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Dropbox, Google Drive, GitHub and Microsoft OneDrive Cloud Services Blocked In Turkey (turkeyblocks.org) 75

An anonymous reader quotes the censorship-monitoring site Turkey Blocks: Turkey has blocked access to Dropbox, Microsoft OneDrive and partially restricted Google Drive cloud file sharing services following the leak of a set of private emails allegedly belonging to Minister Albayrak by hacktivist group RedHack. Both Google Drive and Dropbox services were issuing SSL errors, indicating intercepted traffic at the national or ISP level. Microsoft OneDrive was also subsequently blocked off throughout Turkey.
The emails reportedly document Turkey's use of pro-government trolls on Twitter -- though ironically, it's Twitter that's now being used to document the censorship. (GitHub was also blocked last night, according to a status update from the group.) Google Drive was even displaying an official notice from the Turkish government's Information and Communication Technologies Authority describing their block as an "administration measure" -- although another Twitter update this morning says Google Drive is now back online after Google complied with the government's takedown order.
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Dropbox, Google Drive, GitHub and Microsoft OneDrive Cloud Services Blocked In Turkey

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  • Anyone surprised? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Opportunist ( 166417 ) on Sunday October 09, 2016 @01:56PM (#53042785)

    Seriously, this regime is worse than a lot of the shit that's going down in the middle east.

    Anyone still wants that country and its tinpot dictator in the EU?

    • I certainly won't be voting for any MEP that supports their entry sans régime change.

    • They serve(d) as a buffer against Russia.

      • The 1980s called. They want their enemy ideology back! Islam has replaced Communism as the main enemy of the West since at least 2000, if not 1993 (first WTC bombing). Trump has the right instincts - we need to ally w/ Russia and against all the Islamic powers across the world
        • by Maritz ( 1829006 )
          I find it hilarious that wusses like you are so scared of Islam. Why be scared of people who are quite so scared of women? Fucking hell. Grow a pair. Islam is not an existential threat and never fucking will be.
    • Re:Anyone surprised? (Score:5, Informative)

      by Zocalo ( 252965 ) on Sunday October 09, 2016 @03:23PM (#53043245) Homepage
      You think it's bad now? Having been to Turkey in September, the situation on the ground is a definitely lot more divided than people in the West might grasp from the media reports; there's clearly a huge amount of resentment and suspicion bubbling away beneath the surface, and many Turks are clearly not happy about the supression of the media and widescale arrests if you get them to talk candidly. Likewise, the effect of every arrest, sacking or suspension ripples out across family, friends and acquaintances who have no idea why that person should have been singled out by the government (or, as is now starting to become the case, denounced). To take that analogy further there's also a huge propaganda drive in progress with Turkish flags and nationalist slogans on just about every place you could put some one - hanging from windows of home and offices, bridges, on taxis and buses... any of this starting to sound scarily familiar yet?

      Meanwhile, the economy is on the verge of imploding because the big cash cow of tourism has all but collapsed. The area around the Blue Mosque and Haghia Sophia and the Topkapi in Istanbul were all but deserted in comparison with the norm and traders are getting truly desperate and are selling things at a fraction of what they normally go for just to pay the rent and put food on the table - or at least they are trying to, given that there are so few tourists to actually buy them. Wrecked lives, many social hubs like mosques, schools, media, and stores shutdown, an abundance of resentment, widespread distrust and fear, an oppresive government... Pretty much a perfect environment for any of the several militant Islamic and Kurdish groups present that might be looking to snag some new recruits. Yeah, this is going to end really well.

      As for the EU though; forget it. Turkey's progress towards EU membership requirements before the coup attempt was glacial at best - plate tectonics might actually be a better analogy - and since then it's all but stopped; Ergodan is even toying with things like bringing back the death penalty which would kill and remaining chance of membership dead in its tracks. With everything else that's going on in the EU, especially the growing pushback against globalism and immigration (both internal to the EU and from outside), it would be insane for them to even consider Turkey's membership at this point, although the flipside of that course is that's more likely to result in much tighter links between Ankara and Moscow.
      • Matches pretty closely what I've heard from others who've recently visited there. Thanks for the report.

      • by jonwil ( 467024 )

        I suspect Ataturk would be spinning in his grave if he knew some of the things Edrogen is currently doing to the country he started...

