15 ms·

ProtonMail blocked by Vodafone Turkey

327 points by stockmania 9y ago

jgrid007 9y ago
Things are getting worse in Turkey, but I don't think it's worth to block this service: Most of Protonmail users are familiar with VPN, TOR...
- owly 9y ago
  I disagree. I’ve recommended ProtonMail to many novice users and helped them get setup. It is so simple that I suspect many less technical users are using it in countries with oppressive regimes.
  - luxpir 9y ago
    Aren't you actually agreeing? He's saying they'll use tunneling to get around the block so they can carry on using it.
    - croshan 9y ago
      No, he's saying that some (possibly many) users know how to use the service, but not VPNs or TOR. Therefore, they are easily blocked, compared to advanced users.
      - jgrid007 9y ago
        First time I agree with somebody in internet without saying the same things It’s easy to bypass the block, even for non savvy users. They just need some help.
      - luxpir 9y ago
        Oh OK, they were disagreeing with the last part, not the main point. They both at least agree it shouldn't be blocked...
throwawan 9y ago
Misleading title: "ProtonMail is being blocked in Turkey", it's not blocked in Turkey, but by one provider - Vodafone Turkey. And for full disclosure you should mention that you work for Protonmail when you post here.
- luxpir 9y ago
  It's not fully misleading; it is blocked within the borders of Turkey. But granted, it could be improved.
- JumpCrisscross 9y ago
  > it's not blocked in Turkey, but by one provider - Vodafone Turkey Source?
  - mtmail 9y ago
    The blog post itself "we determined that protonmail.com was unreachable for both Vodafone Turkey mobile and fixed line users."
  - throwawan 9y ago
    It says in the post itself if you read it completely. You can also search Twitter: https://twitter.com/okn_plbyk/status/973911230619537408 https://twitter.com/okn_plbyk/status/973911230619537408 https://twitter.com/sahinn_oguzhan/status/974163059534106624 https://twitter.com/sahinn_oguzhan/status/974163059534106624
    - sillysaurus3 9y ago
      It's very annoying that I'm no longer allowed to upvote. Providing sources is something that should not be downvoted. Also mods, if you're reading, fuck you for revoking my upvoting privileges. I did nothing to deserve that. Especially not for three months and counting. EDIT: Just got a very interesting keybase message from a user who shares my experience. His voting privs have been revoked since 2014. Apparently I get to look forward to years of this, for reasons that were never explained at all. (I tried asking.) If you have similar stories of abuse, I encourage you to send them over to me. I've been collecting them and will hopefully write ... something. I'm not sure what, yet. All I know is that we all helped make this community what it is today, and there's nowhere else to go.
louithethrid 9y ago
I sometimes wonder, wether paranoid dictatorships could not be fooled, by automatically creating fake users in fake relationships, sending each other conspiring comments and information. That way all those secret service snoops could be kept busy chasing wild gooses, leaving the normal people they usually harass into oppossition, to go on about there lives.
- BLKNSLVR 9y ago
  So long as you're covering your tracks when creating these and using these fake accounts. Covering your tracks by using all the tools that are outlawed and detectable, thus putting a bigger target on your back. If you're going to tickle the toes of dictatorially-run law enforcement, your security had better be watertight.
  - bogle 9y ago
    It sounds like a lot of work but if you performed it from outside of the jurisdiction you'd be safe. Not your friends and family inside, though, so still better not to be identified.
- zhte415 9y ago
  Governments, armies, and interested parties, have been doing this for millenia.
ransom1538 9y ago
They recommend ProtonVPN. Does anyone know the legal ramifications of using a vpn with shared exit nodes? EG: A 'crack' squad of computer crime investigators in Jackson Mississippi track illegally uploaded content to a forum originating from ip address [39.21.2.32] (which is a VPN exit node). Unbeknownst to you that is YOUR exit node now. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/09/digital-equivalent-rumor-should-never-lead-police-raid https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/09/digital-equivalent-rum...
- nukeop 9y ago
  Why would that be any different to getting assigned somebody's previous IP address by DHCP? It's non-incriminating because it can be demonstrated you didn't control that IP during the time illegal content was uploaded.
  - ransom1538 9y ago
    True. But my general ISP dhcp'ed ip address doesn't change much AND when it does I have decent odds someone (who would do illegal uploads) wouldn't be dumb enough to do it over a non-VPNed line.
- jlgaddis 9y ago
  In these cases, a request for the identity of the account associated with $IP at $timestamp would typically receive a response such as "$IP is a shared IP address used by many different accounts simultaneously. As we do not log individual sessions at layer 4, it is impossible for us to provide you with this account information."
  - letsgetphysITal 9y ago
    Literally how Private Internet Access responded to an FBI request. Not endorsing PIA in any way, though do use the services.
Feniks 9y ago
Is this site blocked yet? Erdogan is a very bad man! And now it is. All according to keikaku.
jerheinze 9y ago
To get the Tor Browser try to download it from the official Github repository: https://github.com/thetorproject/gettorbrowser https://github.com/thetorproject/gettorbrowser Then use meek-amazon as a pluggable transport which should work.
- qwerty456127 9y ago
  AFAIK the fact of TOR usage is rather easy to detect. AFAIK (from some news here on HN) you can get SWATed and arrested for a mere suspicion (e.g a false positive by an automated traffic analysis system) of using an end-to-end encrypting messenger or even Twitter in Turkey. I doubt it is legal and safe to use TOR in such countries. We need something that is harder to detect on the client ISP side.
  - walrus01 9y ago
    it is by no means foolproof and won't get around a deep packet inspection/flow analysis system, but this is why obfsproxy exists: https://www.google.com/search?q=obfsproxy+tor&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&client=firefox-b-1 https://www.google.com/search?q=obfsproxy+tor&ie=utf-8&oe=ut...
    - jerheinze 9y ago
      But be sure not to use the default bundled obfs4 bridges, they're known.
  - jerheinze 9y ago
    > AFAIK the fact of TOR usage is rater easy to detect. That's why I said: "Then use meek-amazon as a pluggable transport which should work." meek-amazon makes your traffic look like you're talking to: > url=https://d2cly7j4zqgua7.cloudfront.net/ https://d2cly7j4zqgua7.cloudfront.net/ front=a0.awsstatic.com With the snowflake pluggable transport (only available with Linux and Mac alphas for now) the traffic looks like WebRTC. You can read more about them here: https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/doc/meek https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/doc/meek https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/doc/Snowflake https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/doc/Snowflake
