
Dropbox, Google Drive and Microsoft OneDrive blocked in Turkey following leaks - purak
https://turkeyblocks.org/2016/10/08/google-drive-dropbox-blocked-in-turkey/
======
batuhanicoz
This is so annoying for us. I'm not using Dropbox, Google Drive or OneDrive
but GitHub is the tool we use the most as a software agency. We've set-up a
VPN server for our team for the moment.

Only good thing coming from this is that I've discovered a software called
Pritunl today which made setting up the VPN pretty easy.

~~~
ralfn
The real solution off course is to rid your country of the embarrisment of
Erdogan. Vote. If thats still legal coming next election.

~~~
batuhanicoz
I think we are not that close to having theatre elections. I hate admitting it
but democracy works pretty well in Turkey.

There are just too many uneducated people here that are influenced by power
and religious-themed party platforms. I'm not sure if I'm being elitist but a
good democracy requires good, educated people.

The ruling party is systematically fucking the education system here, creating
more religious schools, adding more voluntary religious classes. ProTip, in
Turkey voluntary classes means it's probably mandatory since school
headmasters tend to pick whatever they please for the students, citing
scheduling problems and being understaffed.

I've made peace with the fact Erdogan is not going anywhere soon but I still
hope for the country. I have an opinion about him and his party which is not
popular among my peers. Erdogan is not a stupid bigot. He is not Trump, for
example.

From the first day, AKP always hired the best minds in the country. The party
had a culture of being reasonable, the founders were good, educated people
with the right mindset. They were conservative, which I hate as an atheist,
but also social democrats. They supported most things Bernie Sanders supports
in the U.S. with a good balance for free market and capitalism. But they
attracted stupid bigots as a result of being a religious party. They've done a
good job bringing conservatives in Turkey together (also a result of hiring
the best, their PR was always good[0]). AKP has a rule where their members can
only serve 2 terms in the parliament. As time went by, good ones were replaced
by the new generation of party leaders who are just puppets for the President.
All the good people were pushed out of the party because they started to
disobey orders from the top. They are bigots and too religious. Time to to
time, I catch glimpses of Erdogan, supporting our secularism, saying "it's
unacceptable to create an Islamic constitution".

As they push religion more on Turkey, more they'll lose support. Because
educated people are looking to get away. Investors included. This is hurting
the economy. President Erdogan or his advisors soon will see they need to be
merging the country not separating it. They'll act more secular and sane.
Because as it stands now, AKP will be lost in history after the President
dies. They don't want that. They are also scared of religious powers here
since the coup attempt. Only people they trust right now is the people they
alienated and sentenced to life in prison. Kemalists.

All this combined, we'll see worst days after we see the light but I have hope
we'll see it.

[0] The owner of agency which handled most things for the AKP lost his life,
along with his son on the Bosphorus Bridge on the night of the coup attempt.
Which is why I don't believe AKP was behind the attempt. He was always loyal
and a good friend to the President. He cried at the funeral which is something
I've never saw him do and not the best political action if it was a role.

(Quick note, I'm sorry if this is too political. I started writing a sentence
but I wanted to say something like this for a while, I just had to get it out
I guess.)

~~~
zepolud
> I hate admitting it but democracy works pretty well in Turkey.

Majoritarianism should not be confused with democracy.

~~~
nl
That's a pretty easy mistake to make. Care to enlighten me about the
difference?

~~~
B1FF_PSUVM
He agrees with the results.

(OK, you want to look up Polybius and the word ochlocracy. But it still comes
to that.)

------
0x0
Someone on Reddit highlighted that the block seems to key off of the SSL SNI
header, regardless of which IP you try to connect to. There must be some Deep
Packet Inspection going on here, then?

[https://www.reddit.com/r/europe/comments/56h0s3/they_just_bl...](https://www.reddit.com/r/europe/comments/56h0s3/they_just_blocked_dropbox_in_turkey/d8jfvw5)

Is the blocking able to handle stuff like fragrouter where the TCP stream is
broken down into 1byte payload packets?

~~~
nikcub
We started seeing more sophisticated DPI capabilities after the Feb '14
internet regulations[0] that required ISPs to block by URL and content strings

IMO blocking so many sites so broadly is a sign that their DPI is failing,
because their preference seems to be to block as narrowly as possible because
of negative economic effects.

