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Access to Wikipedia restored in Turkey after more than two and a half years
- tomerbd 7y agoThe people of Turkey have voted for him right? He improved their economic situation enormously, this is democracy, you get who you vote for.
- toyg 7y agoThe regularity of Turkish elections is... disputed, to say the least. Before and after Erdogan.
- aerodog 7y agoReally? Who says this?
- lostlogin 7y agoNames and addresses? Edit: In case it is not clear, this is a (poor taste) joke. The track record for beating those who dissent even when outside of Turkey is well established.
- woodandsteel 7y agoOne way to make elections less free and fair is to cut off access to information from the opposition, and one way of doing this is to cut off access to Wikipedia. Is it your opinion that the government was right to do this?
- lostlogin 7y agoIt’s not clear. The elections were widely reported to be fraudulent and voter intimidation and violence were widely reported. A meaningful portion of the world’s imprisoned reporters are in Turkey. It is trivial to find articles and reports on this.
- decafbad 7y agoHe has half of the country's full support. I can easily see that.
- SahAssar 7y ago> I can easily see that. How? By what methods are you measuring that?
- mengibar10 7y agoand you can say that while Erdogan's party lost all local elections couple of months ago in all major cities like Ankara, Istanbul?
- lostlogin 7y ago> It is trivial to find articles and reports on this. I’ll link to the Wiki, as that seems right. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018_Turkish_presidential_election#Controversies https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018_Turkish_presidential_el...
- mengibar10 7y agoWhat you're trying to claim is ludicrous. He won the presidential elections by a far margin of 22 percent points however in local elections his party lost by only about 0.16 percent points (48.77% vs 48.61%). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_Turkish_local_elections https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_Turkish_local_elections You are entitled to have your own opinion, not to the facts.
- lostlogin 7y agoAnd the violence and voter intimidation? I don’t understand what you are saying I’m wrong about. I’m stating that fraud, violence and intimidation maintain Erdogan’s power. Edit: My link was to the 2018 presidential election, yours is to the more recent 2019 elections. Edit 2: I’m not sure what you find reassuring about the 2019 elections - is that the link you intended to post? The bit titled “Controversies and issues” is completely terrible.
- woodandsteel 7y agoExcept lately the economy has been getting much worse. This is a regular pattern with right-wing populist governments. When they get into power they institute a set of economic policies that lead to wide-spread prosperity in the short term, but in the long-term are a disaster. As far as elections go, the government pretends to be in favor of free and fair elections, but its political philosophy is a set of arguments as to why they are a terrible idea and ought to be eliminated. Which is just what the Ergogan goverment has been attempting to do in a step-by-step fashion.
- AnimalMuppet 7y ago> This is a regular pattern with right-wing populist governments. Left-wing populist governments have been known to do that, too. And left-wing populist governments have also been known to place a thumb on the scales of elections, in order to make sure that they come out "correctly".
- woodandsteel 7y agoI agree, these are also often problems with left-wing populist governments. The reason I was talking about right-wing populist governments is that is what Turkey has.
- thrwaway69 7y agoCan you tell me how you classify right wing and left wing?
- woodandsteel 7y agoLike many things in the area of political philosophy, the distinction is an inexact one. But roughly speaking, right-wing political philosophies stress ethnicity, traditional culture and usually religion, whereas left-wing political philosophies are universalist and based on Enlightement philosphy. Also left-wing philosophy is socialist, whereas right-wing tends to be crony capitalism.
- thenewnewguy 7y agoIgnoring widespread belief that the Turkish elections were less than fair, this kind of sentiment about politicians always surprises me. If I vote for a candidate why am I required to forever support every thing they do? I can vote for someone and still disagree (even strongly) with some of their decisions.
- int_19h 7y agoThe majority shouldn't get to arbitrarily trample the rights of the minority.
- Twixes 7y agoWell… There's this one example from the 1930s where the people got who they voted for and it turned out horribly… In an unprecedented way, really. So being elected does not automatically mean being a righteous ruler. Although of course in that case there's no other way as to campaign for righteousness. Coups sponsored from abroad rarely turn out well for the people.
- brenden2 7y agoI wonder what will happen (politically) in countries that engage in mass Internet censorship when SpaceX's Starlink constellation goes GA. I've always believed (perhaps naively) that the Internet is a great equalizer for information. Free (as in freedom) and unfettered Internet access seems like one of the few things that could make it incredible difficult for bad and oppressive regimes to operate anywhere in the world. If I were a billionaire philanthropist I would try and find ways to get as much Internet connectivity into the hands of impoverished people.