    • Anybody who knows the first thing about Turkey knows that that country does not belong in the EU - regardless of what criteria is used.

      Culturally, the Turks are not Europeans. While they may have lived close to a century of Kemalism, it neither made them a pluralistic, free-thinking society like any of the new EU entrants are, nor did it even make them - the people - less Islamic. Kemalism may have succeeded had it replaced Islam w/ some other imaginary friend that the Turks could have had. Regardless,

  • It's too easy to block stuff. What ever happened to all that *route around the damage* bullshit?

    • by Anonymous Coward

      The internet is broken
      It's too easy to block stuff. What ever happened to all that *route around the damage* bullshit?

      When every client was also a server, it routed around the damage. Now that the only servers are walled gardens - and yes, GitHub is a walled garden, it just happens to have low walls - we're all clients, and there are no servers. We recentralized everything - SMTP got replaced with Gmail/Yahoo/Microsoft's mail servers. IRC became Facebook and Snapchat and Slack.

      The internet isn't broken.

  • by GrahamJ ( 241784 ) on Sunday October 09, 2016 @02:31PM (#53042963)
    Lucky for the Turkish government there are no other ways to send documents over the internet. If only there was a way anyone could publish a document and have it visible by anyone with some sort of a document browser. If they could be linked together it would form sort of a web. That'd be awesome!
    • The one good thing about Erdogan is that his monster hard-on for social media tends to block his view of anything else on the 'Net.

      • by gtall ( 79522 )

        I couldn't read your comment without thinking of that Seinfeld scene at the beach house when Rachel sees George naked after he's been in the pool and she leaves laughing.

  • by Kunedog ( 1033226 ) on Sunday October 09, 2016 @02:33PM (#53042971)

    The emails reportedly document Turkey's use of pro-government trolls on Twitter -- though ironically, it's Twitter that's now being used to document the censorship.

    According to a Turkish journalist, Twitter is also helping out with the censorship:
    https://twitter.com/MahirZeyna... [twitter.com]

    At the request of Turkey, Twitter decided to block my Turkish account within Turkey.

    I'm not the only journalist whose Twitter feed is restricted in Turkey. The process is simple: Turkey asks, Twitter shuts down.

    And lists a few more who have been banned.

  • by Gravis Zero ( 934156 ) on Sunday October 09, 2016 @02:35PM (#53042977)

    What if we had a network of LEO satellites that replaced the internet backbone, providing high speed internet access to all people and only a handful of governments were even capable of disrupting this network? Would it be worth pissing off every nation state that censored the internet and possibly causing a war?

  • by schwit1 ( 797399 ) on Sunday October 09, 2016 @03:28PM (#53043273)
    http://www.huffingtonpost.com/... [huffingtonpost.com]

    Teachers, judges, journalists, businesspeople, bankers, shoemakers, chefs, police officers, florists... All of these people are in Turkish prisons for simply downloading ByLock. Thousands of children were left orphans in a country where child social services are broke. There are dozens of cases where entire families were jailed because of this app.

    • Maybe people will actually think of the possible consequences to others before posting their shitty "secure" messaging app, next time?

  • It's obvious Turkey should be awarded a full membership in the EU as they have proven themselves to be on the same level as the European Commission, the non-elected elitist Rulers of the union. See: European Constitution, and Dutch Ukraine Referendum.
    • We already know that Putin doesn't like the EU.

      You can crawl back into your warren now.

    • It's obvious Turkey should be awarded a full membership in the EU as they have proven themselves to be on the same level as the European Commission, the non-elected elitist Rulers of the union. See: European Constitution, and Dutch Ukraine Referendum.

      Of course. And the death penalty and holocaust denial aren't that important really...

  • Erdogan is modeling himself after something between Mussolini and Stalin, with a touch of the Shah thrown in. 'Purity' has been used for centuries as a convenient yardstick with which to measure one's competitors and find them lacking. Looks like he learned from the best at that game.

  • Google drive partially blocked? How is it possible to partially block an SSL-enabled service? And TFA shows https:/// [https] URL with HTTP responses codes, but SSL should prevent and error insertion by in-the-middle ISP.

Avoid strange women and temporary variables.

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