14 ms·

Turkey has blocked Google DNS access to Twitter

299 points by _ks3e 13y ago

pg 13y ago
I wonder if disconnecting people from the Internet is enough to bring down the government. Has that happened anywhere yet?
- nowarninglabel 13y ago
  I think this is a good read on why digital censorship was a catalyst in Egypt's government transition, though certainly not enough to take much of the credit for it: http://abolitionistpaper.wordpress.com/2012/08/29/networking-rebellion-digital-policing-and-revolt-in-the-arab-uprisings/ http://abolitionistpaper.wordpress.com/2012/08/29/networking...
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- rz2k 13y ago
  Iran quashed its spring revolt, but Mubarak didn't. I think parallel to purported policy goals and idealologies, any ruler or single administration lives to see the next day from a combination of institutions and patronage stacks. Those details probably matter more than a sudden attempt to kill the internet in deciding a regime's fate, though it's certainly not a sign of strength. A regime with enough support can wipe out thousands or millions of people, and a single well-publicized massacre or act of outright corruption can precipitate a complete loss of legitimacy. In Egypt, you could say controlling the population through grain subsidies is a double edged sword if there's ever an interruption in the supply. The tribesmen on camel proved to be a pretty weak constituency contrasted with the military as an Egyptian institution with allegiances to the population at large, and a senior leadership that ultimately would resume power without its former figurehead. Nominally, it was mass grass roots protests that overthrew the Muslim Brotherhood, which wasn't owed credit for the overthrow of Mubarak anyway, but "we'll do you the favor of carrying out a coup if you put x many people in Tahrir square," is much more like a behind the scenes coalition between interest groups than an embrace of democratic principles. That the groups still had the institution of the military to carry it all out, then quietly implement more effective controls on dissent, meant that the revolution might as well never have occurred, as long as your name isn't Mubarak and there are no more shortages in food. In Iran, it was more of a challenge to decouple the regime from a specific scapegoat without undermining its legitimacy. Maybe it is less resilient if any flaws or corruption are openly acknowledged. And yet, there is probably a lot of national solidarity and pride implicit with the revolution (1979) and the war with Iraq. Not only were there more thugs, and they were on motorcycles rather than camels, but the Revolutionary Guard is probably both a patron of the regime and an institution that is respected and gets significant, automatic respect on its own. It may simply have been that the more dynamic classes of society simply didn't have the real power necessary to upset the status quo regardless of restrictions on internet or filming of abuses. In Turkey, the last decade has seen the very steady dismantling of the military as an institutional check on government. I don't think this is the same as 'proactive' governments dismantling institutions like an independent judiciary, a free press, or erosion of conventions on privacy and freedoms from surveillance that you see in places like Pakistan and the United States. The mechanisms for a military veto are almost always extralegal, and no matter how meritocratic advancement within the officer corps is, it's fundamentally anti-democratic. And yet, what has he done with consolidation of power around a more unitary executive? Instead of fostering the growth of more legitimate institutions that would ultimately strengthen the country and cut down on corruption, he seems to have focused on his own patronage stack, whether that involves cashing in public space, or squashing opponents. There is some irony that the allegations against him many very well be as trumped up as some of those against former military leadership, but possibly, equally in service of the ultimate public good. All that said, ineffective attempts to shut down communication probably cause much less harm than making a bigger show of firing artillery into Syria or shooting down jets to gin up nationalist fervor. Anyway, that's my hamfisted attempt at a background for coming up with a 21st century theory on revolutions, probably rife with inaccurate characterizations. So maybe restrictions on the internet can impact general prosperity in ways that rob regimes of their legitimacy, and they're definitely not a sign of strength. However, we can be pretty irascible on issues of liberty, and yet we're pretty slow countering threats to the free flow of information, or the creation of new tools for cronyism.
TrainedMonkey 13y ago
Wow, Turkey is really going nuts. I am surprised, because normally you hear "social media ban" and you think some dictatorship. One thing is certain, while this is going on, Turkey can kiss EU membership ambitions goodbye.
- kaonashi 13y ago
  >Turkey can kiss EU membership ambitions goodbye. Probably all the better for Turkey.
  - s_dev 13y ago
    I doubt that. Turkey would be better off in the EU as would Ukraine or at least the popular opinions of common people would suggest. Turkey is in NATO so it's a completely different ball park to Ukraine. They would be better off economically and culturally. Europe is more harmonious than the the other spheres of influence surrounding Turkey namely the Middle East and Russia.
    - enraged_camel 13y ago
      Nope, not the case. The Turkish economy is very strong, and the workforce is young and energetic. If Turkey joined the EU, the aging European population and the crumbling economies of Greece, Italy and Spain would be a drag on the growth of the Turkish economy. Essentially, the only major benefit EU membership would give Turks is the ability to freely travel around Europe without needing passport visas.
