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Dropbox, Google Drive and Microsoft OneDrive blocked in Turkey following leaks
- rahkiin 10y agoWow, this makes doing your work suddenly a lot harder... I wonder how much this whole fiasco affects the software industry.
- 80801 10y agoIt seems like the turkish government is trying to create jobs here. Building a "nationalised turkish twitter alternative"? The way things are right now, they need a nationalized turkish github service first.
- h1d 10y agoNational Turkish government alternative may be a solution.
- tajen 10y agoActually, it's not acceptable from a national security standpoint to massively let a country's citizen flock on US services, at least as long as the NSA/CIA exists. The internet does need much more competition on all continents, including for webmail services. For example I don't see why my government (in Europe) should accept tax reports with a US email (because everybody has @gmail.com or @hotmail.com) – Why not at this point go all the way and delegate our tax collection to the American IRS... On the other hand it has to go towards privacy, choice and democracy. Obviously cutting your citizen from the international websites is the one wrong way to stem local competition...
- bbcbasic 10y agoOr a decentralized github service ;-)
- hollander 10y agoI think decentralizing government is easier and better.
- fooker 10y agoMaybe a distributed version control system to power it? ;)
- cschmittiey 10y agoYou mean something like this? https://github.com/clehner/git-ssb https://github.com/clehner/git-ssb
- tf2manu994 10y agoI think the joke was that git is distributed already
- bbcbasic 10y agoYes but I feel the joke is on me as some kind of hosting makes discovery at lot easier.
- feklar 10y agoThis is what I first think of when a government makes up excuses to block a foreign service, they are just trying to promote their own local services like Baidu/Sina Weibo in China.
- wfunction 10y agoSomeone warned about this like yesterday... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12668079 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12668079
- return0 10y agoThats was not really valid. Every site is technical. There is far more business documents in dropbox than in github. Plus the purpose of the leakers is to create disruption, and apparently it works.
- the_mitsuhiko 10y agoFor people working in a turkey as programmers I'm pretty sure not having access to GitHub and Dropbox is not great. Surely for political statements you can use any stupid host.
- lolc 10y agoIt all depends on our goals. If the intent is to get people to act, disrupting their life might just be the right thing to do. In this case I blame the Turkish government 100%, the publishers of the material 0%. The guy in question is actually shutting down opposition media in Turkey. If we expect the dissidents to not use the best-connected channels available to them for fear of inconveniencing others, we are complicit in silencing them.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- nashashmi 10y ago> disrupting their life might just be the right thing to do. Never the right thing to do. > we are complicit in silencing them. This is akin to calming a baby crying really hard for attention. I understand that you want to partake in a protest from really far away, but you must have better ways of doing so than hurting them.
- custo15 10y agoI'm in Russia, and I really scared. This is the way we go here, too.
- h1d 10y agoWhat sites are blocked?
- custo15 10y agoLot of them. You can see a list here: https://reestr.rublacklist.net/ https://reestr.rublacklist.net/
- tarancato 10y agoThat's... casinos and porn? Where do I sign up for a degeneracy-free country?
- wruza 10y agoObviously you could try Russia, it perfectly fits this attitude.
- tomatsu 10y agoCensorship is always abused. Once the infrastructure is in place, it's used for all kinds of things. They always start with the usual "think of the children" or "it's against terrorism" spiel, but sooner or later it's used to sweep anything inconvenient under the rug.
- kukx 10y agoFor those interested in what the leaked emails contained, here's a related article: http://www.dailydot.com/layer8/redhack-turkey-albayrak-censorship/ http://www.dailydot.com/layer8/redhack-turkey-albayrak-censo...
- clydethefrog 10y agoI feel this warrants an own thread or at least a discussion. "Troll armies" have been quite successful in quieting dissent the last years in Russia, Turkey and other authoritarian countries. There are theories Russia is partly responsible for the whole Trump spam on Twitter and Reddit. It's time this is taken as a serious threat instead of shrugging off "it's just the internet, 99 % of the comments is always garbage". It's part of a successful information war now when the majority of the public gets their news from social media, which take popularity as a metric for what news is important. It's propaganda behind a proxy. Edit: also shame on Twitter for complying with Turkey. The time they were proud of being part of social change like the Green Revolution in Iran seems over.
