Turkish filters block Reg commentards
The following story was based upon a mistaken assumption that the censorship as described was due to a Turkish governmental directive. That assumption was incorrect. The blockage of the pages discussed was instead merely instituted at a local level - in our reporter's case, through hotel-hosted web access. The Reg page as …
Looks like the word Web is banned unless it is seen with the word apache, +(-apache,web) , add filter for web where it is not seen with apache, similarly +(-chicken,breast). You can have chicken breast but not +(tour, free, horny) which would crank the inappropriate count up.
One oppressive government in the EU is enough IMHO.
Turkey OGC
....'the armenian genocide is not a myth' is right out then.
Are they really doing content inspection on a whole country (which would require a huge infrastructure), or did somebody manage to use his corporate/provider proxy on a wireless connection on the iphone?
Doing this sort of thing seems.. absurd. Especially with the dumb filter rules.
What if they'd want to take a free tour of the horny goat beer brewery ?
So now if you want to restrict turkish access to your website, you now have a list of key words to include.
I particularly like the fact that 'report' is considered bad unless it's a news report... presumably they're trying to block things like reports of MPs expenses and such other offensive reports.
Also, you're not permitted to help any lesbians other than with advice?? Not alowed to discuss education or the environment other than with an article?
Lovely
Thank the Turkish for me... My working set of cynical euphemisms has been running low these days and frankly the "expletive deleted" (memory jog: Nixon years, Bob Haldeman... ) is just so old-school.
What I want to know is, given the extraordinarily high fuck count in that list of terms, what's out there to be censored that's more potty-mouthed than the page presented to the viewer by the censorware?
Just out of interest, is there a Reg comments section that contains more usage of the word fuck (i.e. a higher fuck to other word ratio) than that little lot? Can we link it so that Turkish readers can not see an example of what they are not seeing?
Then anyone mentioning the Armenian genocide or suggesting that Ataturk was anything less than perfect will be on the receiving end of a European arrest warrant.
And you thought the Anglo-American extradition treaty was dodgy...
Its incredible (or a bug) that they the the user know or guess why the page was blocked. The other blockages described in the article seem heavy handed, but this example is transparent and balanced (for a certain value of balance). Maybe its just a mistake ;)
But that still dosen't explain why they ban the word web.
so is it a matter of seeding the comments with the canceling out keywords? perhaps a little footer on the comments page with "advice and news article about apache chicken farming" etc.
Whilst the historic cases like Youtube being banned were merely cases of an over-sensitive national pride, they hid the real sense of conflict in modern Turkey between those that look to the West and those that would rather look to Mecca. Turkey has been a secular state since the days of Ataturk and his drive to drag the country into the modern age. But if you visit major news sites you'd never know - even sites like the BBC often refer to Turkey as a Muslim state. There is no doubt the current Islamist government has pushed the Islamisation agenda, much to the annoyance of Turkey's religeous minorities. Last year when I was in Ankara I met Turkish people desperate for Turkey to join the EU so they could easily move to countries like Italy. One in particular was a web designer and a Greek Orthodox Christian, and he described the Turkish government's attempts to impose Islamic moral values and censorship as "economic and social regression".
So does Turkey have a Big Firewall or just the company providing connectivity on which our esteemed co-reader happened to be perusing the Regalia in question?
So basically I can talk about a lesbian with great breasts as long as I also give some chicken advice. Sorted.
In a strangely masochistic way, I love it when you make me use a dictionary.
Yup, looks like it.
Why only chicken breast? Is +(-turkey, breast) an affront to national pride? We need to be told.
[Everywhere I've worked at with filtering has mysteriously found dictionary and thesaurus sites blocked after *someone* did searches for naughty words]
Nicely analysed (that rules out my comment for containing "anal"). Does this mean Turks are going to be exposed to chicken porn now?
.......turkey gobbler
that's 4/160, or is it 5?
This is genious --- to prevent you from seeing the smut spread over the page, this method helpfully concentrates it for higher efficacity.
Rik and all wanna be racists:
Are you able to browse goatse from your workplace?
No? So by your sordid logic USA / UK (insert your country of choice) must be cencoring the web.
It is just the automated moderating scripts that is doing the blocking (possibly not even the state controlled Telecom company as it is clear that the user accessing the web via wifi).
Unless you have proof that the blokage was sanctioned by the Turkish Goverment GFY!
