13 ms·
Turkey Moves To Block Twitter At The IP Level
- EthanHeilman 13y agoThe question is: how are they doing this? My money is on internal BGP route announcements that blackhole twitter's IP address as this technique has been used for IP filtering in China and Pakistan and doesn't require any special equipment or overhead.
- xtacy 13y agoEither what you said, or installing drop rules on routers to drop traffic to any of Twitter's IP addresses. http://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/support/docs/ip/access-lists/26448-ACLsamples.html#denyftp http://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/support/docs/ip/access-lists/26...
- sgy 13y agoUnix-like operating systems commonly implement IP address blocking using TCP Wrapper, configured by host access control files: /etc/hosts.deny and /etc/hosts.allow
- yuubi 13y agoThe hosts.allow and hosts.deny files only affect incoming connections to services that read them (whether by being invoked through tcpd, or by otherwise using libwrap. You could prevent Twitter from connecting to your FTP service or whatever, but not prevent other users on your network from contacting Twitter.
- diorray 13y agoThey even blocked DNS servers.. Sadly, Erdogan thinks that if people can't access to Twitter, they can't access to corruption tapes.
- sitkack 13y agoThe turks are very sophisticated, it might stop the rurals from getting to twitter but not people in teh cities.
- sitkack 13y ago* https://www.torproject.org/download/download * https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/ They would have to block every VPN provider on the planet.
- sgy 13y agohttps://zenmate.com/ https://zenmate.com/
- johnpowell 13y agoA good friend of mine is in Turkey. I just fired up a few droplets on Digital Ocean for his friends and family to use as VPN's. It only takes about ten minutes per VPS to set everything up.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- czbond 13y agoUsually you can get around proxy and firewall blocks of IP addresses by using the Decimal equivalent.... for instance, here is the decimal version of the IP address for google http://74.125.224.72/ http://74.125.224.72/ http://1249763400 http://1249763400
- ffk 13y agoWhile this works with many basic firewalls, this does not work at the IP routing level. The IP address is in a binary format long before it hits the routing tables on the Internet. [edit: cleaning up wording]
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- jrockway 13y agoThat's easy to fix, Twitter sets their TTL to 5 minutes and changes their frontend address every 5 minutes. Now if they block Google Public DNS, that's a problem, but again, that involves very carefully tweaking route advertisements (since it's anycast). You can also always grab the DNS record out of the root nameservers. Ultimately, filtering the Internet only works if you filter all of the Internet.
- mrtksn 13y agoThey should be able to watch Twitter's frontend address and ban it accordingly. Right now the solutions are VPN, Tor and opera mini style proxy services. It's expected that they may go after these too. AFAIK the law requires ISP's to take measures against censorship avoidance methods. The PM acts against the social media as if it's an existential threat for him. I am not sure if he rationally calculates these actions or he just can't handle any speech that is not controlled directly by him.(as the leaks indicate, he practically controlled the traditional media for years since)
- nknighthb 13y agoAn easy and amusing fix that won't happen would be for Turkish IPs to be directed to a set of proxies shared by Twitter, Facebook, Microsoft, Google, Wikipedia, and a few other popular sites/services. Blocking Twitter is disturbing. Blocking much of the web people use daily is a serious escalation that seems unlikely to last in Turkey.
- 001sky 13y ago"The PM acts against the social media as if it's an existential threat for him." Well, it is.
- jrockway 13y agoThey should be able to watch Twitter's frontend address and ban it accordingly. It's the government. First they'll have to write a contract. Then they'll have to solicit bids. Then... Meanwhile, Twitter has highly-experienced software engineers and system administrators on staff.
- peterkelly 13y agoSo here's an idea that's been forming in my head over the last few days - a distributed version of twitter. The problem with twitter as it currently stands is that it relies on a centralised server (well, servers). That's easy to block, or legally compel to remove content. Imagine instead that every user on twitter had their own "stream" replicated on both their own computer and those of all of their followers. If you choose to follow someone, you get access to their stream either directly from the person themselves, or any of their other followers. This would partition the system according to popularity. The more followed a person is, the more replicas of their tweet stream available. When someone retweets something, it appears in their own stream, so retweets benefit from this replication. Any tweets that are particularly important and popular would be virtually impossible to suppress. To prove that tweets had originated from a particular user, every user would have a public/private key pair generated when they first begin using the system, and all tweets would carry an associated cryptographic signature. "Registering" for the system would be a matter of generating an identity using a key pair and a username. Clashes and impersonation of usernames is something I haven't yet thought of a solution to, though usernames would be for display purposes only; the real identity would be the public key. Replica discovery is another challenge, but there's much in the existing P2P literature and practice (esp bittorrent) that could possibly be of help here. As far as business models are concerned, Twitter's current one wouldn't work, as it relies on the centralised nature of the system. However it would be possible for developers of individual clients to make money by providing various value-adds, and these could co-exist with open source clients. Thoughts? Side note: There seems to be a bug in the comments system where the last paragraph is omitted. Is anyone else experiencing this? Extra last paragraph
- nknighthb 13y agoThe first time you have to say "key" to an end-user, you have lost. Key management (including, critically, movement between devices) is the primary reason email encryption is rare. (And if the solution to key management involves letting a website deal with it, you've just invited re-centralization of the system, since users are going to gravitate to the service everyone else uses, not set up their own server.)
- 13y ago
- adenner 13y agoNext up deep packet inspection of all connections?
- theverse 13y agoNo, TYYP protocol [1]. DPI will be unnecessary. [1] https://github.com/rakyll/tyyp https://github.com/rakyll/tyyp
- existencebox 13y agoA brief glance at the news doesn't give me much information, but the first thing that comes to mind when I see service blocking like this is, "when do the protests start?" Perhaps I only know of the examples that confirm to this pattern, but internet limitations seems to often lead to MUCH higher levels of societal discontent. Could someone who understand the politics/social climate there give me a tl;dr on the situation in that light and what's reasonable to expect?
- gkya 13y agoAllow me to tell you about the worst kind of problem: getting used to government being naughty. When quirky and nasty stuff happens so often, it is commonplace. When everything is so rotten, one first questions "what is their benefits from this" about every thing someone does. Also, what you see and what we experience here is just a game on actuality, to turn away people's looks from problems that are deeper and nastier. It is all done in order to feint reality and get it to go under the dark curtain of a scandal. Basically, we're told "Look! What's over there," and then are slapped in the face.
- puppetmaster3 13y agoIf he had NSA he couldjust predict noncompliant individuals.
- acd 13y agoPonders if they are also blocking Twitter on IPv6. Anyhow here is how to circomvent the filter https://www.hidemyass.com/proxy/ https://www.hidemyass.com/proxy/ type in twitter Background is Turkeys prime minister and leaked audiotapes. http://www.todayszaman.com/news-340552-full-transcript-of-voice-recording-purportedly-of-turkish-pm-erdogan-and-his-son.html http://www.todayszaman.com/news-340552-full-transcript-of-vo...
- p1mrx 13y agoTwitter doesn't support IPv6 at all, unlike Facebook and Google+, where it's been running since World IPv6 Launch on 2012-06-06.
- mattbarrie 13y agoLOL