- HillRat 10y agoAnd a bit more background on RedHack and its ongoing efforts against the government: http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2016/09/turkey-redhackers-daunt-the-erdogan-family.html http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2016/09/turkey-red...
- bertan 10y agoI wonder when will the government sites be blocked? sigh
- hd4 10y agoThere needs to be some kind of new censorship metric for governments, the weaker the government, the more they try to censor and hinder use of the internet by their citizenry.
- ChoHag 10y agoThe stronger the government, the more they succeed?
- andybak 10y agoExcellent stuff. If someone can repost the email leak to every possible service they can think of - then the Turkish government will be forced to make a difficult choice between 'security concerns' and being part of the modern internet economy. I don't think they have the ability that China has to build enough services within their own boundaries to prevent the latter choice causing some pain.
- hd4 10y agoEven China can only limit their citizens access to the extent that it doesn't totally hinder economic growth. They would never be able to completely insulate themselves from the "outer" internet without massive harm to themselves, the same goes for any country in this day and age. The risk of harm will always outweigh the minimal discomfort through free and open discourse that the internet inherently brings with it.
- mediumdeviation 10y agoActually what happens in China is that homegrown tech companies will take over the market space left by Western ones, which the government is perfectly happy to let happen because 1. It keeps the tech industry domestic 2. The servers are physically inside China, guaranteeing them access to the data This is why I've always thought that the Great Firewall's purpose is not only censorship, but also a form of Internet-age protectionism.
- mtgx 10y agoYes, but they wouldn't be able to do that abruptly. That's why they are now forcing all American companies to create "joint ventures" with the local Chinese companies, which can steal the American technology, and then say 10 years later, the American part can be removed. And American companies seem to go along with it, thinking they have no choice. They do, but they're too scared to lose the Chinese market to risk anything at all, and second, they're too shortsighted to create strong alliances with their competitors to speak out against Chinese policies. Think about how Microsoft was ecstatic that Google was getting banned from China, believing this would be an "opportunity" for the company to gain market share - it wasn't. Baidu filled out all the vacuum left by Google. And now Microsoft has to accept whatever bullshit policies China throws at it, too. Instead of allying with Google and others, it thought it can pull one over Google. That's the kind of shortsighted thinking I'm talking about. If American companies want to thrive in China, they need to create strong alliances and cooperate more against bad Chinese government policies, and not sell each other out for some promised short-term gains, that they'll lose in the end to local companies anyway.
- decafbad 10y agoIt's a torrent file you damn ignorant politicians. Tell your favorite IT guys to block this : magnet:?xt=urn:btih:489b0cef1d7d49fe5ae2ae8cc2f0708b8286cbb3&dn=All+mail+Including+Spam+and+Trash.rar
- wruza 10y ago176/354. Hmm, it is pretty popular, will seed until 10.0.
- Svenskunganka 10y agoYeah it's more popular than I thought it would be. Currently seeding it with my 1Gbit which is maxed out at ~112MB/sec, and looking at the peers there are people from all over the world that are grabbing it. Either there are lots of VPN users in the swarm or people are very interested in reading what the dump contains. Hopefully we'll see some more revalations in the upcoming days, I am worried about the path Turkey is going but in the end it is the Turkish citizens that decide.
- trashcanaccount 10y agoI'm one that doesn't care what it contains, but want to help keep it available for those who do care. I typically just seed linux isos and other free software, but when there are leaks or other things that people care about I'll chip in too. I don't have 1 Gbps, so thanks for providing that bandwidth to the swarm, even if it's only for a short amount of time.
- yak0 10y agothanks idiot now they will block ycombinator
- jacquesm 10y agoAdded another seed. 11G, that's quite the archive. The more exposure this gets the better.
