
Access to Wikipedia restored in Turkey after more than two and a half years - EndXA
https://wikimediafoundation.org/news/2020/01/15/access-to-wikipedia-restored-in-turkey-after-more-than-two-and-a-half-years/
======
rdiddly
_"... 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_.

~~~
sdinsn
> guys it was lifted

After 2.5 years... Let's not pretend like this is some major success. It's a
failure by all accounts that luckily ended up OK.

~~~
vunie
Compared to illegal mass surveillance programs that remain running to this
day, and a witty intelligence head who remains free after lying under oath,
this is a shinning success that should be celebrated.

Hopefully other nations follow their lead one day.

~~~
Twixes
Turkish authorities don't have global tech giants to tap into, but worry not,
they're monitoring the internet very closely. In fact, they arrest people over
tweets criticizing their rule. [0] And of course they block Wikipedia
country–wide, over what Donald Trump would call "fake news" (as he does with
news outlets revealing embarrassing facts about him or his administration).
Not an example to be followed by any government on Earth.

[0] [https://www.hrw.org/news/2018/03/27/turkey-crackdown-
social-...](https://www.hrw.org/news/2018/03/27/turkey-crackdown-social-media-
posts)

~~~
remcob
I think grandparent was not about having surveillance programs or not, but
about whether the government is being held accountable to it's own laws. A
quality that is worryingly slipping in several nations. Hence the emphasis on
'illegal' and the shoddy investigation with little follow-up.

------
kitteh
Turkey 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.

~~~
decafbad
That's not the case anymore. They built an application level filter. For
example, Wikipedia block was due to http header reading. https wasn't also a
solution because of hand-shaking part. Even TOR can be blocked this way but
it's reachable through obfs4proxy.

Besides that, DNS queries to all servers are blocked if you try to get a
blocked site's IP. No hijacking attempt here, as far as I can see.

I routed only Wikipedia through TOR with a browser extension. With this setup
not all DNS queries goes through proxy. So I had to take advantage of CoreDNS'
dns-over-tls support.

Because people who knows basic networking and also read English are less than
a thousandth of the country, their method works very well enough.

~~~
insomniacity
“DNS queries to all servers are blocked if you try to get a blocked site's IP”

Wait, so if I was in Turkey, a request for wikipedia.org to my ISP DNS server
would not only have failed, but caused all my other queries to fail as well?
For how long?

~~~
decafbad
I think I couldn't explain well. When we use ISP's DNS, we get a local IP
address and a web-page at that address, explaining who blocked the site and
why. But if I use Google's or Cloudflare's public DNS, the query won't get an
answer, falls to timeout.

~~~
insomniacity
Gotcha. Thanks for explaining!

------
eralps
I 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
The 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.

~~~
monadic2
I’m not sure I buy this. Sure you can have access to the “truth” in the west,
but you also see a staggering amount of propaganda/mass manipulation/willful
distraction and no easy way of differentiating the two.

That said, wikipedia specifically would be a massive loss to anyone.

~~~
erikpukinskis
You’re right that learning to read critically is a challenge, but the idea
that just not having access to the written word is somehow better...

I guess I’ll put it in your terms: I have a hard time buying that.

If your suggestion is that it’d be better to go back to a centrally controlled
publishing industry... I also don’t buy that.

~~~
monadic2
Reading critically is hardly a solution to this; you evaluate “truth” based on
sources and authorities with internalized misinformation themselves entirely
rationally. I don’t have a prescription, and I am certainly against
censorship.

------
kyriakos
Don'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
You can leave out the 'potentially'. There is no way that any coup would
justify putting this many people in jail.

~~~
diminish
Somehow 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

~~~
diego_moita
> 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
egypt & bolivia are the only military dictatorship and have full support from
democratic west.

------
baybal2
While 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)

~~~
kariha
It'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#c...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Block_of_Wikipedia_in_Turkey#cite_note-54)

~~~
baybal2
Yes, that is the formal pretext, but everybody knows that Erdogan's damat is
the real reason

~~~
kariha
That's misrepresentation of the root cause. The block was there, because it's
easy to block. Uber is blocked in Turkey, you can't even access uber.com.
Pastebin.com is blocked due to a data leak was posted in there a couple of
years ago. Imgur is banned due to pro-terrorism post, AFAIK but I'm not sure.
There's no damat (son-in-law) in those cases. Damat is a multiplier but not a
reason.

------
brenden2
I 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
As 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
Unless he hoards wealth and assets in a third party area, like Mars,
Antarctica, or his private home with a hired army

~~~
Ididntdothis
Billionaires 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
He'd have to have them on bitcoin payroll.