- navaati 7y agoAs a billionaire philanthropist you will still have to align to your home country’s foreign policy, because your billions only have value so far as the State enforces your property rights. So very concretely, if China says "hey US of A, please don’t bring uncensored Internet to my citizens: it would be a shame if all this manufacturing and trade suddenly stopped", and the US gov agrees, then Elon Musk will not provide uncensored Internet access to Chinese citizens. Else, Elon Musk will cease to be a billionaire and the Internet access will stop working anyway.
- tomrod 7y agoUnless he hoards wealth and assets in a third party area, like Mars, Antarctica, or his private home with a hired army
- Ididntdothis 7y agoBillionaires still need the protection of a nation state. Their wealth would go away quickly if they had to finance an army. Maybe trillionaires can pull that off.
- mirekrusin 7y agoHe'd have to have them on bitcoin payroll.
- mmhsieh 7y agowithout wiki i don't know how i would have solved my problem sets in grad school. let's see how the academic performance improves in turkey.
- MiroF 7y agoif you're smart enough to be in grad school, you're smart enough to have a VPN
- mmhsieh 7y agoyes, but not all countries smile on use of VPNs. i don't know about turkey but in others you can get in some trouble.
- kyriakos 7y agoDon't expect it to last for long. As soon as something negative about Erdogan gets posted a loophole will be found and will be banned again. Unfortunately the situation in Turkey is not simple, there's potentially innocent people still in prison since the failed coup attempt, Wikipedia is a small inconvenience compared to prosecution of innocents.
- jacquesm 7y agoYou can leave out the 'potentially'. There is no way that any coup would justify putting this many people in jail.
- diminish 7y agoSomehow most western supported military coups and regimes persist, in South America, Africa, middle East and East Asia. And most of these coups have wide spread support in a wider political panorama. So military coups or uprisings seem to destabilize and stabilize third world. Yet ongoing demonstrations in France and England are usually ignored and violently suppressed without support from elites. I'm curious why
- duxup 7y agoI felt the demonstrations in France got a lot of attention.
- diego_moita 7y ago> western supported military coups and regimes persist, in South America Say what? AFAIK, Cuba and Venezuela, the only remaining "military regimes in Latin America" are not "western supported".
- diminish 7y agoegypt & bolivia are the only military dictatorship and have full support from democratic west.
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- sys_64738 7y agoAny government that suppresses the internet like this deserves to be overthrown.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- newuser12341345 7y agoThis is awesome. I think that edrogan really made a mistake, but I'm glad that they're going back and making things better.When I went to turkey, I was really sad that I couldn't wiki all the cool artifacts that I was seeing. So, I installed a vpn on kubernetes so that really likes VPN. Also, that enabled me to read about the stoic philosopher the roman guy emperorr. It was really cool!
- baybal2 7y agoWhile talking about this, I think it's appropriate to at least mention what that block was about: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berat_Albayrak https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berat_Albayrak
- parsimo2010 7y agoFor those that didn't pick up on the nuance, this article is about President Erdogan's son in law, and it discusses how he was a big player in selling/smuggling oil from ISIS, so he basically funded terrorism. It's kind of a bad look for the leader of a country that supposedly was fighting ISIS to have a close relative that is supporting them. So he blocked Wikipedia in his country instead of doing something honest, like acknowledging the bad press, investigating the issue, and stopping his relatives and his country's oil companies from funding terrorism.
- Twixes 7y agoIt seems that for Erdogan's government blocking websites has become a hammer. And when you have such a convenient hammer, everything looks like a nail.
- kariha 7y agoIt's incorrect. The block was began because of Turkey was in the list of State-sponsored Terrorism article [1]. Turkish authorities asked to remove the content from Wikipedia, otherwise they will be blocked. [2] [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State-sponsored_terrorism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State-sponsored_terrorism [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Block_of_Wikipedia_in_Turkey#cite_note-54 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Block_of_Wikipedia_in_Turkey#c...
- baybal2 7y agoYes, that is the formal pretext, but everybody knows that Erdogan's damat is the real reason
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- eralps 7y agoI always wonder what the real effects of these kind of blocks. For even average users of the internet, it was easy to overcome this block by just putting a "0" in front of the domain name. 0wikipedia.org is a clone of wikipedia and it was accessible. WHOIS search shows 0wikipedia domain name was created on 4 May 2017, just five days after the block. I am a Turkish grad student in the US. Whenever I visited Turkey, I would get surprised by the error page, remember that it was blocked and overcome it by just putting a "0" in the domain name.
