Access to Wikipedia restored in Turkey after more than two and a half years
wikimediafoundation.org
wikimediafoundation.org
Your takeaways:
1) Turkey has a Constitutional Court.
2) Turkey has a constitution.
3) The court makes rulings and they are carried out.
4) Erdogan did something and it was "checked" and "balanced."
Sounds an awful lot like a nation of laws, ruled by principles and such. Courts always take a while to catch up, just like e.g. investigations and pretty much every process governed by facts. But yeah, cause for some optimism. Lot of yelling here today about the block - guys it was lifted. After a ruling by a court.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/jul/18/un-urged-to-ac...
Absolute power is dangerous and the mind starts to slip after a while.
In turn, the religious cult was allowed (by Erdoğan, with the 2010 referendum) to colonize the military and the judicial system because previously they were colonized by hardliner modernists who had a history of doing coups or closing down political parties when someone they don't like come to power, and explicitly threatened Erdoğan[1][2].
[0]: http://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/ex-exam-chief-indicted-over...
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Justice_and_Development_P...
Ok, just so we're clear on this: that's ridiculous nonsense, conspiracy theories basically, but you're using it to justify the indefensible actions of a hard-line authoritarian ruler.
Turkey is the country that the term "deep state" was coined to describe. I don't know what to believe about the so-called coup.
Would really appreciate If you could explain what Gulenism is about and particular where it differs from the Erdoganian Muslim Brotherhood ideology.
> “The coup attempt was not initiated by the government. Before July 15 the government had already started a big purge so parts of the military thought they should do a coup quickly before it hit them too,” Kahl said.
In [0], Kahl dismisses the possibility that the Gülen movement did the coup. However, he fails to mention which other group in the military "feared" the purge and was big enough to attempt a coup.
If you combine that with: - the 2010-11 purge of nationalist-modernists from the army was directed by Gülen people[1][2] (and supported by Erdoğan[3]) - all 4 military schools were totally infiltrated by Gülenists[4]
you would see that the Gülen movement was certainly in the army, and after the purge of nationalist-modernists, there was no other group in the Turkish army big enough and pissed off with the govt enough to attempt a coup. The testimonies of suspected army officers[5] mentioning Gülen is no surprise at this point.
When I see the purge of Gülen supporters to be generalized to Erdoğan opponents, something goes off in my mind. People who are against both Erdoğan and Gülen weren't targeted for that purge. If anything, they were trusted more than before, because many pro-Erdoğan people could get into state positions using Gülen connections pre-2013.
A good guestion to ask here is why did Erdoğan facilitate Gülen's infiltration of the institutions in the first place. As I mentioned above, it was because he feared a Kemalist coup or party shutdown. So, if Turkey didn't have the habit of "fending off populists with coups", none of this would happen. Or maybe it would?
All in all, what I'm trying to say is that the whole issue is more complex than "autocrat bad punish opponents".
---
[0]: https://www.rt.com/news/381290-bnd-gulen-erdogan-coup/
[1]: http://www.hurriyet.com.tr/gundem/son-dakika-ergenekon-davas...
[2]: https://www.aa.com.tr/tr/15-temmuz-darbe-girisimi/balyoz-dav...
[3]: http://www.radikal.com.tr/politika/erdogan-evet-savciyiz-888...
[4]: https://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2016/08/turkey-gu...
[5]: https://t24.com.tr/haber/15-temmuz-darbe-girisimi-ifadeleri-...
The voters can also stop him. Instead, Turkish voters not only re-elected him multiple times, they even voted in one special election to give him even more power.
The Turkish people are getting the government they've voted for.
>Absolute power is dangerous and the mind starts to slip after a while.
Yes, but what can you do when a nation of people democratically decide to give someone absolute power? If you try to prevent this, then you're working against democracy.
As for repression, Erdogan didn't do that all by himself. Autocrats like that persist because they have a power structure under them that supports them and keeps them in power. In a democratic country like Turkey, this is supported by the people voting to keep these power structures in place. In short, the majority of the people there do support him. Yeah, it sucks that he repressed minorities, but that's one of the dangers of democracy: if the majority doesn't care about protecting minorities and their civil rights, then the minorities get stomped on. The only thing that makes a democratic system better than a completely autocratic system (like North Korea) is that at least in the democracy, there's a chance the majority will protect the minorities, and whatever institutions have been built in the system of government to do so and prevent leaders from having too much power. But as Turkey shows, and also in Germany in the 1930s, it sometimes falls apart, mainly because the people allow it to.
