back to article Turkey's farcical Twitter ban leads to SPIKE in tweets

The volume of messages sent Turkish Twitter users may have grown by over 130 per cent as users turn to a range of workarounds to circumvent a government banimposed late last week The ban initially appeared to come in the form of a DNS redirect from the country’s ISPs. This took users to a statement explaining that Twitter is …

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  1. Ruairi

    I'm surprised at this for a number of reasons.

    Any single competent network engineer would just drop AS13414 at the border, and be done with it (And AS35995/AS54888, since Twitter have multiple AS's). However that's not the case... So I can only assume the technical advisor to the government either didnt want to have a functional ban in place, or was not competent enough to advise correctly.

    I'm also surprised that Twitter dont start the whack-a-mole game of spinning up EC2 instances as light weight reverse proxies for their service, then GeoDNS to target Turkish users.

    1. Vociferous

      So how, exactly, would that block access via foreign proxies/tor?

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      "...the technical advisor to the government ..."

      Extrapolating from the UK, 'competence' is unlikely to feature anywhere beyond the job ad.

      1. DropBear
        Facepalm

        I'm not entirely sold on that one...

        - "...but sir, we cannot effectively block Twitter. Workarounds will be found! "

        - "Don't tell me what you can't do! Tell me what you can!"

        - "Well, we could block Twitter's domain name, but..."

        - "Then why are we still having this conversation?!? Do it already!"

    3. Sebby

      Google DNS is blocked; it doesn't matter what Twitter's authority servers say.

      And, you must have noticed by now, but Turkey is, in fact, null-routing Twitter.

  2. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Something all Governments desire, a way to cut out any dissent from opposition....

    Thankfully, those in Government are not clever enough, if they were they would have proper jobs.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      So I gather you don't want a proper job? :-)

  3. Winkypop Silver badge
    Linux

    Turkeys

    The mortal enemy of the blue bird of happiness!

  4. Gav

    "The volume of messages sent Turkish Twitter users"

    "The volume of messages sent Turkish Twitter users..."

    Lead sentence is missing a "by"

  5. Jonathan Richards 1
    Headmaster

    Vital... really?

    Useful, I could see. Widely-used, certainly. Desirable, even, in the context of not being muzzled by your own government. But vital, I think might be hypeing it a bit.

  6. Glostermeteor

    Even the President of Turkey thinks it's a bad idea

    I love it how even the President of Turkey took to Twitter saying the ban was ridiculous. The widespread use of VPNs makes blocking any website impossible. UAE bans Skype for example, so I just set up a VPN on my phone before I go there (Hotspot Shield is a great example) and hey presto I have Skype. The West is doing the same thing though, with the blocking of Pirate Bay and other sites like it. That ban is also completely ineffective.

  7. Charlie Clark Silver badge
    Unhappy

    If only they'd done it properly…

    I might consider moving there just to get away from the "join the conversation" shit that seems to infect modern life.

  8. John Brown (no body) Silver badge
    Facepalm

    "the numbers they can use to SMS their tweets."

    Ask any random flock of twitterers when they last sent a tweet by txt msg and most will look blankly at you.

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