- jacquesm 7y agoThe real effect is that Turkey will get more and more behind the rest of the world because its citizens do not have access to information. Regimes that block access to the truth are structurally disadvantaging themselves and their citizens in the long run.
- blfr 7y agoIt doesn't work like that. The Soviet Union which had some of the most tightly controlled access to information, and didn't have to worry about the Internet, managed to stay at the cutting edge of science and technology, even sometimes outpacing the west. The communist economy couldn't support it but that's a different problem.
- blattimwind 7y agoCommon perception is that Soviet electroncis were generally 10-15 years behind.
- TheNorthman 7y agoCommon perception is that the US contributed the most to ending WW2 (Not the opinion at the time) Common perception is also that the US won the space race (Not the opinion at the time outside the US). Perhaps "common perception" isn't the right metric to go by.
- milankragujevic 7y agoWikipedia is down for me today, as well as a large part of Europe. Their tweet: https://twitter.com/Wikipedia/status/1221513346781982722 https://twitter.com/Wikipedia/status/1221513346781982722 Could it be the Turkish regime DDoS-ing their servers?
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- AnotherGoodName 7y agoProbably an accidental DDoS. Deny a whole country for more than 2 years then allow them to view the site. Suddenly you have 80+ million people all trying to catch up.
- diminish 7y agoWikipedia is up in Turkey for already a week I guess. So no.
- milankragujevic 7y agoWhat is worthy of the downvote punishment in this post? I am genuinely interested. Especially since the "regime DDoSes a site they don't like" happened with China and GitHub, so...?
- slater 7y agoI wonder if Wikipedia currently being down has anything to do with access being restored
- tencentshill 7y agoFully?
- kitteh 7y agoTurkey is an interesting country to deal with. For example let's say you are a hosting company in the US and one of your customers is rebroadcasting Turkey television. A turkey govt agency would reach out to you and ask that you terminate that customer. If you refused, they go to the domestic incumbent Telecom (Turk Telecom) and null route your entire company ip addr space. Basically all of turkey won't be able to hit any of your customers. Know a few small hosting shops this happened to and saw the emails.
- combodroid 7y agowow
- lopmotr 7y agoTo be honest, that sounds like the reasonable and fair thing to do when a foreign company is violating your laws on the internet. First tell them to stop, then block them. Not every country has this "safe harbor" concept that the US does, so you may have to take responsibility for the content you host if you want access to those markets.
- kitteh 7y agoIt'd be better if they were transparent about it and you could see these actions clearly instead of having to glean it from a looking glass or from in country probes.
- analognoise 7y agoGetting direct contact about the issue directly seems very transparent to me? If you just suddenly disappeared without a note, that's one thing. "Please stop action X occurring on your network" sounds very clear and direct.
- kitteh 7y agoI meant why doesn't the government publish a list of IPs blocked, when it started and the reason why. Edit: I see I'm getting downvoted here but I want to explain why I am passionate about this topic. As someone who supports network infrastructure and it's operation I'm on the hook to find out why x can't talk to y. It's a challenge when dealing with ISP/country level blocks or packet manipulation. Proving that this is something deliberate versus a legitimate broken thing is a process to go through. Not being able to tell a customer why is not a great story. Different countries have different techniques for this and over time you learn them. Seeing your packets in a traceroute going to a hop that has a DNS PTR record that says "DPI" in the name is a nice heads up to an operator to give you that sort of indication of what you're dealing with. I am aware that basically no country publishes such blocks today and ISPs that are forced to implement such blocks are usually instructed to not tell you anything about it (sometimes off the record, if you're lucky).
- combodroid 7y ago> Access to Wikipedia restored in Turkey after more than two and a half years interesting...
- combodroid 7y agolalala
- rdiddly 7y ago"... a 26 December 2019 ruling by the Constitutional Court of Turkey that the more than two and a half year block imposed by the Turkish government was unconstitutional." Your takeaways: 1) Turkey has a Constitutional Court. 2) Turkey has a constitution. 3) The court makes rulings and they are carried out. 4) Erdogan did something and it was "checked" and "balanced." Sounds an awful lot like a nation of laws, ruled by principles and such. Courts always take a while to catch up, just like e.g. investigations and pretty much every process governed by facts. But yeah, cause for some optimism. Lot of yelling here today about the block - guys it was lifted. After a ruling by a court.
- hinkley 7y agoI'm just relieved it was due to a legal maneuver within Turkey instead of a concession from the WikiMedia Foundation.