[0] [http://aa.com.tr/en/turkey/turkey-s-general-assembly-
ratifie...](http://aa.com.tr/en/turkey/turkey-s-general-assembly-ratifies-
internet-bill/179203)

~~~
hueving
With ssl the best they can do is this host level blocking unless they perform
mitm attacks.

~~~
metachris
> unless they perform mitm attacks

Which any state-sponsored actor can easily do, of course.

~~~
MichaelGG
Please tell me how Turkey is going to MITM Google on a recurring basis, enough
to implement filtering.

~~~
bumblebeard
By using a CA they control to generate a fake certificate for Google like
they've already "accidentally" done:

[http://arstechnica.com/security/2013/01/turkish-
government-a...](http://arstechnica.com/security/2013/01/turkish-government-
agency-spoofed-google-certificate-accidentally/)

~~~
gruez
Which they can only pull off once before their CA is distrusted. See: how
Chinese government CA was restricted to .cn domains only

------
kukx
For those interested in what the leaked emails contained, here's a related
article: [http://www.dailydot.com/layer8/redhack-turkey-albayrak-
censo...](http://www.dailydot.com/layer8/redhack-turkey-albayrak-censorship/)

~~~
clydethefrog
I feel this warrants an own thread or at least a discussion. "Troll armies"
have been quite successful in quieting dissent the last years in Russia,
Turkey and other authoritarian countries. There are theories Russia is partly
responsible for the whole Trump spam on Twitter and Reddit. It's time this is
taken as a serious threat instead of shrugging off "it's just the internet, 99
% of the comments is always garbage". It's part of a successful information
war now when the majority of the public gets their news from social media,
which take popularity as a metric for what news is important. It's propaganda
behind a proxy.

Edit: also shame on Twitter for complying with Turkey. The time they were
proud of being part of social change like the Green Revolution in Iran seems
over.

------
andybak
Excellent stuff. If someone can repost the email leak to every possible
service they can think of - then the Turkish government will be forced to make
a difficult choice between 'security concerns' and being part of the modern
internet economy. I don't think they have the ability that China has to build
enough services within their own boundaries to prevent the latter choice
causing some pain.

~~~
hd4
Even China can only limit their citizens access to the extent that it doesn't
totally hinder economic growth. They would never be able to completely
insulate themselves from the "outer" internet without massive harm to
themselves, the same goes for any country in this day and age.

The risk of harm will always outweigh the minimal discomfort through free and
open discourse that the internet inherently brings with it.

~~~
mediumdeviation
Actually what happens in China is that homegrown tech companies will take over
the market space left by Western ones, which the government is perfectly happy
to let happen because

1\. It keeps the tech industry domestic

2\. The servers are physically inside China, guaranteeing them access to the
data

This is why I've always thought that the Great Firewall's purpose is not only
censorship, but also a form of Internet-age protectionism.

~~~
mtgx
Yes, but they wouldn't be able to do that abruptly. That's why they are now
forcing all American companies to create "joint ventures" with the local
Chinese companies, which can steal the American technology, and then say 10
years later, the American part can be removed.

And American companies seem to go along with it, thinking they have no choice.
They do, but they're too scared to lose the Chinese market to risk anything at
all, and second, they're too shortsighted to create strong alliances with
their competitors to speak out against Chinese policies.

Think about how Microsoft was ecstatic that Google was getting banned from
China, believing this would be an "opportunity" for the company to gain market
share - it wasn't. Baidu filled out all the vacuum left by Google. And now
Microsoft has to accept whatever bullshit policies China throws at it, too.

Instead of allying with Google and others, it thought it can pull one over
Google. That's the kind of shortsighted thinking I'm talking about. If
American companies want to thrive in China, they need to create strong
alliances and cooperate more against bad Chinese government policies, and not
sell each other out for some promised short-term gains, that they'll lose in
the end to local companies anyway.

~~~
pmontra
The IT industry is not special. It's not different from other industries that
have been nationalized or have to do what the government of the countries they
work into wants. The only way out is to somewhat control those governments
(good luck with China) or operate within mutual trade agreements signed at
government level. Again, China put itself into an almost unassailable
negotiation position having so many of the industries of the world.

What I see is a trend to rebuild on the Internet the same borders that are
enforced in the physical world. Some countries will keep their internets open
to each others, others are already closing them down partially. They're
probably putting them at a disadvantage, especially the small ones, but the
governments usually only cares about keeping their seats.

------
custo15
I'm in Russia, and I really scared. This is the way we go here, too.

~~~
h1d
What sites are blocked?

