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Turkey Doubles Down On Censorship With Block On VPNs, Tor (vice.com) 99

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: In what's a significant escalation in its censorship efforts, the Turkish government now wants to block the very same tools that tech-savvy citizens use to get around the government-imposed social media blocks. On Friday, the Turkish information technologies and communications authority, or BTK, ordered internet providers in the country to block Tor and several other censorship-circumvention Virtual Private Networks or VPNs, such as VPN Master, Hotspot Shield, Psiphon, Zenmate, TunnelBear, Zero, Vypr, Express, according to multiple local reports. Earlier in the day, the government had already blocked Twitter, Facebook and YouTube, and restrictions on messaging apps like WhatsApp and Skype were also reported. The independent monitoring organization TurkeyBlocks also reported throttling and other forms of censorship on Friday, linking the disruptions and blocks to the arrests of pro-Kurdish party leaders.
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Turkey Doubles Down On Censorship With Block On VPNs, Tor

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  • by Mostly a lurker ( 634878 ) on Friday November 04, 2016 @07:55PM (#53216527)

    ... but even IS confiscating all phones and computers has failed to cut the population completely from the outside world. The actions of the Turkish authorities are leading them down a slippery slope to a total, hated police-state.

    • by bloodhawk ( 813939 ) on Friday November 04, 2016 @08:14PM (#53216613)
      leading down? Turkey were way down that road long before this was announced.
    • by Anonymous Coward

      Yeah, they should do it like we do in America. Require all the big companies to scan and funnel data to the government or provide you with important pieces of information whenever you ask. Then pass some laws so they're not allowed to tell you they're providing all this information to them. Then invite all the CEOs over to the Big House for lavish parties or recruit them to be your next big political appointee. Then watch the online dissenters drop like flies.

  • Isn't it great (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Okian Warrior ( 537106 ) on Friday November 04, 2016 @07:58PM (#53216541) Homepage Journal

    Isn't it great that we live in the US, where we have freedom of the press.

    The press is free to report on any story without worrying about how the government will react. They are free to cover both sides of a story, to give a different perspective, and not have to worry about what the people in charge will do.

    The press is also free to leak information which would paint the government in a bad light, and which might uncover corruption, collusion, or crime. Additionally, the press isn't liable for publishing this information, as the pentagon papers have clearly shown. (Here I'm making a distinction between "publishing" and "getting". Just publishing, without addressing how the information was obtained, is allowed.)

    There's also a strong sense of "protect your sources" in the mainstream media, so that anyone can feel safe identifying themselves to members of the press as they pass information.

    Living in the US is great, because we have freedom of the press.

    Yay.

  • by rtb61 ( 674572 )

    Just shows what NATO has been allowed to become with Turkey as a member. Basically an empty arms and munitions sales club with total disregard for how those arms and munitions are used. Supply them to terrorists, not a problem, let sex slavers use them to take over towns and cities leading to a million rapes (let them kill themselves till they tire of it - Hillary Clinton, I guess that's what those under age sex slaves do, tire of it and them kill themselves, no excuse the corporate whore knew exactly what

    • by swb ( 14022 )

      It was a cold war Faustian bargain for several strategic advantages.

      It provided control of the Bosphorous Straight, which would have bottled up the Soviet Navy in the Black Sea, depriving them of a southern and warm water port and easy access to the Mediterranean.

      It gave the US access to an airbase at Incirlik, which allowed for electronic eavesdropping on the Soviet southern border as well as a bomber route into the southern Soviet Union.

      It put a buffer between Russia and the oil fields of the middle east.

  • We're going ahead with Thanksgiving.

  • by jonwil ( 467024 ) on Friday November 04, 2016 @08:29PM (#53216689)

    Ataturk would be spinning in his grave if he knew of the things Erdogan has done to the country.

    • by gweihir ( 88907 )

      I expect that Ataturk knew this would likely be coming and tried very hard to prevent it. He has failed, unfortunately. A modern Turkey is a thing that is not going to happen anytime soon. They are going straight back to the dark ages and a large part of the population is cheering this move onwards.

    • Well, Ataturk tried to forcibly reform Turkey into a western style country through a dictatorship. He was always in favour of democracy ... in the future, knowing full well that he hadn't built any real support amongst the people for his plan but betting that over time the culture would change. Seems like he lost that bet.

      • by Altrag ( 195300 )

        I don't really know anything about Ataturk, but just in general converting to a democracy is actually kind of hard. Telling someone that what they've known their entire life is wrong or bad can be pretty jarring, especially when their politics and religion is all mashed together to the point that democracy could almost appear to be denying God's will since many non-secular dictators tend to suggest that their power is granted to them by God.

        And even if you switch to a democracy, you immediately need to gua

  • Are they really, seriously, going to stop their people from doing ssh'ing to cloud servers? Because if they are, they won't have a high tech industry at all. I might have been in the market for freelance django developers, but not from Turkey apparently.

    • by Skapare ( 16644 )

      One can launch an instance in AWS EC2 giving it userdata to start an OpenVPN process on a different port than the default of 1194 (which they might block) without the need for SSH. If they try to block AWS HTTPS access, then they break web site control access for a few thousand Turkey-based businesses.

      • Agreed but the advantage of ssh is that it gives you a web proxy using no server configuration at all. A vanilla ubuntu t2.micro instance does the whole job out of the box.

  • Because internet is easy to block. SMS is far more difficult to block because it is used by all kinds of industrial hardware so blocking it can cause serious issues for thre regime as well. Encrypted SMS is required as a backup service.

    Fortunately the Turks can use the Signal fork Silence: https://silence.im/ [silence.im]

  • by bheerssen ( 534014 ) <bheerssen@gmail.com> on Friday November 04, 2016 @09:11PM (#53216847)

    This is what happens when a government attempts to censor the internet. First, they start with a few "objectionable" sites. Then they expand the list. Then they clamp down on the workarounds that people use to accessed banned content. At some point, they'll have to either relent or go Full DPRK and cut off the external internet entirely.

    Never go Full DPRK.

  • by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 04, 2016 @10:06PM (#53217007)

    What a farce

    • Never going to be allowed into the EU
      • by Mashiki ( 184564 )

        Considering the garbage that some current EU countries are already pushing like midnight raids on people for wrongthink, and posting "hate speech." And the media being in the tank for particular view points? Seems like they'd get along really well.

    • by johanw ( 1001493 )

      Future EU member? Not in a VERY LONG time. The nationalistic parties that are gaining support in Europe are furiously against that.

      • by Anonymous Coward

        Ah so they will be included soon. The current political climate is to do the opposite of what any nationalists want. After all, they must be wrong, they are nationalists.

  • Blocking encrypted speech over the Internet is a human rights violation. Those implementing the censorship are playing with the very rope that will hang themselves.

Don't get suckered in by the comments -- they can be terribly misleading. Debug only code. -- Dave Storer

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