qwerty456127 9y ago
In just so many countries (including those many people never know are in too) the state-led war on privacy and communication freedom is getting hotter and hotter. Some countries do it openly, some manage to look liberal until you look closer. Just try to start marketing a proprietary privacy-oriented messenger app or something like that and the intelligence guys will emerge promptly at your doorstep, demanding you to bake a backdoor in. Sad but true. I don't really know how are we (the people, who value privacy of themselves and of the others) going to win this war while keeping legal, it's an open challenge so far...
- Spooky23 9y ago
  Technolgoists need to remember that tech is nothing without law.
  - natvert 9y ago
    Lawyers and law makers need to remember technology will continually outpace them. Both in execution of ideas and in value creation.
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
    - DomreiRoam 9y ago
      Lots of our technology cannot work without the support of a complex society and I think you can't have that without court and some kind of rules. We are interdependent.
  - qwerty456127 9y ago
    > Technolgoists need to remember that tech is nothing without law. It works both ways. A law can be almost nothing without technical means to enforce it efficiently. There can be cases that make a law [almost] futile so the governments give it up. E.g. many governments tried to ban alcohol but it's so easy (yet dangerous as it can blow up and set the house on fire, especially if the cook is drunk and/or the hardware is amateur) to produce at home that fighting it seriously just doesn't seem to make any sense. Some governments have tried to ban the phalaris grass as it may contain tiny amounts of dimethyltryptamines but it just grows all over everywhere so they have given up the ban as it was almost as ridiculous as it would be to ban sand, flies or whatever this common. The problem is to invent a medium for exchanging messages that is easy to establish independently (no need for uncommon devices, no special requirements to the underlying ISP) yet very hard to detect, compromise or disrupt. This sounds like a serious challenge yet not like an entirely impossible thing provided breakthroughs in mathematics/cryptography, physics and the telecom tech still happen from time to time. Some political/economical factors may also play on our side occasionally. My hope is for the whole Internet to morph into a fully-decentralized distributed network employing DIY P2P links as its organic and vital part. Perhaps this may happen once if something is going to make classic ISPs unprofitable and stimulate growth of MESH networks with something like i2P serving as a layer connecting them in one secure and reliable global network.
pedrocr 9y ago
They couldn't have paid for better advertising than this.
tsax 9y ago
Forgive me for this n00b question, but what do you get with ProtonMail (with respect to security) that you don't get with, say, gmail?
- protonmail 9y ago
  ProtonMail team here. Here is our assessment about how ProtonMail compares to Gmail from the security/privacy perspective: https://protonmail.com/blog/protonmail-vs-gmail-security/ https://protonmail.com/blog/protonmail-vs-gmail-security/
  - bogomipz 9y ago
    >"No tracking and logging Google records literally every action done by its users. This includes your IP address, every search that you do, which emails you open, which websites you visit, and much more. ProtonMail takes the opposite approach and by default, does not monitor or record user activity, not even IP addresses." Has this been verified by an independent third party? Also how do you determine there's an issue with with IP prefixes in AS 15897 Vodaphone Turkey[1], if you don't log IP addresses? [1] https://bgpview.io/asn/15897 https://bgpview.io/asn/15897
    - Kliment 9y ago
      Not a user but I would guess follow up on user complaints
    - therein 9y ago
      They might be using some service that tries to access an endpoint of theirs from multiple AS across the world. Not sure if Catchpoint has a Vodafone TR endpoint.
    - Erlich_Bachman 9y ago
      > Has this been verified by an independent third party? For one thing, it seems to have been verified by the Turkish government, seing how gmail is not blocked, and protonmail is ;)
    - 9y ago
JepZ 9y ago
Actually, I am not sure if it wise to circumvent that block. I mean its probably as easy as typing echo "8.8.8.8" > /etc/hosts to a root shell, but since we know that in the past people have been send to prison, just because some app on their phone requested an URL from the wrong domain, I suspect that something similarly can happen to the people who try to use Proton mail. On the other hand, if everybody stops using those services, the surveillance tyrants have won...
- dsacco 9y ago
  > but since we know that in the past people have been send to prison, just because some app on their phone requested an URL from the wrong domain Do you have a citation? When did that happen?
  - batuhanw 9y ago
    It wasn't one big event that someone got arrested for using the app. It was, civil polices were arresting anyone who uses crypto-message apps like ByLock. We've seen cases where people sent to prison because they are wearing certain T-short. Really. edit links: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/sep/11/turks-detained-encrypted-bylock-messaging-app-human-rights-breached https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/sep/11/turks-detained... https://www.huffingtonpost.com/mahir-zeynalov/turkish-police-say-no-bas_b_13319222.html https://www.huffingtonpost.com/mahir-zeynalov/turkish-police...
    - fyfy18 9y ago
      Here in Lithuania (EU) you can also get in trouble for wearing the wrong t-shirt. Nazi and Soviet symbols are banned from being shown in public, and you will end up with a fine if caught with a t-shirt or bumper sticker. I believe it’s the case in a few other post-Soviet countries as well.
      - azureel 9y ago
        Here in Turkey, you can get arrested for wearing the wrong t-shirt. https://www.google.com/search?q=hero+t+shirt+antalya+arrested& https://www.google.com/search?q=hero+t+shirt+antalya+arreste...
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
tyingq 9y ago
I lived in Izmir in the 90's, and the vibe was actually fairly liberal. The locals seemed to feel pretty free, optimistic, and not overly worried about their government. Sad to see things regressing so much.
- BLKNSLVR 9y ago
  Everywhere is regressing at the moment. Brexit, US protectionism, China's a dictatorship again. It's like none of the 'leaders of the world' have read any history. Or they have, and are arrogant enough to think 'that won't happen now that I'M in charge'.
  - tyingq 9y ago
    Sure, but Turkey is a little different. It's going from, for some people "no issues, I'm influential and popular, if perhaps a little controversial", to suddenly "I'm in jail now, for probably months".
    - def_true_false 9y ago