      - mkuhn 13y ago
        And maybe free access to a huge market to sell all the goods your growing economy produces to!?
      - Ygg2 13y ago
        While workforce being young and energetic is helpful, it's not the sole reason of someone's economy being strong. I'm pretty sure most African countries have way younger population. It's not like Turks already don't go to Germany to work.
ayi 13y ago
As a Turk, i'm just ashamed of our government. Schools in Turkey teaches in geography classes that Turkey is a bridge between Asia and Europe. But this is also true for our social structure: We sometimes turn our face to europe, ass to asia and sometimes we turn our ass to europe and face to middle east. Our last 12 years was a sample for second statement. (by the way, i'm sorry for my english skills)
- srl 13y ago
  Completely off-topic, but my pet peeve: > (by the way, i'm sorry for my english skills) If you feel the need to append this statement, that's a good sign that you don't need to. Your English is fine (should be "schools teach", not "schools teaches", and I wouldn't have used "sample for" there, but who cares -- it's clear and unambiguous). It's the morons who don't care that end up being painful to read.
  - ayi 13y ago
    Thanks for suggestions :)
  - r0h1n 13y ago
    Continuing further down your OT pet peeve: how would you distinguish between people who know their English isn't perfect and are sorry about it (without saying so, per your advice) and those "morons" who are unapologetic about the same?
    - saraid216 13y ago
      Well, for those of us who fine at English, we can tell. The hard part is for you to determine if you yourself are correct. It's more useful to invite constructive feedback than to apologize preemptively; that's what I'd recommend people do. Add onto this that, culturally, Americans tend to appreciate such invitations more than they appreciate apologies. (I can't speak to other cultures; I'm about 99% certain there are some major world-spanning ones where this is not true.)
higherpurpose 13y ago
Good thing Tor exists: http://www.dailydot.com/technology/turkey-twitter-ban-tor-usage/ http://www.dailydot.com/technology/turkey-twitter-ban-tor-us...
- Cuuugi 13y ago
  VPN's or other DNS server's would work better.
  - jeffisabelle 13y ago
    twitter's IP block also blocked, so other dns servers dont work either. VPNs are quite OK now.
    - cturhan 13y ago
      Good news is you can change hosts file
  - ChrisAntaki 13y ago
    VPN's definitely help. There's an effort now to purchase them for journalists in Turkey: https://unblockturkey.fightforthefuture.org/fight-censorship-and-spying-in-turkey https://unblockturkey.fightforthefuture.org/fight-censorship...
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
diorray 13y ago
From Turkish Medical Association's press release: “There is the interest lobby behind Gezi Park protests.” “They had alcohol in Dolmabahçe Mosque.” “They assaulted my sisters covering their hair.” As physicians we are following with worry the discriminating, stigmatizing and polarizing discourse adopted by Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan since Gezi Park protests. We were actually appalled hearing what he said yesterday in Gaziantep about Berkin Elvan. Normally, no one would try to bring two families both losing their child in confrontation. Normally, no one would declare as “terrorist” a 15 years old child shot by police while out for buying a loaf of bread and lost his life after 269 days of struggle for survival. Normally, no one would slant playing marbles as if they were cannonballs to fire. Normally, no one would provoke a rally crowd to protest a mother who lost her child only two days ago. We are physicians. We know about to many psychological and emotional states of human beings. We are worried about the emotional state of Prime Minister Erdoğan. We are utterly worried. Indeed worried about himself, his close circles and our country. And we share our worries with public.
Jemaclus 13y ago
This will end well.
cturhan 13y ago
Kaddafi could stand 30 days after he banned twitter and Husnu Mubarek could stand 18 days after his prohibition. Now it's time for Erdogan!
- camus2 13y ago
  Strange ,no reaction from Obama on this one... ;)
  - ihsw 13y ago
    Not strange at all. Turkey is in an interesting position of being quite comfortable with the US, Russia, and the Middle East, and China. The only major world power that Turkey is not in good graces with is the EU. Turkey is also a massive nation in a very militarily strategic location -- if it were to destabilize then things would get ugly very quickly. With Libya and Syria in such recent memory, toppling a government is no longer appealing at all.
  - johansch 13y ago
    http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2014/03/21/the-white-house-is-deeply-concerned-about-turkeys-twitter-ban/ http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2014/03/21...
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
_cbb1 13y ago
IIRC google dns is banned in North Korea. :)
- valarauca1 13y ago
  And China, sort of. 8.8.8.8 is blocked in mainland china, but 8.8.4.4 is not.
  - btw0 13y ago
    Not sure where you are in China, but 8.8.8.8 is not blocked for me here in Beijing and everywhere I visited - Shanghai & Hubei province.
biesnecker 13y ago
It's cute to watch an sliding-into-autocracy government trying to implement internet censorship without the infrastructure. Mr. Erdogan, call Cisco, see if you can get a discount on the China Package.
- makmanalp 13y ago