- 10y ago
- 0x0 10y agoSomeone on Reddit highlighted that the block seems to key off of the SSL SNI header, regardless of which IP you try to connect to. There must be some Deep Packet Inspection going on here, then? https://www.reddit.com/r/europe/comments/56h0s3/they_just_blocked_dropbox_in_turkey/d8jfvw5 https://www.reddit.com/r/europe/comments/56h0s3/they_just_bl... Is the blocking able to handle stuff like fragrouter where the TCP stream is broken down into 1byte payload packets?
- nikcub 10y agoWe started seeing more sophisticated DPI capabilities after the Feb '14 internet regulations[0] that required ISPs to block by URL and content strings IMO blocking so many sites so broadly is a sign that their DPI is failing, because their preference seems to be to block as narrowly as possible because of negative economic effects. [0] http://aa.com.tr/en/turkey/turkey-s-general-assembly-ratifies-internet-bill/179203 http://aa.com.tr/en/turkey/turkey-s-general-assembly-ratifie...
- hueving 10y agoWith ssl the best they can do is this host level blocking unless they perform mitm attacks.
- metachris 10y ago> unless they perform mitm attacks Which any state-sponsored actor can easily do, of course.
- MichaelGG 10y agoPlease tell me how Turkey is going to MITM Google on a recurring basis, enough to implement filtering.
- bumblebeard 10y agoBy using a CA they control to generate a fake certificate for Google like they've already "accidentally" done: http://arstechnica.com/security/2013/01/turkish-government-agency-spoofed-google-certificate-accidentally/ http://arstechnica.com/security/2013/01/turkish-government-a...
- batuhanicoz 10y agoThis is so annoying for us. I'm not using Dropbox, Google Drive or OneDrive but GitHub is the tool we use the most as a software agency. We've set-up a VPN server for our team for the moment. Only good thing coming from this is that I've discovered a software called Pritunl today which made setting up the VPN pretty easy.
- fixxer 10y agoWe feel for you! Those DDOS attacks a couple years ago against Github were only intermittent, but more than enough to annoy the shit out of me.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- subliminalpanda 10y agoStreisand [https://github.com/jlund/streisand https://github.com/jlund/streisand] works quite well too.
- hueving 10y agoIf you can access github...
- subliminalpanda 10y agoTor
- batuhanicoz 10y agoWe'll, most people I know in Turkey already uses ZenMate on their browsers. It doesn't help in this situation since all these "apps" are also installed software so you need a VPN installed to route every connection for the computer.
- batuhanicoz 10y agoI've actually looked for this and couldn't find it. I should've looked at my starts on GitHub. Pritunl was too easy but I'll try this for my personal needs. :) Thanks for the link.
- Raed667 10y agoWhen blocking do they display a state issued message like "This website has been blocked for X and Y reasons" (like in KSA) Or do they just 404 it, like they used to do in Tunisia back in the days of censorship?
- beyti 10y agoNo message, just not responding.
- Raed667 10y agoDoes using a VPN put people under any kind of threat like in the UAE?
- beyti 10y agoTill today, I've never heard anyone sued over a situation like using vpn but I'm sure we'll see that in not so distant future. For almost a year, I've been forced to use vpn at least couple of times a month for a similar problem.
- singularity2001 10y agoGlad to hear that you live in a country where people generally have to be sued in order to be punished.
- beyti 10y agoTo be honest, for a couple of years, "justice" is not a thing in Turkey sadly. If you become a target against government for any reason at all, you'll get sued for an absurd claim, taken into prison till the law case to be handled which will not be lasted for years. There are dozens of examples of the scenario above including mostly journalists, activists, military personnel etc. To describe how serious this is let me give an example: I'm arguing my dad for him to not share his political messages via facebook from his account. It is that paranoid you've become that you fear for a simple fb message, you can lose your parents.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- CSDude 10y agoI am sad to say it but Github is also blocked.