      This is not a recent thing. Turkey has been topping the incarcerated journalists per capita list for years.
  - abrbhat 9y ago
    It could also have to do with the unprecedented means of mass surveillance available today.
  - zaarn 9y ago
    Turkey is special. They openly arrest Journalists opposing the government. Prisons in Turkey currently have the highest literacy rates in the country. People outside of Turkey who oppose Erdogan are threatened by either turkish accounts or even locals (I've seen this happening in a private whatsapp group from a school class I graduate a while ago where someone was threatened bodily harm if they did not retract statements about Erdogan) It is an authoritarian, Orwellian government out of the book.
fouc 9y ago
The picture of the monitor displaying traceroute with dirt clinging to the screen and some finger smudges and the reflection of the photographer is pretty hilarious.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
hknc 9y ago
I think they have not been blocked, rather they had an outage. https://twitter.com/ProtonMail/status/974167124892700673 https://twitter.com/ProtonMail/status/974167124892700673
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- protonmail 9y ago
  There was a brief outage, but the block in Turkey is something entirely different.
_bohm 9y ago
Probably impossible to tell, but I'm willing to bet this is related to the fact that the YPG uses ProtonMail for communications.
- protonmail 9y ago
  Is there actually a public source for this? We were not aware of this (but then again, we know almost nothing about users)
  - _bohm 9y ago
    They YPG International communications page: http://ypg-international.org/contact/ http://ypg-international.org/contact/
bogomipz 9y ago
>"Our support team first became aware of connectivity problems for Turkish ProtonMail users starting on Tuesday. After further investigation, we determined that protonmail.com was unreachable for both Vodafone Turkey mobile and fixed line users. Since then, we have also received some sporadic reports from users of other Turkish ISPs. At one point, the issue was prevalent in every single major city in Turkey. After investigating the issue along with members of the ProtonMail community in Turkey, we have confirmed this is a government-ordered block rather than a technical glitch. Internet censorship in Turkey tends to be fluid so the situation is constantly evolving" Vodaphone like every major ISP has a NOC. Did Prontomail reach out to the ISP to see if it was a routing issue? I don't see that mentioned above anywhere in the investigation methodology. How did you confirm that it was a "government-ordered block" if you only worked with "members of the ProtonMail community'?
- protonmail 9y ago
  ProtonMail is quite prevalent in Turkey and there are actually ProtonMail users who work within Vodafone Turkey, and that is how we got the confirmation.
  - bogomipz 9y ago
    So did you also contact their NOC via the handle listed for them in their RIPE routing registry entry? That's the normal protocol. Just because there's "ProtonMail users who work within Vodafone Turkey" doesn't mean they have enable level access on Vodaphone's routers.
ekianjo 9y ago
Why use protonmail instead of actual PGP that would never be blocked?
- nurettin 9y ago
  Because they would have to maintain their own key pair which could easily be taken by chance, unlike a trusted third party who is in another country's jurisdiction and is unwilling to just hand them over. Not everything is software.
- zaarn 9y ago
  Protonmail makes it easy. Even today using PGP Email is not something I would trust the average computer user to pull off and pull it off safely
  - ekianjo 9y ago
    > Even today using PGP Email is not something I would trust the average computer user to pull off and pull it off safely I'd argue it is not that complicated once you take the time to explain how it works.
    - zaarn 9y ago
      If I have to explain it, it's already a lost cause. If you want any hope of PGP being widespread, or any cryptosystem for that matter, you need to have it being self-explanatory. Someone at the age of 90 should be able to download the software, click a "yes" button and secure their mail. Secure E-Mail must be as DAU-proof as possible.
2aa07e2 9y ago
Just a note to anybody who wants to try their free tier, they add a tapatalk-like message in every e-mail you send ('this email was sent via protonmail' or something in that nature), unless you pay. It's not like the e-mail receivers couldn't already see the host, but I was unaware of that when I was registering an account, so I'm calling that a dark pattern. At least it was easy to self-delete it afterwards.
- tonyztan 9y ago
  It is just a default email signature that you can see in your compose window and delete manually if you do not wish to pay.
  - 2aa07e2 9y ago
    No, it is not. It is not related to the signature settings anymore.
    - tjomk 9y ago
      It is. They add it automatically on mobile but you can delete it. And it's never on desktop. Just tried to send from both clients and didn't have any extra added to the message.
      - 2aa07e2 9y ago
        When was your account created? Mine was created in the previous 30 days. I even had brought up the browser's dev tools and tried to disable that setting but with no luck. It might had been a A/B test, or specific only to my country, but the point remains that it was a separate setting than the signature and it was impossible to disable it without paying. On desktop.
        tonyztan 9y ago
        Are you still able to manually delete the added line from your email messages at compose time?
rocky1138 9y ago
A totalitarian government blocking a service is a good sign they are unable to break its security and thus use it as a surveillance tool. It's a great advertisement for ProtonMail.
- gukov 9y ago
  Unable to break its security or the service's owners are not cooperating.
  - jerrre 9y ago
    Unable to break its security AND the service's owners are not cooperating maybe even
- KMag 9y ago
  Vizzini: ... they block it because they can break it and want all of their adversaries to think it's unbreakable... Now, a clever man would put the poison into his own goblet, because he would know that only a great fool would reach for what he was given. I’m not a great fool, so I can clearly not choose the wine in front of you.
azureel 9y ago
A small note (though it may be unrelated), some ip address ranges are not accessible from Vodafone TR (3G/4G) connections. 216.239.36.219 <- For example this address returns "HTTP 504" from Vodafone. There are some other addresses like this which happen to be around, randomly. So it may be a misconfiguration on Vodafone TR Network, routers or such thing. Sample curl output below. $ time curl -vki 216.239.36.219 * rebuilt url to: 216.239.36.219/ * trying 216.239.36.219... * connected to 216.239.36.219 (216.239.36.219) port 80 (#0) > get / http/1.1 > host: 216.239.36.219 > user-agent: curl/7.47.0 > accept: */* > < http/1.1 504 gateway time-out http/1.1 504 gateway time-out < server: webproxy/1.0 pre-alpha server: webproxy/1.0 pre-alpha < date: mon, 08 may 2017 07:04:23 gmt date: mon, 08 may 2017 07:04:23 gmt < content-length: 0 content-length: 0 < connection: keep-alive connection: keep-alive < * connection #0 to host 216.239.36.219 left intact real 0m10.909s user 0m0.012s sys 0m0.004s $ curl -vki http://84.19.190.203/ * trying 84.19.190.203... * connected to 84.19.190.203 (84.19.190.203) port 80 (#0) > get / http/1.1 > host: 84.19.190.203 > user-agent: curl/7.47.0 > accept: */* > < http/1.1 504 gateway time-out http/1.1 504 gateway time-out < server: webproxy/1.0 pre-alpha server: webproxy/1.0 pre-alpha < date: mon, 08 may 2017 07:56:58 gmt date: mon, 08 may 2017 07:56:58 gmt < content-length: 0 content-length: 0 < connection: keep-alive connection: keep-alive < * connection #0 to host 84.19.190.203 left intact $
