the blocking of Blogspot, Incisozluk (a popular Turkish community dictionary) and thousands of other websites. The more shocking ban was that of Tinyurl, a URL shortening service. Turkey currently blocks thousands of websites and is classified as one of the countries under surveillance by the 2012 Internet Enemies report (PDF) published last week by the Reporters Without Borders."

Re:Can they stop them all?

[Anonymous Coward]

Turkey has a governmental department that regulates what the imams will preach in the mosques.
The military forced out the government four times in the last sixty years, the last time was fifteen years ago.
There's literally hundreds of judgements by the European Court of Human Rights against Turkey.
There's still ongoing concerns about torture in the judicial system.
For fuck's sake, this is a country that once executed a guy for opposing a ban on a certain type of HAT.

So no, Turkey isn't "just another liberal democracy right".

Re:actually how are they blocking ?

[Archon-X]

If it's the same implementation as Turkey's (now defuct) ban YouTube, it was done on a DNS level.

Simply changing your DNS servers to anything else (Google / OpenDNS, etc) - not only do you bypass the block, but you also have reliable DNS.

Re:Who needs tiny?

[Xtifr]

That's for wimps. Badasses use Shady URLs [shadyurl.com]. I mean, how can you not feel good going to http://5z8.info/38--start.spamBot--this-ip--_s1h7hw_racist [5z8.info]

Re:Can they stop them all?

[gl4ss]

turkey won't be the next full member. other countries are joining in the meantime, but turkeys process has been stalled for as long as I can remember reading the news, it's one step forward two steps back. they're a nato member though since forever, which had made them a probable eu joiner.

and if they became a full member of EU, their government would be fucked, their military top personnel would get insta-sued, their imaams and christian clerics would be free to preach whatever the fuck they want, booze would be available at every street corner with hookers&blow from italy, they would have to fix their prison system and release a large bunch of guys who would proceed to sue the government straight away, they would lose tariff controlling their economy and they'd have to stop bickering with kurds, boooyahhhhhh!(they would still be able to block sites distributing copyrighted material though..).

I don't think EU member states would go as far as to provide retroactive amnesty for anyone who had been involved in the government in Turkey.. but still, preparing for turkeys eventual joining sometime in the far future creates some byro-jobs.

Re:Citation Needed

[anonimim]

According to this article [hurriyet.com.tr] from a major Turkish newspaper, related authority in charge (BTK) revised and lifted the Tinyurl.com ban today! Ban was in effect since the 1st of March, so it's probably lifted due to recent press coverage. Engelliweb includes a catalog of blocked websites in Turkey. You can check related pages for Tinyurl [engelliweb.com] and Pastebin [engelliweb.com] to confirm the bans. Linked article was from the February, when BTK databases were leaked to Pastebin. So it doesn't cover the recent events.