I never condone the actions of the state to cencor the web but you have to give the credit where it is due!
Moderatrix: How did this biased and inflammatory article even made it to this quality site?
Yeah, I would block Dawkins' site too, the man just annoys me...
At least now it's official, courtesy El Turkey Government. I'd add some snarky comment on whether it's a good idea to let this censoring country join the EU, but then the rest of the EU is censoring too. Yes, welcome, good Turkey Friends!
"The Reg to Ankara: block YouTube and others if you must, but when you mess with our readers' right to self-expression, you risk inciting the wrath of Vulture Central"
I bet they're bricking it now...
... how come the iPhone, shown in Flight Mode, has a wireless WLAN connection?
The iPhone permits you to enable WLAN whilst in flight mode for those people who fly with airlines good enough to have onboard wireless.
Orange blocking me from accessing MoneySavingExpert over mobile broadband, purportedly because it contains inappropriate content* (although their home broadband has no such limitation). There's a whole host of seemingly innocuous sites that Orange block. But apparently because these people are Johnny Foreigner With A Tan they are dancing their little hooved feet over freedom?
Paris because apparently she has inappropriate content.
*probably because of the epic thread with umpteen thousand posts detailing how to wriggle out your contract in fairness
Remember- El Reg is quite probably the only tech news site with a space program. So they're high tech and high skill. Plus someone on here probably has the details of that $5k cruise missile...
Plus, a lot of the commentards have played computer games- which totally teaches you to use guns and not care about killing others.
A message to those who believe they can censor comments better than the Moderatrix: Be afraid! :p
I can get anything with fucking open comments so fuckers in turkey can't fucking read the fucking thing just by fucking posting fuck a lot of fucking times so the fucking censorship fucktards fuck up and fuck the site on the fucked-up assumption it's a fucking site about fucking?
Fucking A!
Nope, no censoring here just checked it with your suggested site.
AAAAARRRGGGHHH! MY EYES, MY EYES
So you have the audacity to say: "...at least you don't live in Turkey."
...and yet we don't know for sure if the blockage was Government sanctioned. So when exactly did Rupert Murdoch buy this site? This type of 'lacks research, lacks objectivity' reporting is something I'd expect to see on Fox News, not The Register.
And since when has 'living in the UK' been something worth being superiour over, If I'm not mistaken we did block some Wikipedia pages at one point. And archive.org
Not a good article...
And tells you the reason it cannot display the page is by repeating the word its saved you from seeing.
I'm based in London but use a proxy server in the Turkish office at the corporate I work for to get around the fact that the UK one is heavily websensed. No I can't get you tube, but I can see that comment page fine.
How disgusting!
I'm appalled!
That's it, I'm off...
"You may suffer under the heavy hand of the Moderatrix "
This wonderful opening line and no one comments?
Our BEEloved and BEEleaguered Moderatrix does not have a heavy hand. A large whip maybe; wielded with loving care upon the teeming masses of commentards, but not a heavy hand.
You mean the country Turkey was the one doing the censorship and not a turkey? Damnit Lester you just ruined my day-dreaming about Gobbles the turkey doing at the blocking at a keyboard.
That's odd, I'm reading the page without any censor things , and I'm in Turkey, using Turkish Telecom's ADSL network.. the mainstream thing that most ppl use..
So words such as "education", "learning", and "research" are considered dirty words in Turkey.
Says it all really.
If that's a stock iPhone (i.e., not jailbroken or otherwise modified) why is there an active WiFi connection indicator AND and Airplane Mode indicator?
I smell trickery...
There is censorship in Turkey for a lot of websites (including quite a lot of online porn -internet's reason for existence- along with some others such as geocities, youtube, google sites, etc).
But the basis of this particular story is invalid - neither the link in question, nor the site, nor the comments have been blocked.
Actually the blockage in question is a quite basic DNS filter (and easily circumvented, but that's not the point, its existence is). There isn't a sophisticated keyword based filter, such as the great firewall of china.
Getting the facts straight is important, even for commentards. Better an anal nitpicker than a retard.
The European Commission is proposing mandatory blocking across the EU (not reported in El Reg yet, for some reason). This proposal is in the draft Framework Decision on child exploitation.
A study on the legal and technical aspects of blocking was published recently (not reported in El Reg yet, for some reason)
http://www.aconite.com/blocking/study
