Turkish prez tw*ts YouTube ban
The Turkish president has come out against his country's banning of YouTube — and he let his opposition be known on Twitter. In a recent tweet, president Abdullah Gül told his 27,893 followers: "About Turkey’s YouTube prohibition: I don't approve of the state's blocking of Google categories. Legal channels can be found."1 …
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Turkey
The strange thing about this country is that in some ways, it is quite modern, even by western standards.
But nearly predictably, they display this kind of kneejerkism, should somebody high in the government be insulted. Good that their president at least criticizes Prime Minister Erdogan's Administration. A bit too diplomatic, though.
Blocking Google is for the internet what is castration for a man, maybe that is an analogy Mr Erdogan can understand. Probably the Google ban does not include the government's internet connection....
About a year ago, a cheap turkish airline was caught in Germany with worn-down tyres and consequentially grounded. The kneejerks in the turkish govt responded by grounding LTU, just as a retaliation, probably for insulting national pride or something. LTU had no technical/safety issues whatsoever.
Europe isn't suffering from "kneejerkism", you imply?
Extreme porn laws, detain overlong photographer laws, don't look like you're going to protest near whitehall laws.... And that's just the top of the iceberg in Britain. There's databases, quangos, rumourmills, blocklists, and whatnot else. Almost every ``civilised'' government already has, sometimes quite silently, or is in the process of rolling out ``internet measures'' and ``anti terrorist measures'' that are at least as bad even if they're different.
I say, welcome Turkey right away, that shining example of governmental transparency by comparison. Yes, they look backward, but compared to the supposed advanced rest, they're not at all. Carry on governments.
Shame
Never mind farmyards, Washington had far worse things on his mind. Mr Washington, hero and founding father ordered the Sullivan Campaign to "destroy" the Iroquois tribes for siding with the British during the revolutionary wars. A scorched-earth policy that saw the deaths of thousands of innocent Native Americans through starvation.
No one is 100% squeaky clean, everyone has something hiding in the back of the closet. One reason why the governments hate the internet, has nasty habit of airing dirty laundry whether you want it to or not.
Technically pathetic blocking
My understanding is that the implementation of the block is the DNS doesn't respond for the blocked domains. If you use a different DNS you can access Youtube. Apparently it is common knowledge in Turkey how to do this. YouTube is one of the most popular sites in Turkey. I've even heard that it isn't even blocked to this degree on at least one mobile network and it may even be promoted.
DNS
Yup, been there a few times and got people to set their own DNS up rather than use the ISP's one and hey presto youtube works
Quelle surprise?
Turkeys Islamist president is getting all fluffy liberal about a law that seems mainly to be used to censor any badmouthing of the founder of Turkeys avowedly secular state - which gave him and the various incarnations of his Islamist party a good deal of grief over the years, and more recently in his presidential campaign. Perhaps he really is sincere in his desire to reduce censorship in Turkey, but I suspect he'd prefer to replace the current closed mindedness with a more stifling variety more suited to his own politics and beliefs.
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