~~~
custo15
Lot of them. You can see a list here:
[https://reestr.rublacklist.net/](https://reestr.rublacklist.net/)

------
throwaway98237
And this is why the web should be decentralized. To be clear, not so we can
access centralized services (Dropbox, Google Drive, and MS OneDrive), but so
an entire country can't have it's access to the Internet so easily censored /
blocked. This has happened like, a thousand times already, but I guess, like
Ebola until it hits the U.S.A. hard enough we're gonna just keep on reading
about it in the news with some fascination but otherwise not caring to act.

~~~
bogomipz
Could you elaborate on what that decentralized architecture might look like?
P2P? IPFS?

~~~
throwaway98237
I've given this tons of thought, and to be honest, haven't hit on a solution
that I think would be a fix-it-all solution. Some thoughts though.

a) "Private" neighborhood mesh networks should be more heavily utilized. They
would be "private" from the rest of the Internet, but "public" in as much as
they are community based / owned.

b) We should admit that cryptography is here to stay, and work with that
assumption. End-to-end encryption doesn't automatically provide 100%
anonymity. The traffic movement can still be traced. This is much like a car
that is being followed by law enforcement from one private residence to
another. Law enforcement doesn't yet know what is going on in either residence
or in the car, but can still do there job, and eventually law enforcement can
target a weak-point in the activities that does not rely on encryption, such
as talking to neighbors, turning suspects into cooperating witnesses, or
investigating legal activities such as bank statements. My point is,
encryption is here to stay, and if good citizens can't use it, whatever,
"criminals" (and political dissidents and victims of domestic violence, etc.)
will use it. Additionally, in my mind, encryption should fall under the
protection provided by the second amendment. It's important to remember that
the second amendment was meant to allow citizens to arm themselves to protect
themselves against _the government_ in times of war. It was not meant to allow
for folksy looking guns to go hunting for Bambi.

It might sound like I'm going on a crazy tangent, but consider what a
decentralized web requires. It requires it's constituent parts to be equally
robust. If they are not equally robust then there will quickly be a "winner
takes all" shuffling of the lines of communication. If your local network is
not robust, you're not going to use it for banking, health care, government
communication, etc.

So, a decentralized web will be a "confederacy" of networks, each of which can
choose to be equally robust in terms of network speed, capacity, and security.
It isn't necessary that each is equal, but each must be allowed to be so if so
desired.

c) Between local or regional networks a federal network would provide much the
same purpose as the federal highway system currently does for car traffic. I
say this to mean the same purpose both as relates to 1) physical movement, 2)
freedom to execute such physical movement, and 3) legally enforcing certain
rights and restrictions as relates to such traffic. 1) The federated networks
work provide physical infrastructure for the traffic and provide financial and
administrative mechanisms to make such traffic a reality. 2) The federated
network would politically / legally enforce the equal rights of individuals
belonging to regional / confederate members to participate in taking advantage
of the federal network. 3) The federated network would enforce laws and
regulations on the "restrictions" sides of things as well, such as "no
illicit" packages.

One difference between the real world highway system and what I'm describing
here that is of interest is the potential for overlapping boundaries of the
smaller (confederate) members. So, provided there is "region a", "region b",
"region c", and the "federated network", "region b" might overlap some with
"region a" and some with "region c", such that an individual in "region a"
could send a package to "region c" either via the "federated network" or via
"region b", provided the individual is fine with the terms set by "region b".

d) Provided you're working within the framework described above, I guess there
will be P2P, IPFS, and other protocols. So, I suggesting that a major
component that is missing is the communities, the goverment components. You
can come up with all the protocols you want, but until they are required by
the governments we legitimize, then they are not going to change society. So,
in summary, it's not a technical solution we need, it's a political.

------
80801
It seems like the turkish government is trying to create jobs here. Building a
"nationalised turkish twitter alternative"? The way things are right now, they
need a nationalized turkish github service first.

~~~
bbcbasic
Or a decentralized github service ;-)

~~~
fooker
Maybe a distributed version control system to power it? ;)

~~~
cschmittiey
You mean something like this?

[https://github.com/clehner/git-ssb](https://github.com/clehner/git-ssb)

~~~
tf2manu994
I think the joke was that git _is_ distributed already

~~~
bbcbasic
Yes but I feel the joke is on me as some kind of hosting makes discovery at
lot easier.

------
decafbad
It's a torrent file you damn ignorant politicians. Tell your favorite IT guys
to block this :
magnet:?xt=urn:btih:489b0cef1d7d49fe5ae2ae8cc2f0708b8286cbb3&dn=All+mail+Including+Spam+and+Trash.rar