genericacct 9y ago
TBH vodafone blocks just about anything in italy. i have to click thre warnings to download binaries from bitbucket for example. Their secure browsing "service" is half a scam.
gkya 9y ago
Seemingly this is nothing to do with the government, as controlling through the website of the insitution where there's a form to check if a given domain is blocked [1], it tells me that there are "no blocks on this domain", i.e. protonmail.com. You can try instead wikipedia.org to see what it looks like when a domain is blocked. [1] http://internet.btk.gov.tr/sitesorgu/ http://internet.btk.gov.tr/sitesorgu/
Aissen 9y ago
It's time. Browser should integrate hardened-DNS features. TLS 1.3 is just a stepping stone. Local DNS resolver, DNSSEC, DNS over DTLS/HTTPS/QUIC (pick one) and of course, Tor.
Tepix 9y ago
When I visited Egypt a three years ago I was using Vodafone to connect to my mail server. They performed a MITM attack and stripped the STARTTLS from the SMTP dialogue. I had to switch to the legacy SSL port 465 for SMTP to use encryption.
aiCeivi9 9y ago
So I wonder - does that have any negative impact on vodafone brand in other countries?
ssijak 9y ago
For the love of everything, I can`t remember the name and can`t find/google it, of a private mail service also from Switzerland. It had simpler marketing and UX, maybe not even web clients and had some affiliate program and I think the name started with "m". Help?
- ssijak 9y ago
  Found it! Migadu.
- bogle 9y ago
  If we're starting a list of possible alternatives then Tutanota is good (Germany IIRC).
DyslexicAtheist 9y ago
(x) Don't use public DNS such as google (or the DNS provided by your ISP such as Vodafone). Look for an anonymous non-logging service preferably outside Turkey (x) Tor is is one of many layers for anonymity to circumvent blocking. Don't "just" install the tor-browser or tor-proxy on your system but run tails from a clean machine. If you know what you're doing you might want to help others by isolating whole networks using PORTALofPi to guarantee no DNS-leaks. Pro-Tip: build a LEDE based device and share your design with the community so others can benefit and give you input (because you will make mistakes). (x) Don't use mobile internet if you don't know what you're doing (those who know what they're doing don't use mobile phones for critical comms) (x) Use burner phones with anonymous SIM cards and aggressive hardware based compartmentalization. Check this article for good OpSec/compartmentalization tips (second half of the article after the discussion on browsers that looks dated). (x) Despite popular claim VPNs don't give you anonymity. They shift the trust from your ISP to the VPN. If you pay for a VPN service by credit card consider what the payment provider knows about you. see https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/vodafone-blocks-protonmail-turkey-joachim-bauernberger/ https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/vodafone-blocks-protonmail-tu...
- gruez 9y ago
  >Look for an anonymous non-logging service preferably outside Turkey what's the point? DNS isn't encrypted, so it's trivial to log/intercept your queries.
  - PTRFRLL 9y ago
    You could run DNSCrypt and use a server that supports it: https://servers.opennic.org/ https://servers.opennic.org/
  - martimarkov 9y ago
    I guess it's harder to monitor all DNS traffic in the entire country than asking the ISP to give records for a specific user.
  - ju-st 9y ago
    DNS over VPN is encrypted (at least until the VPN server)
kerberos84 9y ago
What I don't understand is if it is a "government-ordered block", which wouldn't be surprising, why is it limited to Vodafone users? I would expect half-government hold TTNet and even Turkcell to block as well.
- rowyourboat 9y ago
  It isn't limited to Vodafone. The original headline is "ProtonMail is being blocked in Turkey. Here’s how to bypass Turkey’s online censorship."
  - kerberos84 9y ago
    I read the article not only the title. i would also recommend you to read the article.
    - rowyourboat 9y ago
      I did read the article before answering you. I referred you to the original headline because it better fits the article's contents, not because I stopped reading there.
      - kerberos84 8y ago
        In the article they are stating that Vodafone users can not access to proton services. They have written they have seen some complaints from other ISP users as well but there is neither a statement nor a clue that it is blocked by other ISPs as well. After all, the fact is that it is not blocked by other ISPs only by Vodafone.
giancarlostoro 9y ago
Another public DNS is available from the IPredator.se guys as well. Forgot what page on their site they had it under though. They also run some tor nodes. They're one of my favorite VPN services. The staff is very welcoming on their IRC server too.
philfrasty 9y ago
Anyone know why they have this weird onion url „protonirockerxow.onion“? Kinda hard to remember.
- detaro 9y ago
  You can't just choose your onion url, since it's directly derived from your key, and that's probably the best they found (if you want to have any choice at all, you have to bruteforce try keys until you find one matching the pattern, so everything more than choosing a few letters gets difficult/expensive)
  - philfrasty 9y ago
    thanks so much for taking the time to explain!
notaplumber 9y ago
It should be blocked by all public mailing lists too, quite frankly. Its users cannot be bothered configure the webmail properly and often send atrociously formatted replies to threads.
atomkarinca 9y ago
the suggestions that are proposed are: - use a vpn >> when protonmail is unreachable, protonvpn is unreachable, too. so not so useful. - switch dns >> till when? till it`s not only a dns problem anymore. by the looks of it, it`s not gonna take much time. - use tor >> tor is blocked, too. so... yeah. i guess when people in the us or europe think about censorship, then think of this romantic blocking of some services, and if you`re tech-savvy enough, you can bypass anything. no you can`t (at least i can`t). it`s turkey now, it`s gonna be universal tomorrow.
medyadaily 9y ago
Turkey is the largest prison for journalists they recently started a genocide on Kurdish population in Syria in city of afrin and they are hugely cracking down on anyone who is criticisizing their war on kurdish civilians. Unfortunately they have extended their censorship outside turkey and even in United States to get Kurdish accounts banned for criticizing erdogan's government

