
Turkey has blocked Google DNS access to Twitter - _ks3e
http://www.todayszaman.com/news-342851-turkey-becomes-first-country-ever-to-ban-google-dns.html
======
ayi
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
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.

~~~
r0h1n
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
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.)

~~~
egeozcan
I wish there was an easy and unobtrusive way to invite people to correct my
English. Would it be okay to state that every once in a while in my comments?
My opinion is that people don't like it, not because it's rude but because it
carries the conversation off topic. I also wish there was a way to send a
private message here to remedy that but maybe that's me over-complicating
things.

~~~
Jtsummers
If you're particularly worried about a specific post (for instance, you're
uncertain of the right word when there are several words with similar
pronunciations/spellings, or it's just longer than a normal post), I'd say
just ask in that post. And regarding off-topic conversations, I say "meh".
Most threads get derailed by far less productive side-discussions. I usually
like to tuck corrections into actual conversation anyways. Respond normally,
and then as an aside (may be first or at the end) comment on the correct
spelling or usage of a word.

------
TrainedMonkey
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.

~~~
gioele
> Turkey can kiss EU membership ambitions goodbye.

Why? Single EU countries have widespread censoring infrastructure in place and
IP-based bans are common and normal. They are just not at stupid to ban hi-
profile sites yet.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship_in_Germany](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship_in_Germany)
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship_in_France](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship_in_France)
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship_in_Italy#In...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship_in_Italy#Internet_censorship)
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship_in_Denmark](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship_in_Denmark)
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship_in_the_Repu...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship_in_the_Republic_of_Ireland)
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship_in_the_Unit...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship_in_the_United_Kingdom)

Please note the common pattern of the justifications: censorship starts often
with "terrorism/children abuse/pornography", then covers "counterfeit
goods/media", finally "libel/hate speech".

~~~
thisiswrong
Very well said. This, and the EU's encouraging the fascist overthrow of the
democratically elected Ukrainian president has made me strongly opposed to the
current form of European 'Union'.

~~~
kalms
What makes them fascist in nature? I'm fascinated by your use of the word.

~~~
nzp
He's probably referring to considerable fascist elements in the Maidan
movement. The Right Sector[1] and Freedom[2] (formerly called Social-National
Party of Ukraine). The former is "just" fascist, and the latter is neo-nazi.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_Sector](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_Sector)

[2]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Svoboda_(political_party)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Svoboda_\(political_party\))

------
diorray
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.

------
biesnecker
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
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 ...

------
eurleif
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
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_
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
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.

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

~~~
rz2k
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.

------
cturhan
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
Strange ,no reaction from Obama on this one... ;)

~~~
ihsw
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.

------
jrochkind1
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
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
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
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.

~~~
miopa
Mass port blocking is easy. Not so hard and less disruptive is DPI of all port
53 traffic, blocking only requests for Twitter. In addition, you block the IP
address range of Twitter to foil the smart-asses who use hosts file.

------
enscr
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
> Time is ripe for a P2P real-time people-network

[http://twister.net.co](http://twister.net.co)

~~~
enscr
Looks cool, Hopefully more people pick it up. Does it have much traction with
any particular demographics?

------
higherpurpose
Good thing Tor exists:

[http://www.dailydot.com/technology/turkey-twitter-ban-tor-
us...](http://www.dailydot.com/technology/turkey-twitter-ban-tor-usage/)

~~~
Cuuugi
VPN's or other DNS server's would work better.

~~~
jeffisabelle
twitter's IP block also blocked, so other dns servers dont work either. VPNs
are quite OK now.

~~~
cturhan
Good news is you can change hosts file

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

------
ericraio
IIRC google dns is banned in North Korea. :)

~~~
valarauca1
And China, sort of. 8.8.8.8 is blocked in mainland china, but 8.8.4.4 is not.

~~~
btw0
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.

------
siculars
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
Blocking 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4, Google's public DNS servers, is exactly what
this article is about.

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

------
Jemaclus
This will end well.

------
Eleutheria
If the government shuts down the internet

keep calm

and shut down the government

~~~
r00fus
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.

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

~~~
prht
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.

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