~~~
justinclift
_Maybe_ some kind of cryptocurrency, but it's unlike to be Bitcoin. When
people get paid, they want the value of their payment to not massively go
up/down each week.

~~~
mirekrusin
You can be paid usd amount at the fx at the time of transfer in bitcoin and
you can convert it right away if you want. Or use stablecoin for transfers.
It's actually relatively trivial to have dozens of options of payment options
depending on employee preference (I mean once you have cryptocurrency payroll
setup it's not difficult to have all available options... available and
customizable by receiver).

------
sebastianconcpt
_This 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._

------
milankragujevic
Wikipedia 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?

~~~
diminish
Wikipedia is up in Turkey for already a week I guess. So no.

------
newuser12341345
This 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!

~~~
sedatk
Turkey ISPs throttle or ban foreign VPN services.

~~~
CENGaverK
No

~~~
sedatk
Here is a source: [http://www.diken.com.tr/bu-da-oldu-erisim-engelini-asan-
vpn-...](http://www.diken.com.tr/bu-da-oldu-erisim-engelini-asan-vpn-
hizmetlerine-de-erisim-engeli-getirildi/)

------
mmhsieh
without 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
if you're smart enough to be in grad school, you're smart enough to have a VPN

~~~
mmhsieh
yes, but not all countries smile on use of VPNs. i don't know about turkey but
in others you can get in some trouble.

~~~
zehemer
More like inconvenience than trouble, I would say, as most prominent VPN
providers are blocked at IP level.

~~~
mmhsieh
i am told by expats that you can use VPNs in china to get access to blocked
sites; i am also told that the government generally turns a blind eye,
especially to foreigners using VPNs. how they deal with chinese users, in
terms of social credit score, is something that is opaque. it seems like an
inherently "antisocial" activity by the standards of their governance.

this is all assuming that with nation state resources they can identify use of
VPNs at the user level.

------
slater
I wonder if Wikipedia currently being down has anything to do with access
being restored

------
andrewseanryan
I couldn’t believe I couldn’t access Wikipedia when I was in Turkey. If
Wikipedia is blocked, how many other sites are blocked?

------
sys_64738
Any government that suppresses the internet like this deserves to be
overthrown.

------
cnst
What 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/1050...](https://mailman.nanog.org/pipermail/nanog/2019-December/105002.html)

Any news stories about such development? Or do they only care about Turkey?

~~~
Thorrez
They 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/wikipe...](https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/phame/post/view/111/wikipedia_goes_100_forward_secret/)

~~~
cnst
Can 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
I 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#Ciphe...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transport_Layer_Security#Cipher)

~~~
cnst
That's all fine and dandy, but why does it matter? This is not some sort of
personal messaging, banking or financial transactions that we're talking
about; this is literally an online resource where any anonymous user can come
and edit anything they please without any sort of authentication or peer
review whatsoever — on English Wikipedia, all edits are immediately shown to
all subsequent visitors/readers, even the vandalism made by anonymous users,
which on some articles goes undetected for months or even years at a time,
especially in cases where the vandalism is subtle-enough.

Put it simply, it's literally a big dump of unverified information, even if
some of it appears to be relatively reliable and of good quality most of the
time; how is preventing me from accessing it from my iPad or Android magically
makes it so great and "secure"? Don't they have any bigger problems to worry
about?

And what does PCI-DSS compliance has to do with an encyclopaedia? How does it
benefit Wikipedia from being PCI-DSS compliant? What's next — is Wikipedia
going to adopt EDD-KYC, too?

~~~
niij
They accept credit card donations on the site.

~~~
cnst
No, they don't.

There's only one link for words "donate", and it leads to
[https://donate.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:FundraiserRedirect...](https://donate.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:FundraiserRedirector?utm_source=donate&utm_medium=sidebar&utm_campaign=C13_en.wikipedia.org&uselang=en),
which is an entirely different site from en.wikipedia.org.

Or are you saying there's something in PCI-DSS that would prohibit creating a
link from an insecure website to a secure one?

------
tomerbd
The people of Turkey have voted for him right? He improved their economic
situation enormously, this is democracy, you get who you vote for.

~~~
lostlogin
It’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.

~~~
mengibar10
and you can say that while Erdogan's party lost all local elections couple of
months ago in all major cities like Ankara, Istanbul?

~~~
lostlogin
> 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_el...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018_Turkish_presidential_election#Controversies)

~~~
mengibar10
What 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
And 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.