- detay 10y agoBeing an IT worker in Turkey is horribly hard.
- throwaway98237 10y agoAnd this is why the web should be decentralized. To be clear, not so we can access centralized services (Dropbox, Google Drive, and MS OneDrive), but so an entire country can't have it's access to the Internet so easily censored / blocked. This has happened like, a thousand times already, but I guess, like Ebola until it hits the U.S.A. hard enough we're gonna just keep on reading about it in the news with some fascination but otherwise not caring to act.
- bogomipz 10y agoCould you elaborate on what that decentralized architecture might look like? P2P? IPFS?
- throwaway98237 10y agoI've given this tons of thought, and to be honest, haven't hit on a solution that I think would be a fix-it-all solution. Some thoughts though. a) "Private" neighborhood mesh networks should be more heavily utilized. They would be "private" from the rest of the Internet, but "public" in as much as they are community based / owned. b) We should admit that cryptography is here to stay, and work with that assumption. End-to-end encryption doesn't automatically provide 100% anonymity. The traffic movement can still be traced. This is much like a car that is being followed by law enforcement from one private residence to another. Law enforcement doesn't yet know what is going on in either residence or in the car, but can still do there job, and eventually law enforcement can target a weak-point in the activities that does not rely on encryption, such as talking to neighbors, turning suspects into cooperating witnesses, or investigating legal activities such as bank statements. My point is, encryption is here to stay, and if good citizens can't use it, whatever, "criminals" (and political dissidents and victims of domestic violence, etc.) will use it. Additionally, in my mind, encryption should fall under the protection provided by the second amendment. It's important to remember that the second amendment was meant to allow citizens to arm themselves to protect themselves against the government in times of war. It was not meant to allow for folksy looking guns to go hunting for Bambi. It might sound like I'm going on a crazy tangent, but consider what a decentralized web requires. It requires it's constituent parts to be equally robust. If they are not equally robust then there will quickly be a "winner takes all" shuffling of the lines of communication. If your local network is not robust, you're not going to use it for banking, health care, government communication, etc. So, a decentralized web will be a "confederacy" of networks, each of which can choose to be equally robust in terms of network speed, capacity, and security. It isn't necessary that each is equal, but each must be allowed to be so if so desired. c) Between local or regional networks a federal network would provide much the same purpose as the federal highway system currently does for car traffic. I say this to mean the same purpose both as relates to 1) physical movement, 2) freedom to execute such physical movement, and 3) legally enforcing certain rights and restrictions as relates to such traffic. 1) The federated networks work provide physical infrastructure for the traffic and provide financial and administrative mechanisms to make such traffic a reality. 2) The federated network would politically / legally enforce the equal rights of individuals belonging to regional / confederate members to participate in taking advantage of the federal network. 3) The federated network would enforce laws and regulations on the "restrictions" sides of things as well, such as "no illicit" packages. One difference between the real world highway system and what I'm describing here that is of interest is the potential for overlapping boundaries of the smaller (confederate) members. So, provided there is "region a", "region b", "region c", and the "federated network", "region b" might overlap some with "region a" and some with "region c", such that an individual in "region a" could send a package to "region c" either via the "federated network" or via "region b", provided the individual is fine with the terms set by "region b". d) Provided you're working within the framework described above, I guess there will be P2P, IPFS, and other protocols. So, I suggesting that a major component that is missing is the communities, the goverment components. You can come up with all the protocols you want, but until they are required by the governments we legitimize, then they are not going to change society. So, in summary, it's not a technical solution we need, it's a political.
- bogomipz 10y agoI am curious and maybe someone form Turkey could say, does the government inform people of these service disruptions? I mean in addition to the economic impact from loss of productivity there is the loss of time by everyone trying to troubleshoot what they may think is "their technical problem" which is in fact an issue intentionally created at the state level.
- hrgeek 10y agoAny context on the why of those blocks? I've heard some of the news of the situation in Turkey lately, but the article does not talks about why would they block those services now...