  The scary part is that with the recent restructuring of the internet law, the new telecommunications communications directorate (TIB, yeah kinda redundant) is supposed to be starting deep packet inspection, which is rumored to be the reason why the internet has been slower recently ...
enscr 13y ago
Time is ripe for a P2P real-time people-network. Outside first world, Twitter has been playing a pivotal role in helping people counter oppressive regimes & lack of democracy. But this may not continue for long. Edit: Ripe = not just for making it but adopting it as well.
- jcbrand 13y ago
  > Time is ripe for a P2P real-time people-network http://twister.net.co http://twister.net.co
  - enscr 13y ago
    Looks cool, Hopefully more people pick it up. Does it have much traction with any particular demographics?
rasur 13y ago
I see a vision of the future... where Turkey plays "whack-a-mole" with the worlds DNS..
vegustui 13y ago
Internet access is a privilege, not a right, just like driving a car /s
- prht 13y ago
  That would be correct we were living in 1990s. Today blocking access to social network can be interpreted as direct violation of right to communicate.
jrochkind1 13y ago
Wait, how did simple access to google DNS circumvent their twitter ban? They had blocked twitter... merely by removing it from some DNS servers that they thought were the only ones used by people in Turkey? Or something? That seems like a particularly ineffectual way to try and block twitter. And I don't understand, if they have the ability to _actually_ block Google DNS... why don't they just do the same thing to actually block twitter? This makes no sense, I must be missing something. Anyone have the scoop?
- MichaelGG 13y ago
  Probably because blocking Google DNS is 2 just IPs? If you can "force" most people to use your own DNS, it's far easier to implement blocking via DNS. Otherwise, you're left playing whackamole if a company adds new frontend machines.
  - jrochkind1 13y ago
    Except there are an indefinite number of other DNS servers, free and with a contract, that Turkish users could use too, from an indefinite number of different vendors. It's a heck of a lot harder to block "any DNS server that isn't under Turkish government control" than it is to block twitter. We can all speculate, but really I was hoping that someone had some additional information, perhaps because they are in Turkey, on what's going on exactly. (Is it too much to expect discussion of technical details on HN, instead of political bickering? On anything involving Turkey, anywhere on the internet, yeah, it probably is. The reason why I'm curious about technical details is, of course, because I have an interest in knowing how to circumvent and help people circumvent whatever censors are up to these days).
    - vacri 13y ago
      I imagine that if you wanted to block all DNS queries not going to government DNS, you put a block on packets routing to port 53. This is going to hit a lot of businesses that use their own DNS systems though. It would be harder to do a wide-ranging-but-not-total block, methinks, but I am not a net admin; I don't know the feasibility of mass port blocking.
siculars 13y ago
Ah, the slippery slope. What's next? 8.8.8.8, 8.8.4.4, or has that been done already. Hey everybody in the world, this is how dictators stop free speech and tighten control on their people. Technologists need to think about these things going forward in all the work we do.
- Kerrick 13y ago
  Blocking 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4, Google's public DNS servers, is exactly what this article is about.
afsina 13y ago
Actually title should have been "Turkey has blocked Google DNS to access Twitter". Because Google DNS is working fine for other sites.
Eleutheria 13y ago
If the government shuts down the internet keep calm and shut down the government
- r00fus 13y ago
  Nice turn of phrase, but I hope you do realize that this is being attempted, and has been for quite a while now. Easier said than done.
eurleif 13y ago
I have a site that receives >200k daily uniques from Turkey. I feel like I should put something up to tell my Turkish users about how to get around their government's Internet blocking, but I'm not sure exactly what to put up. Is there a link for this specific purpose? Should I just give them a link to Tor?
- hershel 13y ago
  I think hola.org would be a good recommendation - it's a free p2p proxy service. I used it to watch hulu and it worked quite well with a simple UI.
  - voltagex_ 13y ago
    Is hola really a p2p proxy? I thought it just inserted a proxy.pac into Firefox/Chrome to do whatever it wanted with your web browser. Either way, it might be good for watching streaming video, but I wouldn't trust it somewhere that Twitter is blocked.
    - hershel 13y ago
      You can use hola against cencorship.From reading a bit around the web, it seems that most of the time it does work in china, the country with the most advanced censorship tech.
- ayberk 13y ago
  Tunnelbear is providing free Giant Tunnelbear package for people from Turkey[1]. It is easy enough to use and gets the job done perfectly. [1]:https://twitter.com/theTunnelBear/status/446776207367864320 https://twitter.com/theTunnelBear/status/446776207367864320
- voltagex_ 13y ago
  If you can afford the bandwidth, put up a mirror of the Tor executables and also consider becoming a Tor bridge.
  - 13y ago
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
allochthon 13y ago
“Twitter has knelt down [before the Turkish government]. [We are a] nation in love with its independence. And [enhancing] this is what Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has done. We are no banana republic.” Wait, what?
thret 13y ago
"We are no banana republic. And by no means are we a pineapple republic. We are a complete fruit salad."