327 points by stockmania 9y ago

Things are getting worse in Turkey, but I don't think it's worth to block this service: Most of Protonmail users are familiar with VPN, TOR...

owly 9y ago
I disagree. I’ve recommended ProtonMail to many novice users and helped them get setup. It is so simple that I suspect many less technical users are using it in countries with oppressive regimes.
- luxpir 9y ago
  Aren't you actually agreeing? He's saying they'll use tunneling to get around the block so they can carry on using it.
  - croshan 9y ago
    No, he's saying that some (possibly many) users know how to use the service, but not VPNs or TOR. Therefore, they are easily blocked, compared to advanced users.
    - jgrid007 9y ago
      First time I agree with somebody in internet without saying the same things It’s easy to bypass the block, even for non savvy users. They just need some help.
    - luxpir 9y ago
      Oh OK, they were disagreeing with the last part, not the main point. They both at least agree it shouldn't be blocked...

throwawan 9y ago

Misleading title: "ProtonMail is being blocked in Turkey", it's not blocked in Turkey, but by one provider - Vodafone Turkey. And for full disclosure you should mention that you work for Protonmail when you post here.

luxpir 9y ago
It's not fully misleading; it is blocked within the borders of Turkey. But granted, it could be improved.
JumpCrisscross 9y ago
> it's not blocked in Turkey, but by one provider - Vodafone Turkey Source?
- mtmail 9y ago
  The blog post itself "we determined that protonmail.com was unreachable for both Vodafone Turkey mobile and fixed line users."
- throwawan 9y ago
  It says in the post itself if you read it completely. You can also search Twitter: https://twitter.com/okn_plbyk/status/973911230619537408 https://twitter.com/okn_plbyk/status/973911230619537408 https://twitter.com/sahinn_oguzhan/status/974163059534106624 https://twitter.com/sahinn_oguzhan/status/974163059534106624
  - sillysaurus3 9y ago
    It's very annoying that I'm no longer allowed to upvote. Providing sources is something that should not be downvoted. Also mods, if you're reading, fuck you for revoking my upvoting privileges. I did nothing to deserve that. Especially not for three months and counting. EDIT: Just got a very interesting keybase message from a user who shares my experience. His voting privs have been revoked since 2014. Apparently I get to look forward to years of this, for reasons that were never explained at all. (I tried asking.) If you have similar stories of abuse, I encourage you to send them over to me. I've been collecting them and will hopefully write ... something. I'm not sure what, yet. All I know is that we all helped make this community what it is today, and there's nowhere else to go.

louithethrid 9y ago

I sometimes wonder, wether paranoid dictatorships could not be fooled, by automatically creating fake users in fake relationships, sending each other conspiring comments and information. That way all those secret service snoops could be kept busy chasing wild gooses, leaving the normal people they usually harass into oppossition, to go on about there lives.

BLKNSLVR 9y ago
So long as you're covering your tracks when creating these and using these fake accounts. Covering your tracks by using all the tools that are outlawed and detectable, thus putting a bigger target on your back. If you're going to tickle the toes of dictatorially-run law enforcement, your security had better be watertight.
- bogle 9y ago
  It sounds like a lot of work but if you performed it from outside of the jurisdiction you'd be safe. Not your friends and family inside, though, so still better not to be identified.
zhte415 9y ago
Governments, armies, and interested parties, have been doing this for millenia.

ransom1538 9y ago

They recommend ProtonVPN. Does anyone know the legal ramifications of using a vpn with shared exit nodes? EG: A 'crack' squad of computer crime investigators in Jackson Mississippi track illegally uploaded content to a forum originating from ip address [39.21.2.32] (which is a VPN exit node). Unbeknownst to you that is YOUR exit node now. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/09/digital-equivalent-rumor-should-never-lead-police-raid https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/09/digital-equivalent-rum...

nukeop 9y ago
Why would that be any different to getting assigned somebody's previous IP address by DHCP? It's non-incriminating because it can be demonstrated you didn't control that IP during the time illegal content was uploaded.
- ransom1538 9y ago
  True. But my general ISP dhcp'ed ip address doesn't change much AND when it does I have decent odds someone (who would do illegal uploads) wouldn't be dumb enough to do it over a non-VPNed line.
jlgaddis 9y ago
In these cases, a request for the identity of the account associated with $IP at $timestamp would typically receive a response such as "$IP is a shared IP address used by many different accounts simultaneously. As we do not log individual sessions at layer 4, it is impossible for us to provide you with this account information."
- letsgetphysITal 9y ago
  Literally how Private Internet Access responded to an FBI request. Not endorsing PIA in any way, though do use the services.

Feniks 9y ago

Is this site blocked yet? Erdogan is a very bad man! And now it is. All according to keikaku.

jerheinze 9y ago

To get the Tor Browser try to download it from the official Github repository: https://github.com/thetorproject/gettorbrowser https://github.com/thetorproject/gettorbrowser Then use meek-amazon as a pluggable transport which should work.

qwerty456127 9y ago
AFAIK the fact of TOR usage is rather easy to detect. AFAIK (from some news here on HN) you can get SWATed and arrested for a mere suspicion (e.g a false positive by an automated traffic analysis system) of using an end-to-end encrypting messenger or even Twitter in Turkey. I doubt it is legal and safe to use TOR in such countries. We need something that is harder to detect on the client ISP side.
- walrus01 9y ago
  it is by no means foolproof and won't get around a deep packet inspection/flow analysis system, but this is why obfsproxy exists: https://www.google.com/search?q=obfsproxy+tor&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&client=firefox-b-1 https://www.google.com/search?q=obfsproxy+tor&ie=utf-8&oe=ut...
  - jerheinze 9y ago
    But be sure not to use the default bundled obfs4 bridges, they're known.
- jerheinze 9y ago
  > AFAIK the fact of TOR usage is rater easy to detect. That's why I said: "Then use meek-amazon as a pluggable transport which should work." meek-amazon makes your traffic look like you're talking to: > url=https://d2cly7j4zqgua7.cloudfront.net/ https://d2cly7j4zqgua7.cloudfront.net/ front=a0.awsstatic.com With the snowflake pluggable transport (only available with Linux and Mac alphas for now) the traffic looks like WebRTC. You can read more about them here: https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/doc/meek https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/doc/meek https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/doc/Snowflake https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/doc/Snowflake

qwerty456127 9y ago

In just so many countries (including those many people never know are in too) the state-led war on privacy and communication freedom is getting hotter and hotter. Some countries do it openly, some manage to look liberal until you look closer. Just try to start marketing a proprietary privacy-oriented messenger app or something like that and the intelligence guys will emerge promptly at your doorstep, demanding you to bake a backdoor in. Sad but true. I don't really know how are we (the people, who value privacy of themselves and of the others) going to win this war while keeping legal, it's an open challenge so far...