The general point here is that, no, Turkey is not, in fact, a banana republic, but ultimately a pretty normal enlightenment-ideas-based country which is dealing with a leader that tries to stretch everything it can find to give himself more unrestrained power. That should unfortunately be pretty familiar to people who live in the US at this point.
Up until 1851 the largest minority in the Empire were Muslims at 45% of the population, followed by Christians at 35%. You could argue that it's an unbroken lineage because 35% of the population still followed Roman law which was still valid and in full force, or you could argue that the most populous minority didn't, therefore a broken lineage.
In either case, the reality is more shades of grey, of course: all jurisdictions of accepted law evolved side by side with some crosstalk over time. Ultimately though, Turkey terminated the application of muslim law, removed it entirely from its code and completely switched to a western code after World War I, roughly coincident with the collapse of the Empire and the foundation of the current, modern Republic.
It's subject to both European Court of Justice, and the European Court of Human Rights as the ultimate courts of appeal, both of which, I believe, have some presiding Turkish judges.
(My knowledge in this field is very superficial — if someone knows better, please feel free to correct!)
Do you know how this worked with disputes between people of different religions?
The judicial system of this empire was quite accommodative for an Islamic system. It had Islamic courts which were the primary courts and they formed the cornerstone of administration in the empire. But there were also other courts that were not based on Sharia law and were meant for the interpretation of the law as understood by non-Muslims who were part of the empire. They included Jews and Christians who had been welcomed to the empire and lived in groupings called millets. But the Jews and Christians had the freedom to take their cases to the Islamic courts if they wanted to and many did as a way of giving judicial credence to their cases, given the immense unofficial respect that was given to the Islamic courts. It should be noted that this recognition was informal and any decision from the other courts were equally respected in the empire.
The third type of courts was the trade/commercial/industrial or business courts. In these courts, disputes emanating from business within the empire were solved. The parties involved determined the inclination and sometimes, both Islamic law experts and Christian and Jewish judicial officers would sit side by side and decide a case. They were more concerned with securing justice and fairness and religion was never a key consideration. New laws into the three types of courts came from the top leadership as well as the judicial experts of the three courts.
They are both institutions of the state and since the Ottoman Empire was an Islam state, they were obviously Islamic. But, Divan-i Humayun's decisions were "Sultan's Word" so they had to be fair. The usual/accepted route is to go Kadi first and then you can appeal to Divan-i Humayun. But it's seen im records that sometimes non-Muslims directly went to Divan-i Humayun because they believed that they wouldn't be treated fair at Kadi.
It's a rhetoric question. There is nothing "enlightened" about modern Turkey: it is a de facto military dictatorship, belligerent and militaristic, that relishes its self-chosen role as the regional bully in the Eastern Mediterrannean and the Near East. It was like this before Erdogan (with Turgut Ozal) and it will be like this after Erdogan, and for a long time still.
But perhaps I'm just blinded by prejudice having lived most of my life in Greece, which is right next door to Turkey. Perhaps you -presumably not living so close to Turkey- may have a broader perspective that I am missing.
In that case, can you name one time in the last 45 years when Turky has actively promoted peace and stability in the regions it borders? (I'm leaving out 1974, the year of the invasion of Cyprus, to make it easier).
Is this level of trolling even considered trying? Trump has done very little to expand the powers of the US presidency.
Beautiful strawman here. Let's let Turkey go on denying genocide, murdering Kurds, destabilizing the region, and arresting political opponents and holding them without charges, because gosh darn it, they let wikipedia in.
Sure, after 2.5 years. And after being blocked in the first place.
It seems easy from the outside, but it isn't.
In an even freer country, it would not have happened in the first place.
What am I supposed to be impressed by?
After 2.5 years... Let's not pretend like this is some major success. It's a failure by all accounts that luckily ended up OK.
Hopefully other nations follow their lead one day.
[0] https://www.hrw.org/news/2018/03/27/turkey-crackdown-social-...
Also it's quite naive to assume that lifting the ban wasn't the government's intention, just days before European Court of Human Right's deadline to oversee the case.
https://explorer.ooni.org/search?test_name=web_connectivity&...
It took 2 and half years for this to happen. That does not sound like a nation of laws to me.
Imagine if this happened in America. Would you be making apologist arguments, in that situation?
You don't have to defend them. Just say that they did a bad thing and call it a day.
This decision should read "Erdogan orders the Constitutional Court to restore access to Wikipedia".
If you just suddenly disappeared without a note, that's one thing. "Please stop action X occurring on your network" sounds very clear and direct.