299 points by _ks3e 13y ago

pg 13y ago

I wonder if disconnecting people from the Internet is enough to bring down the government. Has that happened anywhere yet?

nowarninglabel 13y ago
I think this is a good read on why digital censorship was a catalyst in Egypt's government transition, though certainly not enough to take much of the credit for it: http://abolitionistpaper.wordpress.com/2012/08/29/networking-rebellion-digital-policing-and-revolt-in-the-arab-uprisings/ http://abolitionistpaper.wordpress.com/2012/08/29/networking...
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
rz2k 13y ago
Iran quashed its spring revolt, but Mubarak didn't. I think parallel to purported policy goals and idealologies, any ruler or single administration lives to see the next day from a combination of institutions and patronage stacks. Those details probably matter more than a sudden attempt to kill the internet in deciding a regime's fate, though it's certainly not a sign of strength. A regime with enough support can wipe out thousands or millions of people, and a single well-publicized massacre or act of outright corruption can precipitate a complete loss of legitimacy. In Egypt, you could say controlling the population through grain subsidies is a double edged sword if there's ever an interruption in the supply. The tribesmen on camel proved to be a pretty weak constituency contrasted with the military as an Egyptian institution with allegiances to the population at large, and a senior leadership that ultimately would resume power without its former figurehead. Nominally, it was mass grass roots protests that overthrew the Muslim Brotherhood, which wasn't owed credit for the overthrow of Mubarak anyway, but "we'll do you the favor of carrying out a coup if you put x many people in Tahrir square," is much more like a behind the scenes coalition between interest groups than an embrace of democratic principles. That the groups still had the institution of the military to carry it all out, then quietly implement more effective controls on dissent, meant that the revolution might as well never have occurred, as long as your name isn't Mubarak and there are no more shortages in food. In Iran, it was more of a challenge to decouple the regime from a specific scapegoat without undermining its legitimacy. Maybe it is less resilient if any flaws or corruption are openly acknowledged. And yet, there is probably a lot of national solidarity and pride implicit with the revolution (1979) and the war with Iraq. Not only were there more thugs, and they were on motorcycles rather than camels, but the Revolutionary Guard is probably both a patron of the regime and an institution that is respected and gets significant, automatic respect on its own. It may simply have been that the more dynamic classes of society simply didn't have the real power necessary to upset the status quo regardless of restrictions on internet or filming of abuses. In Turkey, the last decade has seen the very steady dismantling of the military as an institutional check on government. I don't think this is the same as 'proactive' governments dismantling institutions like an independent judiciary, a free press, or erosion of conventions on privacy and freedoms from surveillance that you see in places like Pakistan and the United States. The mechanisms for a military veto are almost always extralegal, and no matter how meritocratic advancement within the officer corps is, it's fundamentally anti-democratic. And yet, what has he done with consolidation of power around a more unitary executive? Instead of fostering the growth of more legitimate institutions that would ultimately strengthen the country and cut down on corruption, he seems to have focused on his own patronage stack, whether that involves cashing in public space, or squashing opponents. There is some irony that the allegations against him many very well be as trumped up as some of those against former military leadership, but possibly, equally in service of the ultimate public good. All that said, ineffective attempts to shut down communication probably cause much less harm than making a bigger show of firing artillery into Syria or shooting down jets to gin up nationalist fervor. Anyway, that's my hamfisted attempt at a background for coming up with a 21st century theory on revolutions, probably rife with inaccurate characterizations. So maybe restrictions on the internet can impact general prosperity in ways that rob regimes of their legitimacy, and they're definitely not a sign of strength. However, we can be pretty irascible on issues of liberty, and yet we're pretty slow countering threats to the free flow of information, or the creation of new tools for cronyism.

