Only good thing coming from this is that I've discovered a software called Pritunl today which made setting up the VPN pretty easy.
There are just too many uneducated people here that are influenced by power and religious-themed party platforms. I'm not sure if I'm being elitist but a good democracy requires good, educated people.
The ruling party is systematically fucking the education system here, creating more religious schools, adding more voluntary religious classes. ProTip, in Turkey voluntary classes means it's probably mandatory since school headmasters tend to pick whatever they please for the students, citing scheduling problems and being understaffed.
I've made peace with the fact Erdogan is not going anywhere soon but I still hope for the country. I have an opinion about him and his party which is not popular among my peers. Erdogan is not a stupid bigot. He is not Trump, for example.
From the first day, AKP always hired the best minds in the country. The party had a culture of being reasonable, the founders were good, educated people with the right mindset. They were conservative, which I hate as an atheist, but also social democrats. They supported most things Bernie Sanders supports in the U.S. with a good balance for free market and capitalism. But they attracted stupid bigots as a result of being a religious party. They've done a good job bringing conservatives in Turkey together (also a result of hiring the best, their PR was always good[0]). AKP has a rule where their members can only serve 2 terms in the parliament. As time went by, good ones were replaced by the new generation of party leaders who are just puppets for the President. All the good people were pushed out of the party because they started to disobey orders from the top. They are bigots and too religious. Time to to time, I catch glimpses of Erdogan, supporting our secularism, saying "it's unacceptable to create an Islamic constitution".
As they push religion more on Turkey, more they'll lose support. Because educated people are looking to get away. Investors included. This is hurting the economy. President Erdogan or his advisors soon will see they need to be merging the country not separating it. They'll act more secular and sane. Because as it stands now, AKP will be lost in history after the President dies. They don't want that. They are also scared of religious powers here since the coup attempt. Only people they trust right now is the people they alienated and sentenced to life in prison. Kemalists.
All this combined, we'll see worst days after we see the light but I have hope we'll see it.
[0] The owner of agency which handled most things for the AKP lost his life, along with his son on the Bosphorus Bridge on the night of the coup attempt. Which is why I don't believe AKP was behind the attempt. He was always loyal and a good friend to the President. He cried at the funeral which is something I've never saw him do and not the best political action if it was a role.
(Quick note, I'm sorry if this is too political. I started writing a sentence but I wanted to say something like this for a while, I just had to get it out I guess.)
Besides, those leaks are really BS by the way. Those so called Redhack hackers are as idiot as the people who shuts down whole sites for nothing.
Thanks for the link.
Though there is a lesson in this, apart from politics etc.: if it's not public, don't put it on the net, e.g. set up a Raspberry Pi in your office with a static IP and use it as the DVCS server. Thus, what happens in the outer world does not disrupt your work, and if there is a problem or a need, you can sort it out.
https://www.reddit.com/r/europe/comments/56h0s3/they_just_bl...
Is the blocking able to handle stuff like fragrouter where the TCP stream is broken down into 1byte payload packets?
IMO blocking so many sites so broadly is a sign that their DPI is failing, because their preference seems to be to block as narrowly as possible because of negative economic effects.
[0] http://aa.com.tr/en/turkey/turkey-s-general-assembly-ratifie...
It's stream5 preprocessor can deal with most evasion techniques as it does full tcp stream reconstruction.
http://manual-snort-org.s3-website-us-east-1.amazonaws.com/n...
Edit: also shame on Twitter for complying with Turkey. The time they were proud of being part of social change like the Green Revolution in Iran seems over.
The risk of harm will always outweigh the minimal discomfort through free and open discourse that the internet inherently brings with it.
1. It keeps the tech industry domestic
2. The servers are physically inside China, guaranteeing them access to the data
This is why I've always thought that the Great Firewall's purpose is not only censorship, but also a form of Internet-age protectionism.
Tendency here is to quick-block-and-wait, and it is site owner who must prove, not they. "It seems like" is enough.
Btw, judge who blocked p*hub.com "didn't know it is popular".
On the other hand it has to go towards privacy, choice and democracy. Obviously cutting your citizen from the international websites is the one wrong way to stem local competition...
Hopefully we'll see some more revalations in the upcoming days, I am worried about the path Turkey is going but in the end it is the Turkish citizens that decide.
Or do they just 404 it, like they used to do in Tunisia back in the days of censorship?