Spooky23 9y ago
Technolgoists need to remember that tech is nothing without law.
- natvert 9y ago
  Lawyers and law makers need to remember technology will continually outpace them. Both in execution of ideas and in value creation.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - DomreiRoam 9y ago
    Lots of our technology cannot work without the support of a complex society and I think you can't have that without court and some kind of rules. We are interdependent.
- qwerty456127 9y ago
  > Technolgoists need to remember that tech is nothing without law. It works both ways. A law can be almost nothing without technical means to enforce it efficiently. There can be cases that make a law [almost] futile so the governments give it up. E.g. many governments tried to ban alcohol but it's so easy (yet dangerous as it can blow up and set the house on fire, especially if the cook is drunk and/or the hardware is amateur) to produce at home that fighting it seriously just doesn't seem to make any sense. Some governments have tried to ban the phalaris grass as it may contain tiny amounts of dimethyltryptamines but it just grows all over everywhere so they have given up the ban as it was almost as ridiculous as it would be to ban sand, flies or whatever this common. The problem is to invent a medium for exchanging messages that is easy to establish independently (no need for uncommon devices, no special requirements to the underlying ISP) yet very hard to detect, compromise or disrupt. This sounds like a serious challenge yet not like an entirely impossible thing provided breakthroughs in mathematics/cryptography, physics and the telecom tech still happen from time to time. Some political/economical factors may also play on our side occasionally. My hope is for the whole Internet to morph into a fully-decentralized distributed network employing DIY P2P links as its organic and vital part. Perhaps this may happen once if something is going to make classic ISPs unprofitable and stimulate growth of MESH networks with something like i2P serving as a layer connecting them in one secure and reliable global network.

pedrocr 9y ago

They couldn't have paid for better advertising than this.

tsax 9y ago

Forgive me for this n00b question, but what do you get with ProtonMail (with respect to security) that you don't get with, say, gmail?

protonmail 9y ago
ProtonMail team here. Here is our assessment about how ProtonMail compares to Gmail from the security/privacy perspective: https://protonmail.com/blog/protonmail-vs-gmail-security/ https://protonmail.com/blog/protonmail-vs-gmail-security/
- bogomipz 9y ago
  >"No tracking and logging Google records literally every action done by its users. This includes your IP address, every search that you do, which emails you open, which websites you visit, and much more. ProtonMail takes the opposite approach and by default, does not monitor or record user activity, not even IP addresses." Has this been verified by an independent third party? Also how do you determine there's an issue with with IP prefixes in AS 15897 Vodaphone Turkey[1], if you don't log IP addresses? [1] https://bgpview.io/asn/15897 https://bgpview.io/asn/15897
  - Kliment 9y ago
    Not a user but I would guess follow up on user complaints
  - therein 9y ago
    They might be using some service that tries to access an endpoint of theirs from multiple AS across the world. Not sure if Catchpoint has a Vodafone TR endpoint.
  - Erlich_Bachman 9y ago
    > Has this been verified by an independent third party? For one thing, it seems to have been verified by the Turkish government, seing how gmail is not blocked, and protonmail is ;)
  - 9y ago

JepZ 9y ago

Actually, I am not sure if it wise to circumvent that block. I mean its probably as easy as typing echo "8.8.8.8" > /etc/hosts to a root shell, but since we know that in the past people have been send to prison, just because some app on their phone requested an URL from the wrong domain, I suspect that something similarly can happen to the people who try to use Proton mail. On the other hand, if everybody stops using those services, the surveillance tyrants have won...

dsacco 9y ago
> but since we know that in the past people have been send to prison, just because some app on their phone requested an URL from the wrong domain Do you have a citation? When did that happen?
- batuhanw 9y ago
  It wasn't one big event that someone got arrested for using the app. It was, civil polices were arresting anyone who uses crypto-message apps like ByLock. We've seen cases where people sent to prison because they are wearing certain T-short. Really. edit links: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/sep/11/turks-detained-encrypted-bylock-messaging-app-human-rights-breached https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/sep/11/turks-detained... https://www.huffingtonpost.com/mahir-zeynalov/turkish-police-say-no-bas_b_13319222.html https://www.huffingtonpost.com/mahir-zeynalov/turkish-police...
  - fyfy18 9y ago
    Here in Lithuania (EU) you can also get in trouble for wearing the wrong t-shirt. Nazi and Soviet symbols are banned from being shown in public, and you will end up with a fine if caught with a t-shirt or bumper sticker. I believe it’s the case in a few other post-Soviet countries as well.
    - azureel 9y ago
      Here in Turkey, you can get arrested for wearing the wrong t-shirt. https://www.google.com/search?q=hero+t+shirt+antalya+arrested& https://www.google.com/search?q=hero+t+shirt+antalya+arreste...

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

tyingq 9y ago

I lived in Izmir in the 90's, and the vibe was actually fairly liberal. The locals seemed to feel pretty free, optimistic, and not overly worried about their government. Sad to see things regressing so much.