TrainedMonkey 13y ago

Wow, Turkey is really going nuts. I am surprised, because normally you hear "social media ban" and you think some dictatorship. One thing is certain, while this is going on, Turkey can kiss EU membership ambitions goodbye.

kaonashi 13y ago
>Turkey can kiss EU membership ambitions goodbye. Probably all the better for Turkey.
- s_dev 13y ago
  I doubt that. Turkey would be better off in the EU as would Ukraine or at least the popular opinions of common people would suggest. Turkey is in NATO so it's a completely different ball park to Ukraine. They would be better off economically and culturally. Europe is more harmonious than the the other spheres of influence surrounding Turkey namely the Middle East and Russia.
  - enraged_camel 13y ago
    Nope, not the case. The Turkish economy is very strong, and the workforce is young and energetic. If Turkey joined the EU, the aging European population and the crumbling economies of Greece, Italy and Spain would be a drag on the growth of the Turkish economy. Essentially, the only major benefit EU membership would give Turks is the ability to freely travel around Europe without needing passport visas.
    - mkuhn 13y ago
      And maybe free access to a huge market to sell all the goods your growing economy produces to!?
    - Ygg2 13y ago
      While workforce being young and energetic is helpful, it's not the sole reason of someone's economy being strong. I'm pretty sure most African countries have way younger population. It's not like Turks already don't go to Germany to work.

ayi 13y ago

As a Turk, i'm just ashamed of our government. Schools in Turkey teaches in geography classes that Turkey is a bridge between Asia and Europe. But this is also true for our social structure: We sometimes turn our face to europe, ass to asia and sometimes we turn our ass to europe and face to middle east. Our last 12 years was a sample for second statement. (by the way, i'm sorry for my english skills)

srl 13y ago
Completely off-topic, but my pet peeve: > (by the way, i'm sorry for my english skills) If you feel the need to append this statement, that's a good sign that you don't need to. Your English is fine (should be "schools teach", not "schools teaches", and I wouldn't have used "sample for" there, but who cares -- it's clear and unambiguous). It's the morons who don't care that end up being painful to read.
- ayi 13y ago
  Thanks for suggestions :)
- r0h1n 13y ago
  Continuing further down your OT pet peeve: how would you distinguish between people who know their English isn't perfect and are sorry about it (without saying so, per your advice) and those "morons" who are unapologetic about the same?
  - saraid216 13y ago
    Well, for those of us who fine at English, we can tell. The hard part is for you to determine if you yourself are correct. It's more useful to invite constructive feedback than to apologize preemptively; that's what I'd recommend people do. Add onto this that, culturally, Americans tend to appreciate such invitations more than they appreciate apologies. (I can't speak to other cultures; I'm about 99% certain there are some major world-spanning ones where this is not true.)

higherpurpose 13y ago

Good thing Tor exists: http://www.dailydot.com/technology/turkey-twitter-ban-tor-usage/ http://www.dailydot.com/technology/turkey-twitter-ban-tor-us...