I mean in addition to the economic impact from loss of productivity there is the loss of time by everyone trying to troubleshoot what they may think is "their technical problem" which is in fact an issue intentionally created at the state level.
a) "Private" neighborhood mesh networks should be more heavily utilized. They would be "private" from the rest of the Internet, but "public" in as much as they are community based / owned.
b) We should admit that cryptography is here to stay, and work with that assumption. End-to-end encryption doesn't automatically provide 100% anonymity. The traffic movement can still be traced. This is much like a car that is being followed by law enforcement from one private residence to another. Law enforcement doesn't yet know what is going on in either residence or in the car, but can still do there job, and eventually law enforcement can target a weak-point in the activities that does not rely on encryption, such as talking to neighbors, turning suspects into cooperating witnesses, or investigating legal activities such as bank statements. My point is, encryption is here to stay, and if good citizens can't use it, whatever, "criminals" (and political dissidents and victims of domestic violence, etc.) will use it. Additionally, in my mind, encryption should fall under the protection provided by the second amendment. It's important to remember that the second amendment was meant to allow citizens to arm themselves to protect themselves against the government in times of war. It was not meant to allow for folksy looking guns to go hunting for Bambi.
It might sound like I'm going on a crazy tangent, but consider what a decentralized web requires. It requires it's constituent parts to be equally robust. If they are not equally robust then there will quickly be a "winner takes all" shuffling of the lines of communication. If your local network is not robust, you're not going to use it for banking, health care, government communication, etc.
So, a decentralized web will be a "confederacy" of networks, each of which can choose to be equally robust in terms of network speed, capacity, and security. It isn't necessary that each is equal, but each must be allowed to be so if so desired.
c) Between local or regional networks a federal network would provide much the same purpose as the federal highway system currently does for car traffic. I say this to mean the same purpose both as relates to 1) physical movement, 2) freedom to execute such physical movement, and 3) legally enforcing certain rights and restrictions as relates to such traffic. 1) The federated networks work provide physical infrastructure for the traffic and provide financial and administrative mechanisms to make such traffic a reality. 2) The federated network would politically / legally enforce the equal rights of individuals belonging to regional / confederate members to participate in taking advantage of the federal network. 3) The federated network would enforce laws and regulations on the "restrictions" sides of things as well, such as "no illicit" packages.
One difference between the real world highway system and what I'm describing here that is of interest is the potential for overlapping boundaries of the smaller (confederate) members. So, provided there is "region a", "region b", "region c", and the "federated network", "region b" might overlap some with "region a" and some with "region c", such that an individual in "region a" could send a package to "region c" either via the "federated network" or via "region b", provided the individual is fine with the terms set by "region b".
d) Provided you're working within the framework described above, I guess there will be P2P, IPFS, and other protocols. So, I suggesting that a major component that is missing is the communities, the goverment components. You can come up with all the protocols you want, but until they are required by the governments we legitimize, then they are not going to change society. So, in summary, it's not a technical solution we need, it's a political.
Stream fragmentation has its own entire configuration in snort as it is a known attack method to bypass detection.
Last I remember that top end box was 2x 12 or 16 core Xeon CPUs with 256GB ram.
I don't have 1 Gbps, so thanks for providing that bandwidth to the swarm, even if it's only for a short amount of time.
http://www.dailydot.com/layer8/redhack-turkey-albayrak-censo...
I wish we still had good investigative reports who'll read those e-mails and summarize it for us.
And American companies seem to go along with it, thinking they have no choice. They do, but they're too scared to lose the Chinese market to risk anything at all, and second, they're too shortsighted to create strong alliances with their competitors to speak out against Chinese policies.
Think about how Microsoft was ecstatic that Google was getting banned from China, believing this would be an "opportunity" for the company to gain market share - it wasn't. Baidu filled out all the vacuum left by Google. And now Microsoft has to accept whatever bullshit policies China throws at it, too.
Instead of allying with Google and others, it thought it can pull one over Google. That's the kind of shortsighted thinking I'm talking about. If American companies want to thrive in China, they need to create strong alliances and cooperate more against bad Chinese government policies, and not sell each other out for some promised short-term gains, that they'll lose in the end to local companies anyway.
What I see is a trend to rebuild on the Internet the same borders that are enforced in the physical world. Some countries will keep their internets open to each others, others are already closing them down partially. They're probably putting them at a disadvantage, especially the small ones, but the governments usually only cares about keeping their seats.