BLKNSLVR 9y ago
Everywhere is regressing at the moment. Brexit, US protectionism, China's a dictatorship again. It's like none of the 'leaders of the world' have read any history. Or they have, and are arrogant enough to think 'that won't happen now that I'M in charge'.
- tyingq 9y ago
  Sure, but Turkey is a little different. It's going from, for some people "no issues, I'm influential and popular, if perhaps a little controversial", to suddenly "I'm in jail now, for probably months".
  - def_true_false 9y ago
    This is not a recent thing. Turkey has been topping the incarcerated journalists per capita list for years.
- abrbhat 9y ago
  It could also have to do with the unprecedented means of mass surveillance available today.
- zaarn 9y ago
  Turkey is special. They openly arrest Journalists opposing the government. Prisons in Turkey currently have the highest literacy rates in the country. People outside of Turkey who oppose Erdogan are threatened by either turkish accounts or even locals (I've seen this happening in a private whatsapp group from a school class I graduate a while ago where someone was threatened bodily harm if they did not retract statements about Erdogan) It is an authoritarian, Orwellian government out of the book.

fouc 9y ago

The picture of the monitor displaying traceroute with dirt clinging to the screen and some finger smudges and the reflection of the photographer is pretty hilarious.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

hknc 9y ago

I think they have not been blocked, rather they had an outage. https://twitter.com/ProtonMail/status/974167124892700673 https://twitter.com/ProtonMail/status/974167124892700673

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
protonmail 9y ago
There was a brief outage, but the block in Turkey is something entirely different.

_bohm 9y ago

Probably impossible to tell, but I'm willing to bet this is related to the fact that the YPG uses ProtonMail for communications.

protonmail 9y ago
Is there actually a public source for this? We were not aware of this (but then again, we know almost nothing about users)
- _bohm 9y ago
  They YPG International communications page: http://ypg-international.org/contact/ http://ypg-international.org/contact/

bogomipz 9y ago

>"Our support team first became aware of connectivity problems for Turkish ProtonMail users starting on Tuesday. After further investigation, we determined that protonmail.com was unreachable for both Vodafone Turkey mobile and fixed line users. Since then, we have also received some sporadic reports from users of other Turkish ISPs. At one point, the issue was prevalent in every single major city in Turkey. After investigating the issue along with members of the ProtonMail community in Turkey, we have confirmed this is a government-ordered block rather than a technical glitch. Internet censorship in Turkey tends to be fluid so the situation is constantly evolving" Vodaphone like every major ISP has a NOC. Did Prontomail reach out to the ISP to see if it was a routing issue? I don't see that mentioned above anywhere in the investigation methodology. How did you confirm that it was a "government-ordered block" if you only worked with "members of the ProtonMail community'?

protonmail 9y ago
ProtonMail is quite prevalent in Turkey and there are actually ProtonMail users who work within Vodafone Turkey, and that is how we got the confirmation.
- bogomipz 9y ago
  So did you also contact their NOC via the handle listed for them in their RIPE routing registry entry? That's the normal protocol. Just because there's "ProtonMail users who work within Vodafone Turkey" doesn't mean they have enable level access on Vodaphone's routers.

ekianjo 9y ago

Why use protonmail instead of actual PGP that would never be blocked?

nurettin 9y ago
Because they would have to maintain their own key pair which could easily be taken by chance, unlike a trusted third party who is in another country's jurisdiction and is unwilling to just hand them over. Not everything is software.
zaarn 9y ago
Protonmail makes it easy. Even today using PGP Email is not something I would trust the average computer user to pull off and pull it off safely
- ekianjo 9y ago
  > Even today using PGP Email is not something I would trust the average computer user to pull off and pull it off safely I'd argue it is not that complicated once you take the time to explain how it works.
  - zaarn 9y ago
    If I have to explain it, it's already a lost cause. If you want any hope of PGP being widespread, or any cryptosystem for that matter, you need to have it being self-explanatory. Someone at the age of 90 should be able to download the software, click a "yes" button and secure their mail. Secure E-Mail must be as DAU-proof as possible.

2aa07e2 9y ago

Just a note to anybody who wants to try their free tier, they add a tapatalk-like message in every e-mail you send ('this email was sent via protonmail' or something in that nature), unless you pay. It's not like the e-mail receivers couldn't already see the host, but I was unaware of that when I was registering an account, so I'm calling that a dark pattern. At least it was easy to self-delete it afterwards.

tonyztan 9y ago
It is just a default email signature that you can see in your compose window and delete manually if you do not wish to pay.
- 2aa07e2 9y ago
  No, it is not. It is not related to the signature settings anymore.
  - tjomk 9y ago
    It is. They add it automatically on mobile but you can delete it. And it's never on desktop. Just tried to send from both clients and didn't have any extra added to the message.
    - 2aa07e2 9y ago
      When was your account created? Mine was created in the previous 30 days. I even had brought up the browser's dev tools and tried to disable that setting but with no luck. It might had been a A/B test, or specific only to my country, but the point remains that it was a separate setting than the signature and it was impossible to disable it without paying. On desktop.
      - tonyztan 9y ago
        Are you still able to manually delete the added line from your email messages at compose time?

rocky1138 9y ago

A totalitarian government blocking a service is a good sign they are unable to break its security and thus use it as a surveillance tool. It's a great advertisement for ProtonMail.

gukov 9y ago
Unable to break its security or the service's owners are not cooperating.
- jerrre 9y ago
  Unable to break its security AND the service's owners are not cooperating maybe even
KMag 9y ago
Vizzini: ... they block it because they can break it and want all of their adversaries to think it's unbreakable... Now, a clever man would put the poison into his own goblet, because he would know that only a great fool would reach for what he was given. I’m not a great fool, so I can clearly not choose the wine in front of you.

azureel 9y ago

A small note (though it may be unrelated), some ip address ranges are not accessible from Vodafone TR (3G/4G) connections. 216.239.36.219 <- For example this address returns "HTTP 504" from Vodafone. There are some other addresses like this which happen to be around, randomly. So it may be a misconfiguration on Vodafone TR Network, routers or such thing. Sample curl output below. $ time curl -vki 216.239.36.219 * rebuilt url to: 216.239.36.219/ * trying 216.239.36.219... * connected to 216.239.36.219 (216.239.36.219) port 80 (#0) > get / http/1.1 > host: 216.239.36.219 > user-agent: curl/7.47.0 > accept: */* > < http/1.1 504 gateway time-out http/1.1 504 gateway time-out < server: webproxy/1.0 pre-alpha server: webproxy/1.0 pre-alpha < date: mon, 08 may 2017 07:04:23 gmt date: mon, 08 may 2017 07:04:23 gmt < content-length: 0 content-length: 0 < connection: keep-alive connection: keep-alive < * connection #0 to host 216.239.36.219 left intact real 0m10.909s user 0m0.012s sys 0m0.004s $ curl -vki http://84.19.190.203/ * trying 84.19.190.203... * connected to 84.19.190.203 (84.19.190.203) port 80 (#0) > get / http/1.1 > host: 84.19.190.203 > user-agent: curl/7.47.0 > accept: */* > < http/1.1 504 gateway time-out http/1.1 504 gateway time-out < server: webproxy/1.0 pre-alpha server: webproxy/1.0 pre-alpha < date: mon, 08 may 2017 07:56:58 gmt date: mon, 08 may 2017 07:56:58 gmt < content-length: 0 content-length: 0 < connection: keep-alive connection: keep-alive < * connection #0 to host 84.19.190.203 left intact $

genericacct 9y ago

TBH vodafone blocks just about anything in italy. i have to click thre warnings to download binaries from bitbucket for example. Their secure browsing "service" is half a scam.