Cuuugi 13y ago
VPN's or other DNS server's would work better.
- jeffisabelle 13y ago
  twitter's IP block also blocked, so other dns servers dont work either. VPNs are quite OK now.
  - cturhan 13y ago
    Good news is you can change hosts file
- ChrisAntaki 13y ago
  VPN's definitely help. There's an effort now to purchase them for journalists in Turkey: https://unblockturkey.fightforthefuture.org/fight-censorship-and-spying-in-turkey https://unblockturkey.fightforthefuture.org/fight-censorship...

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

diorray 13y ago

From Turkish Medical Association's press release: “There is the interest lobby behind Gezi Park protests.” “They had alcohol in Dolmabahçe Mosque.” “They assaulted my sisters covering their hair.” As physicians we are following with worry the discriminating, stigmatizing and polarizing discourse adopted by Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan since Gezi Park protests. We were actually appalled hearing what he said yesterday in Gaziantep about Berkin Elvan. Normally, no one would try to bring two families both losing their child in confrontation. Normally, no one would declare as “terrorist” a 15 years old child shot by police while out for buying a loaf of bread and lost his life after 269 days of struggle for survival. Normally, no one would slant playing marbles as if they were cannonballs to fire. Normally, no one would provoke a rally crowd to protest a mother who lost her child only two days ago. We are physicians. We know about to many psychological and emotional states of human beings. We are worried about the emotional state of Prime Minister Erdoğan. We are utterly worried. Indeed worried about himself, his close circles and our country. And we share our worries with public.

Jemaclus 13y ago

This will end well.

cturhan 13y ago

Kaddafi could stand 30 days after he banned twitter and Husnu Mubarek could stand 18 days after his prohibition. Now it's time for Erdogan!

camus2 13y ago
Strange ,no reaction from Obama on this one... ;)
- ihsw 13y ago
  Not strange at all. Turkey is in an interesting position of being quite comfortable with the US, Russia, and the Middle East, and China. The only major world power that Turkey is not in good graces with is the EU. Turkey is also a massive nation in a very militarily strategic location -- if it were to destabilize then things would get ugly very quickly. With Libya and Syria in such recent memory, toppling a government is no longer appealing at all.
- johansch 13y ago
  http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2014/03/21/the-white-house-is-deeply-concerned-about-turkeys-twitter-ban/ http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2014/03/21...
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]

_cbb1 13y ago

IIRC google dns is banned in North Korea. :)

valarauca1 13y ago
And China, sort of. 8.8.8.8 is blocked in mainland china, but 8.8.4.4 is not.
- btw0 13y ago
  Not sure where you are in China, but 8.8.8.8 is not blocked for me here in Beijing and everywhere I visited - Shanghai & Hubei province.

biesnecker 13y ago

It's cute to watch an sliding-into-autocracy government trying to implement internet censorship without the infrastructure. Mr. Erdogan, call Cisco, see if you can get a discount on the China Package.

makmanalp 13y ago
The scary part is that with the recent restructuring of the internet law, the new telecommunications communications directorate (TIB, yeah kinda redundant) is supposed to be starting deep packet inspection, which is rumored to be the reason why the internet has been slower recently ...

enscr 13y ago

Time is ripe for a P2P real-time people-network. Outside first world, Twitter has been playing a pivotal role in helping people counter oppressive regimes & lack of democracy. But this may not continue for long. Edit: Ripe = not just for making it but adopting it as well.

jcbrand 13y ago
> Time is ripe for a P2P real-time people-network http://twister.net.co http://twister.net.co
- enscr 13y ago
  Looks cool, Hopefully more people pick it up. Does it have much traction with any particular demographics?

rasur 13y ago

I see a vision of the future... where Turkey plays "whack-a-mole" with the worlds DNS..