Edit: I see I'm getting downvoted here but I want to explain why I am passionate about this topic. As someone who supports network infrastructure and it's operation I'm on the hook to find out why x can't talk to y. It's a challenge when dealing with ISP/country level blocks or packet manipulation. Proving that this is something deliberate versus a legitimate broken thing is a process to go through. Not being able to tell a customer why is not a great story. Different countries have different techniques for this and over time you learn them. Seeing your packets in a traceroute going to a hop that has a DNS PTR record that says "DPI" in the name is a nice heads up to an operator to give you that sort of indication of what you're dealing with. I am aware that basically no country publishes such blocks today and ISPs that are forced to implement such blocks are usually instructed to not tell you anything about it (sometimes off the record, if you're lucky).
It's not about offense in the parent comment, it's about theft.
I see this as a reasonable response, given no additional context.
Besides that, DNS queries to all servers are blocked if you try to get a blocked site's IP. No hijacking attempt here, as far as I can see.
I routed only Wikipedia through TOR with a browser extension. With this setup not all DNS queries goes through proxy. So I had to take advantage of CoreDNS' dns-over-tls support.
Because people who knows basic networking and also read English are less than a thousandth of the country, their method works very well enough.
Wait, so if I was in Turkey, a request for wikipedia.org to my ISP DNS server would not only have failed, but caused all my other queries to fail as well? For how long?
For even average users of the internet, it was easy to overcome this block by just putting a "0" in front of the domain name. 0wikipedia.org is a clone of wikipedia and it was accessible.
WHOIS search shows 0wikipedia domain name was created on 4 May 2017, just five days after the block.
I am a Turkish grad student in the US. Whenever I visited Turkey, I would get surprised by the error page, remember that it was blocked and overcome it by just putting a "0" in the domain name.
Common perception is also that the US won the space race (Not the opinion at the time outside the US).
Perhaps "common perception" isn't the right metric to go by.
The US eventually did win the space race, but they lost Rounds 1 and 2 to Russia. The United States getting involved in WW2 when they could no longer ignore it ended up getting the formidable American industrial engine engaged in ways that had Japan been a little bit smarter might have seen a completely different ending to WW2.
The US view is that they did all the heavy lifting, when in fact Canada and the UK did given the relative sizes of their population at the time made a disproportionate difference in Western Europe, but America was definitely very important while in the East Russia made the biggest difference. In the pacific it really was the United States that made the difference.
Perception when simplified to the point where it makes no sense isn't the right metric to go by, but with some nuance it can actually be quite useful.
They did _because they started a new round_. What the US did is equivalent to losing badly and then screaming "Last goal wins" repeatedly until you score the last goal. Yes, US sources claim a US victory. That doesn't mean they actually won.
> The US view is that they did all the heavy lifting,
The Soviet Union was responsible for ~80% of german casualties. The Soviets made a difference in Western Europe by winning in the east. It's what killed the german propaganda machine.
None of which would have been possible without the extraordinary industrial might of the US that kept the USSR supplied. They had no capacity to fight minus being supplied.
Do you know how much territory the European allies had reclaimed in the years of fighting prior to the US invasion of Europe? None. There is no scenario where Nazi Germany gets defeated without the US supplies and invasion and the USSR leadership openly admitted exactly that privately.
Here's a map at the time of Normandy in 1944 (WW2 of course began in 1939):
https://omniatlas.com/assets/img/articles/complete/europe/eu...
Notice anything interesting? The Germans hadn't lost any territory in nearly five years of war.
The US was a liberator of Europe. It didn't keep half of Western Europe for itself. Do you know what the Soviets were by comparison? It was the 1,900,000 US soldiers, backed with US supplies and nukes (to stand off the Soviet conquerors in the East), that enabled Western Europe to become free after the war.
The USSR would not have even been able to keep its trains functioning without the US supplies. The US gave them nearly 2,000 locomotives.
It included 12,000+ airplanes. 1,911 steam locomotives, 66 diesel locomotives, 9,920 flat cars, 1,000 dump cars, 120 tank cars, and 35 heavy machinery cars. 400,000 jeeps and cargo trucks. 8,000 tractors. 12,000 armored vehicles, including 7,000 tanks. 35,000 motorcycles. 1.5 million blankets. 15 million pairs of boots. Four million tons of food supplies. And a vast amount of energy supplies.
Between Dec 1941 and August 1945, the allies consumed seven billion barrels of oil. The US supplied six billion of those barrels.
So the US kept the USSR in the war with its industry, while fighting two massive war fronts simultaneously in Europe and the Pacific.