- tokai 7y agoMakes sense why Ergodan is attacking the court system. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/jul/18/un-urged-to-act-over-purge-of-turkeys-lawyers-by-erdogan https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/jul/18/un-urged-to-ac...
- onetimemanytime 7y agoHe's destroying the other side completely, whether they are lawyers or government janitors. But in theory courts and military can stop him. He purged the military https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016%E2%80%93present_purges_in_Turkey https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016%E2%80%93present_purges_in... so it's just the court now. Absolute power is dangerous and the mind starts to slip after a while.
- duck2 7y agoIt's more complicated than that. The military and the judicial system had to be purged because a religious cult had colonized them, often exerting power for the cult's interests[0] and topping off with the coup attempt in 2016. In turn, the religious cult was allowed (by Erdoğan, with the 2010 referendum) to colonize the military and the judicial system because previously they were colonized by hardliner modernists who had a history of doing coups or closing down political parties when someone they don't like come to power, and explicitly threatened Erdoğan[1][2]. [0]: http://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/ex-exam-chief-indicted-over-feto-ties-150451 http://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/ex-exam-chief-indicted-over... [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Justice_and_Development_Party_closure_trial https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Justice_and_Development_P... [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-memorandum https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-memorandum
- cnst 7y agoWhat about here in the US? Wikipedia is blocking my access to their website on my iPad because I'm too poor to afford a new one: https://mailman.nanog.org/pipermail/nanog/2019-December/105002.html https://mailman.nanog.org/pipermail/nanog/2019-December/1050... Any news stories about such development? Or do they only care about Turkey?
- Thorrez 7y agoThey don't have a goal of blocking iPads or poor people, they have a goal of blocking old TLS versions. But yes, I would like to see their reasoning for this decision. How many people were using <= TLS1.1? If it was near-0 then it should be fine, but if a lot of people were using it (probably yes), then they should have a strong reason to block them. This page[1] seems to say the reason is for PCI-DSS compliance. I dislike compliance-based decisions. We should base decisions on real user impact, not on compliance. [1] https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/phame/post/view/111/wikipedia_goes_100_forward_secret/ https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/phame/post/view/111/wikipe...
- cnst 7y agoCan you explain why blocking old TLS versions is even necessary? Didn't all the browser vendors announced that they're disabling old TLS versions in their browsers in a few months now? Blocking poor people is the only thing that is accomplished by this policy employed by Wikipedia. It's very sad that everyone's celebrating all these actions, instead of calling Wikipedia out for widening the digital gap, and quite literally expiring your right to read.
- Thorrez 7y agoI never said it's necessary. But there are certain risks from supporting the old versions. Take a look at this table[1]. In the TLS 1.0 and TLS 1.1 columns not a single cipher is listed as secure. Some can be secure with mitigations, but I'm not familiar with the difficulty of those mitigations, and whether the mitigations would have to be serverside or clientside. If clientside, then by blocking old versions, they might actually be closing vulnerabilities. Supporting more stuff means more surface area for new attacks. Also the older stuff was designed with less knowledge of current attack strategies, so there might be a higher likelihood of vulnerabilities being found there. Just because new browsers disable old TLS versions doesn't mean everyone is safe. As you've already pointed out, some people use old browsers, so to protect those people there might need to be serverside changes. > Blocking poor people is the only thing that is accomplished by this policy employed by Wikipedia. That seems like an exaggeration. One thing they accomplished was PCI-DSS compliance. I don't value that, but some people probably do. > It's very sad that everyone's celebrating all these actions I'm not celebrating their actions. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transport_Layer_Security#Cipher https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transport_Layer_Security#Ciphe...
- ericls 7y agoLooking at you China
- yasserarafat 7y agowell done Turkey, yet the FSF and Debian are still censoring things, what is worse? https://debian.community/debconf20-palestine-messages-censored-debian-project/ https://debian.community/debconf20-palestine-messages-censor...
- andrewseanryan 7y agoI couldn’t believe I couldn’t access Wikipedia when I was in Turkey. If Wikipedia is blocked, how many other sites are blocked?
- oriettaxx 7y agoOnce you are in a new country, this app is great https://ooni.org/post/ooni-mobile-app/ https://ooni.org/post/ooni-mobile-app/ to know the situation Its use helps them to collect live information on the list of websites that are blocked in each country
- sebastianconcpt 7y agoThis latest development follows a 26 December 2019 ruling by the Constitutional Court of Turkey that the more than two and a half year block imposed by the Turkish government was unconstitutional. Earlier today, the Turkish Constitutional Court made the full text of that ruling available to the public, and shortly after, we received reports that access was restored to Wikipedia.