vegustui 13y ago

Internet access is a privilege, not a right, just like driving a car /s

prht 13y ago
That would be correct we were living in 1990s. Today blocking access to social network can be interpreted as direct violation of right to communicate.

jrochkind1 13y ago

Wait, how did simple access to google DNS circumvent their twitter ban? They had blocked twitter... merely by removing it from some DNS servers that they thought were the only ones used by people in Turkey? Or something? That seems like a particularly ineffectual way to try and block twitter. And I don't understand, if they have the ability to _actually_ block Google DNS... why don't they just do the same thing to actually block twitter? This makes no sense, I must be missing something. Anyone have the scoop?

MichaelGG 13y ago
Probably because blocking Google DNS is 2 just IPs? If you can "force" most people to use your own DNS, it's far easier to implement blocking via DNS. Otherwise, you're left playing whackamole if a company adds new frontend machines.
- jrochkind1 13y ago
  Except there are an indefinite number of other DNS servers, free and with a contract, that Turkish users could use too, from an indefinite number of different vendors. It's a heck of a lot harder to block "any DNS server that isn't under Turkish government control" than it is to block twitter. We can all speculate, but really I was hoping that someone had some additional information, perhaps because they are in Turkey, on what's going on exactly. (Is it too much to expect discussion of technical details on HN, instead of political bickering? On anything involving Turkey, anywhere on the internet, yeah, it probably is. The reason why I'm curious about technical details is, of course, because I have an interest in knowing how to circumvent and help people circumvent whatever censors are up to these days).
  - vacri 13y ago
    I imagine that if you wanted to block all DNS queries not going to government DNS, you put a block on packets routing to port 53. This is going to hit a lot of businesses that use their own DNS systems though. It would be harder to do a wide-ranging-but-not-total block, methinks, but I am not a net admin; I don't know the feasibility of mass port blocking.

siculars 13y ago

Ah, the slippery slope. What's next? 8.8.8.8, 8.8.4.4, or has that been done already. Hey everybody in the world, this is how dictators stop free speech and tighten control on their people. Technologists need to think about these things going forward in all the work we do.

Kerrick 13y ago
Blocking 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4, Google's public DNS servers, is exactly what this article is about.

afsina 13y ago

Actually title should have been "Turkey has blocked Google DNS to access Twitter". Because Google DNS is working fine for other sites.

Eleutheria 13y ago

If the government shuts down the internet keep calm and shut down the government

r00fus 13y ago
Nice turn of phrase, but I hope you do realize that this is being attempted, and has been for quite a while now. Easier said than done.

eurleif 13y ago

I have a site that receives >200k daily uniques from Turkey. I feel like I should put something up to tell my Turkish users about how to get around their government's Internet blocking, but I'm not sure exactly what to put up. Is there a link for this specific purpose? Should I just give them a link to Tor?

hershel 13y ago
I think hola.org would be a good recommendation - it's a free p2p proxy service. I used it to watch hulu and it worked quite well with a simple UI.
- voltagex_ 13y ago
  Is hola really a p2p proxy? I thought it just inserted a proxy.pac into Firefox/Chrome to do whatever it wanted with your web browser. Either way, it might be good for watching streaming video, but I wouldn't trust it somewhere that Twitter is blocked.
  - hershel 13y ago
    You can use hola against cencorship.From reading a bit around the web, it seems that most of the time it does work in china, the country with the most advanced censorship tech.
ayberk 13y ago
Tunnelbear is providing free Giant Tunnelbear package for people from Turkey[1]. It is easy enough to use and gets the job done perfectly. [1]:https://twitter.com/theTunnelBear/status/446776207367864320 https://twitter.com/theTunnelBear/status/446776207367864320
voltagex_ 13y ago
If you can afford the bandwidth, put up a mirror of the Tor executables and also consider becoming a Tor bridge.
- 13y ago

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

allochthon 13y ago

“Twitter has knelt down [before the Turkish government]. [We are a] nation in love with its independence. And [enhancing] this is what Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has done. We are no banana republic.” Wait, what?

thret 13y ago

"We are no banana republic. And by no means are we a pineapple republic. We are a complete fruit salad."