gkya 9y ago

Seemingly this is nothing to do with the government, as controlling through the website of the insitution where there's a form to check if a given domain is blocked [1], it tells me that there are "no blocks on this domain", i.e. protonmail.com. You can try instead wikipedia.org to see what it looks like when a domain is blocked. [1] http://internet.btk.gov.tr/sitesorgu/ http://internet.btk.gov.tr/sitesorgu/

Aissen 9y ago

It's time. Browser should integrate hardened-DNS features. TLS 1.3 is just a stepping stone. Local DNS resolver, DNSSEC, DNS over DTLS/HTTPS/QUIC (pick one) and of course, Tor.

Tepix 9y ago

When I visited Egypt a three years ago I was using Vodafone to connect to my mail server. They performed a MITM attack and stripped the STARTTLS from the SMTP dialogue. I had to switch to the legacy SSL port 465 for SMTP to use encryption.

aiCeivi9 9y ago

So I wonder - does that have any negative impact on vodafone brand in other countries?

ssijak 9y ago

For the love of everything, I can`t remember the name and can`t find/google it, of a private mail service also from Switzerland. It had simpler marketing and UX, maybe not even web clients and had some affiliate program and I think the name started with "m". Help?

ssijak 9y ago
Found it! Migadu.
bogle 9y ago
If we're starting a list of possible alternatives then Tutanota is good (Germany IIRC).

DyslexicAtheist 9y ago

(x) Don't use public DNS such as google (or the DNS provided by your ISP such as Vodafone). Look for an anonymous non-logging service preferably outside Turkey (x) Tor is is one of many layers for anonymity to circumvent blocking. Don't "just" install the tor-browser or tor-proxy on your system but run tails from a clean machine. If you know what you're doing you might want to help others by isolating whole networks using PORTALofPi to guarantee no DNS-leaks. Pro-Tip: build a LEDE based device and share your design with the community so others can benefit and give you input (because you will make mistakes). (x) Don't use mobile internet if you don't know what you're doing (those who know what they're doing don't use mobile phones for critical comms) (x) Use burner phones with anonymous SIM cards and aggressive hardware based compartmentalization. Check this article for good OpSec/compartmentalization tips (second half of the article after the discussion on browsers that looks dated). (x) Despite popular claim VPNs don't give you anonymity. They shift the trust from your ISP to the VPN. If you pay for a VPN service by credit card consider what the payment provider knows about you. see https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/vodafone-blocks-protonmail-turkey-joachim-bauernberger/ https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/vodafone-blocks-protonmail-tu...

gruez 9y ago
>Look for an anonymous non-logging service preferably outside Turkey what's the point? DNS isn't encrypted, so it's trivial to log/intercept your queries.
- PTRFRLL 9y ago
  You could run DNSCrypt and use a server that supports it: https://servers.opennic.org/ https://servers.opennic.org/
- martimarkov 9y ago
  I guess it's harder to monitor all DNS traffic in the entire country than asking the ISP to give records for a specific user.
- ju-st 9y ago
  DNS over VPN is encrypted (at least until the VPN server)

kerberos84 9y ago

What I don't understand is if it is a "government-ordered block", which wouldn't be surprising, why is it limited to Vodafone users? I would expect half-government hold TTNet and even Turkcell to block as well.

rowyourboat 9y ago
It isn't limited to Vodafone. The original headline is "ProtonMail is being blocked in Turkey. Here’s how to bypass Turkey’s online censorship."
- kerberos84 9y ago
  I read the article not only the title. i would also recommend you to read the article.
  - rowyourboat 9y ago
    I did read the article before answering you. I referred you to the original headline because it better fits the article's contents, not because I stopped reading there.
    - kerberos84 8y ago
      In the article they are stating that Vodafone users can not access to proton services. They have written they have seen some complaints from other ISP users as well but there is neither a statement nor a clue that it is blocked by other ISPs as well. After all, the fact is that it is not blocked by other ISPs only by Vodafone.

giancarlostoro 9y ago

Another public DNS is available from the IPredator.se guys as well. Forgot what page on their site they had it under though. They also run some tor nodes. They're one of my favorite VPN services. The staff is very welcoming on their IRC server too.

philfrasty 9y ago

Anyone know why they have this weird onion url „protonirockerxow.onion“? Kinda hard to remember.

detaro 9y ago
You can't just choose your onion url, since it's directly derived from your key, and that's probably the best they found (if you want to have any choice at all, you have to bruteforce try keys until you find one matching the pattern, so everything more than choosing a few letters gets difficult/expensive)
- philfrasty 9y ago
  thanks so much for taking the time to explain!

notaplumber 9y ago

It should be blocked by all public mailing lists too, quite frankly. Its users cannot be bothered configure the webmail properly and often send atrociously formatted replies to threads.

atomkarinca 9y ago

the suggestions that are proposed are: - use a vpn >> when protonmail is unreachable, protonvpn is unreachable, too. so not so useful. - switch dns >> till when? till it`s not only a dns problem anymore. by the looks of it, it`s not gonna take much time. - use tor >> tor is blocked, too. so... yeah. i guess when people in the us or europe think about censorship, then think of this romantic blocking of some services, and if you`re tech-savvy enough, you can bypass anything. no you can`t (at least i can`t). it`s turkey now, it`s gonna be universal tomorrow.

medyadaily 9y ago

Turkey is the largest prison for journalists they recently started a genocide on Kurdish population in Syria in city of afrin and they are hugely cracking down on anyone who is criticisizing their war on kurdish civilians. Unfortunately they have extended their censorship outside turkey and even in United States to get Kurdish accounts banned for criticizing erdogan's government