~~~
wruza
176/354\. Hmm, it is pretty popular, will seed until 10.0.

~~~
Svenskunganka
Yeah it's more popular than I thought it would be. Currently seeding it with
my 1Gbit which is maxed out at ~112MB/sec, and looking at the peers there are
people from all over the world that are grabbing it. Either there are lots of
VPN users in the swarm or people are very interested in reading what the dump
contains.

Hopefully we'll see some more revalations in the upcoming days, I am worried
about the path Turkey is going but in the end it is the Turkish citizens that
decide.

~~~
trashcanaccount
I'm one that doesn't care what it contains, but want to help keep it available
for those who do care. I typically just seed linux isos and other free
software, but when there are leaks or other things that people care about I'll
chip in too.

I don't have 1 Gbps, so thanks for providing that bandwidth to the swarm, even
if it's only for a short amount of time.

------
Raed667
When blocking do they display a state issued message like "This website has
been blocked for X and Y reasons" (like in KSA)

Or do they just 404 it, like they used to do in Tunisia back in the days of
censorship?

~~~
beyti
No message, just not responding.

~~~
Raed667
Does using a VPN put people under any kind of threat like in the UAE?

~~~
beyti
Till today, I've never heard anyone sued over a situation like using vpn but
I'm sure we'll see that in not so distant future. For almost a year, I've been
forced to use vpn at least couple of times a month for a similar problem.

~~~
singularity2001
Glad to hear that you live in a country where people generally have to be sued
in order to be punished.

~~~
beyti
To be honest, for a couple of years, "justice" is not a thing in Turkey sadly.

If you become a target against government for any reason at all, you'll get
sued for an absurd claim, taken into prison till the law case to be handled
which will not be lasted for years.

There are dozens of examples of the scenario above including mostly
journalists, activists, military personnel etc.

To describe how serious this is let me give an example: I'm arguing my dad for
him to not share his political messages via facebook from his account. It is
that paranoid you've become that you fear for a simple fb message, you can
lose your parents.

------
hd4
There needs to be some kind of new censorship metric for governments, the
weaker the government, the more they try to censor and hinder use of the
internet by their citizenry.

~~~
ChoHag
The stronger the government, the more they succeed?

------
wfunction
Someone warned about this like yesterday...
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12668079](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12668079)

~~~
return0
Thats was not really valid. Every site is technical. There is far more
business documents in dropbox than in github. Plus the purpose of the leakers
is to create disruption, and apparently it works.

~~~
the_mitsuhiko
For people working in a turkey as programmers I'm pretty sure not having
access to GitHub and Dropbox is not great. Surely for political statements you
can use any stupid host.

~~~
lolc
It all depends on our goals. If the intent is to get people to act, disrupting
their life might just be the right thing to do. In this case I blame the
Turkish government 100%, the publishers of the material 0%. The guy in
question is actually shutting down opposition media in Turkey.

If we expect the dissidents to not use the best-connected channels available
to them for fear of inconveniencing others, we are complicit in silencing
them.

~~~
nashashmi
> disrupting their life might just be the right thing to do.

Never the right thing to do.

> we are complicit in silencing them.

This is akin to calming a baby crying really hard for attention.

I understand that you want to partake in a protest from really far away, but
you must have better ways of doing so than hurting them.

~~~
lolc
Civil disobedience has a long history of sometimes working.

> I understand that you want to partake in a protest from really far away, but
> you must have better ways of doing so than hurting them.

I'm observing, not partaking. The Turkish state is doing the hurting, don't
shift the blame.

------
CSDude
I am sad to say it but Github is also blocked.

------
bogomipz
I am curious and maybe someone form Turkey could say, does the government
inform people of these service disruptions?

I mean in addition to the economic impact from loss of productivity there is
the loss of time by everyone trying to troubleshoot what they may think is
"their technical problem" which is in fact an issue intentionally created at
the state level.

------
detay
Being an IT worker in Turkey is horribly hard.

------
rahkiin
Wow, this makes doing your work suddenly a lot harder... I wonder how much
this whole fiasco affects the software industry.

------
hrgeek
Any context on the why of those blocks? I've heard some of the news of the
situation in Turkey lately, but the article does not talks about why would
they block those services now...

------
bertan
I wonder when will the government sites be blocked? _sigh_