Which any state-sponsored actor can easily do, of course.
http://arstechnica.com/security/2013/01/turkish-government-a...
If you become a target against government for any reason at all, you'll get sued for an absurd claim, taken into prison till the law case to be handled which will not be lasted for years.
There are dozens of examples of the scenario above including mostly journalists, activists, military personnel etc.
To describe how serious this is let me give an example: I'm arguing my dad for him to not share his political messages via facebook from his account. It is that paranoid you've become that you fear for a simple fb message, you can lose your parents.
I know in China VPNs are a game of whackamole but I haven't heard of any personal liability for using one.
If we expect the dissidents to not use the best-connected channels available to them for fear of inconveniencing others, we are complicit in silencing them.
Never the right thing to do.
> we are complicit in silencing them.
This is akin to calming a baby crying really hard for attention.
I understand that you want to partake in a protest from really far away, but you must have better ways of doing so than hurting them.
> I understand that you want to partake in a protest from really far away, but you must have better ways of doing so than hurting them.
I'm observing, not partaking. The Turkish state is doing the hurting, don't shift the blame.
You're not being elitist - good government requires good decisions, which require being educated about the topic. When the people are involved in government (democracy), they also need to understand the ramifications of what they do. The better politically-educated the demographic, the more effective the democracy will be, all other things being equal (which they're usually not...).
Majoritarianism should not be confused with democracy.
(OK, you want to look up Polybius and the word ochlocracy. But it still comes to that.)
There are more than a handful of bigoted statements that have come from Erdogan:
Some examples:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2014/08/06...
https://www.frontpagemag.com/point/196265/understanding-turk...
"On 5 August 2014, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, in a televised interview on NTV news network, remarked that being Armenian is "uglier" even than being Georgian, saying "You wouldn't believe the things they have said about me. They have said I am Georgian...they have said even uglier things - they have called me Armenian, but I am Turkish"
Context is this, some people in Turkey loves to attack people/politicians for their ethnicity. And I guess some people called him Georgian or Armenian descendant. However, some said it as "Ermeni dölü" - a little hard to translate - "from Armenian seed (or semen)". During his speech he says exactly this: "They called me Georgian. They called me, excuse me, in a very ugly way, Armenian". This is a typical conservative way of talking. He refrained himself using the term "döl-semen" and terms "excuse me" and "very ugly way" was for that word, not for "Armenian".
Of course, to me correct way of talking about this issue could be "they call me this and that.. who cares!"
And this is not the only one. I have provided exampled of at least two others.
This was the rebuttal against the claim. And, it was so obvious to conservative speakers or old timers like me. I was actually baffled that people misunderstood this.
Also, If you are a native speaker, it is obvious (listen it first if you want https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_UPIF2ql7pw ).
He says "Benim için mesela neler söylediler, çıktı bir tanesi aynı zihniyet Gürcüdür diyen oldu. Çıktı bir tanesi afedersin çok daha çirkin şeylerle Ermeni diyen oldu.." "then one another came out and told, excuse me, with much more uglier things, Armenian."
Grammatically you would not use the term "şeylerle - with..things" there to got the other meaning. Prosody and stops also would be weird to get that meaning. Use of "excuse me" before telling an inappropriate word is also very well known (not for a word like Armenian). It is common that in Turkey many politicians were smeared with slurs like "Armenian dölü-seed" or "Yunan dölü" and he was called with that. He is defining the adjective used frequently. Besides, he is known as the person who tries to break the ice with Armenians state level, do you think he would insult Armenians so calmly like that?
Your second link is based on a racist speech claim. However I cannot find the original Turkish speech to make more comments. But it is a well known fact that there is no black-white racism in Turkey. But please provide a better source to dig further.
Really? I think Didier Drogba and many others might disagree with you. This was well-publicized:
http://www.nationalturk.com/en/turkish-derbysome-of-fools-sh...
http://www.goal.com/en/news/467/turkey/2013/05/21/3993492/dr...
In regards to the second link, there is another link here:
To compare any established football team's supporting crowd to a countries Democratic process is foolish.
We're not about to start comparing the social status of Britain to West Ham's Claret and Blue Army, are we? I'd suggest we do not follow the same in Turkey.
Nowhere did I attempt to conflate racism with democratic process. I even included the one particular statement I was responding to in my post which was:
"But it is a well known fact that there is no black-white racism in Turkey."