Google confirms Turkish ISPs 'intercepted' its DNS service Google confirmed over the weekend that its Domain Name System (DNS) service has been “intercepted” by Turkish ISPs after government orders to block Twitter. Software engineer Steve Carstensen revealed in a brief blog post that the web giant had confirmed with its own research previous reports about the Twitter ban which began …
Oh the joy of working on the Internet in Turkey. A remember a few years ago being out in Istanbul to run a training class and one week they'd blocked port 22. YAWN, restart the SSH server on another port too and get back to working normally again. I mentioned the problem the next morning to my students, they all knew they needed to do this from time to time.
But it comes to something when a countries president is posting hacks to get people around restrictions imposed by their Prime Minister.
DNS has no protection from transparent proxying.
The protection from MIM leaves a lot to be desired too - you can break it by rewriting all zones as unsigned from the top and downwards. While most of the TLD zones are signed, the clients on end-user machines are not yet checking for the signatures and have no expectation that they should have a signature. So you just break them all :)
DNSCrypt (and to some extent DNSSec which aims to prevent a MITM NXDOMAIN via NSEC/NSEC3 records) would go some way towards fixing the MiTM vulnerabilities of DNS; but that's not really a meaningful workaround to this sort of situation as one can easily imagine that if they had been implemented and MiTM became too difficult to do, Turkey would have simply outright blocked routing to the IPs of the alternative resolvers instead. Tor (or something similar) would seem to be a more durable technical workaround here.
Until they block encryption wholesale except through approved addresses. And before you say stego, image mangling and other de-stego techniques can reduce any robust technique down to a trickle. Any other kind of data being passed would likely have enough structure to sniff.
Makes me wonder why no repressive regime has really taken this step as of yet.
I know this is a little off topic but I am hearing from so many sources that the potential for war between Syria and Turkey is extremely high. I was in Syria last year to photo document the conflict and am very well connected in the middle east. I started hearing things about 6 months ago and recently the suggestion is coming to me from many different sources. I sincerely hope they are wrong but they have been spot on about so many things in the past.
Sounds logical, when you are in power but vastly unpopular nothing as good as a war to raaly people behind you, being in Syria or on Terrorism.
The only war that seem unpopular with governments seems to be the war on poverty (which is usually the main force driving their unpopularity in the first place....). Probably because "poverty" is not a party supporter and doesn't contribute as much as the military industry :-(
Yeah, probably because "war on poverty" means liberalizing the economy. Instead of that, you get regulations, cronyism, powerful "liberal" action and the war on the poor.
If Turkey does Syria, the whole region might well resemble a can of gasoline going up in flames. At least we won't hear about the insufferable hectoring from our idiotic self-styled Lord Protectors Of Crimea anymore.
Better get some popcorn.
I "block" my personal access to it by never logging in to it, and effectively ignoring it, but people wishing to reach it should be allowed to do so.
Blocking Twitter (and Youtube) was a pointless thing to do anyway. People work around it easily, and all it does is show that you are a humourless bully who cannot take criticism.
"Blocking Twitter (and Youtube) was a pointless thing to do anyway."
Funnily enough, after our "riots" where the poor abused English unemployed middle class went after some new trainers, our goverenment got legislation passed to give them the ability to do exactly what Turkey have done.
Except it would work in the Uk. Our people are generally lazy and stupid, not caring (or really understanding) what happens to their liberties.
Just like to War on Drugs, Crime, Antisocial behaviour etc etc....
How do you know you are winning the war? By the number of people you lock and arrest..
Look at the budget for crime prevention* vs crime detention, it's a disgrace.
You won't get rid of crime, but you sure as hell can reduce it, but hey, if you have to close a youth centre to save £100k a year, those 4 or 5 kids it stopped from spiralling into crime, now cost £500k a year to lock up, but who cares, it's someone else's budget.
* proper crime prevention, not camera's. So youth clubs, after school clubs, decent street lighting, drug rehab centres, sporting facilities, gang intervention measures; things that time and time again have been proven to work, but as you can't but a figure on how much you *may* of saved, no-one gives a shit.
Was in (oriental side of) Istanbul last year when Taksim square protest/repression took place.
Let's put it that way the Daily Mail could win Pulitzer prize everyday. All except one newspapers are controlled/obey the government line. The TV was even worst. CNN Turks turning into Discovery channel and showing some zoological documentaries, ignoring the protest and repression.
The only way to get some coverage was my iPad and getting the BBC and French media.... or just open the hotel windows and listen to the pan noise and people protesting in the streets.
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