Best I can remember, USSR produced about as many tanks as the rest of the world combined during the period.
Yes, they produced a great many tanks. Of the 270,041 tanks and self-propelled guns made by the Allies, 120,000 of them were made by the Soviets. That's a very impressive number, Russian tanks were pretty good, and tanks in general are impressive machines, so this makes for a very good example if you want to boast about Soviet productivity.
What about other vehicles though? The Soviets got 400,000 good trucks and jeeps from America. Tanks alone won't win a war, you need to move men and supplies too otherwise those tanks won't get very far. Take a look at the "Other Vehicles" column on the land vehicles table.
Take a look at the aircraft table on that same page. The British alone made way more aircraft than the Soviets, and frankly the British aircraft were much better. Particularly the Lancaster, which was superb. The British gave thousands of combat aircraft to the Soviet Union, and trained many Soviet pilots as well.
If you look at the table for production of coal, iron, and oil, you'll find that the Soviet Union was lagging far behind Britain and America. And Canada deserves a special mention for producing most of the aluminum. Of course I don't say any of this to demean the contribution of the Soviet Union to the war effort. It's undeniable that the Soviet Union shed the most blood, paying for the war with tens of millions of lives. How many more would have died had Soviet resources been stretched even thinner? That's not a pleasant thing to consider.
The war was a team effort. That's my point.
Without the USSR involved in the war, US supplies would be unable to help stop the Germans and the German forces would not be spread thin enough for an invasion to be feasible. Both were necessary, but the Soviets gave up much more to secure the victory.
Normandy was June 1944. The US had nukes by August 1945. The Germans signed their surrender in May of 1945. The Germans were done. Period. The war in Europe was over one way or another and soon.
Within one year of the US invading at Normandy, all that Nazi territory in the prior map I posted was gone, whereas none of it had been reclaimed in the prior five years before the US invasion. It's not a coincidence. Churchill recognized that once the US joined on to invade Europe, the war was won.
There's a reasonable argument that the Soviets helped delay the possibility of the Nazis developing nuclear weapons. Historical evidence suggests the Nazis were nowhere close to developing a nuclear weapon though and they had largely abandoned the project in early 1942. Most likely, with or without the Soviet effort between January 1942 and May 1945, the US was going to bring Nazi Germany to capitulation with nuclear weapons.
There is a big difference in the stakes however: the US didn't need to win the war in Europe to survive. It could have stepped back, relatively safe with its nuclear position. And the Soviets would have treated Western Europe very differently without the US there to safeguard territorial lines from further Soviet expansion and influence west.
The premise floated is that the Soviets paid the most to guarantee victory in WWII, hence "won" the war. US entry in the war may have been a significant turning point, but the Soviet involvement dwarfs the US involvement.
>There's a reasonable argument that the Soviets helped delay the possibility of the Nazis developing nuclear weapons. Historical evidence suggests the Nazis were nowhere close to developing a nuclear weapon though and they had largely abandoned the project in early 1942.
Without the incredibly taxing years of war with the USSR, Germany would have had the resources to all sorts of other things. Not only could they have furthered their own advances, they would have been able to disrupt the UK's assistance and limit US access to necessary resources. You can't simply say the US would have still been able to win that race without the Soviets war.
This sentence is nonsense. They publicly (not privately) thanked the US for their aid.
Besides, your framing of the war is obviously false. The allies had lost the war up until about ~1943, where they started gaining momentum. A turning point I'd like to point out is the Battle of Kursk, in which the Germans for the first time cancelled a major operation. Sure, the invasion of Sicily played a role in their decision, but the battles weren't even on the same scale (14k casualties vs 370k in Kursk).
Also the lend-lease is a false equivalence. Yes, the "industrial might" played a role, but the US hadn't lost 25 million men to the war. Their capacity for production was higher because they weren't sending everyone to their death. The US even saw population growth during the war. The Soviet Union only saw their loses replaced during the mid-50s.
The US played their part, but make no mistake in the difference between 11 billion USD and 25 million men.
Well of course that's why. I don't thing anyone is arguing otherwise. OP was simply saying, without the US, the allies would likely have lost.
Why the US was able to supply most of the Ally's supplies doesn't take away from the fact that they did. Your not even arguing against anything OP was saying here, other than the "openly private" contradiction, which was right on. Now of course it wasn't just the US that won the war, without the USSR the Allies would almost assuredly have lost.
Now certain people may argue that one was more responsible for winning the war than the other. I think that's pretty pointless and we can leave it at them both being critical to winning the war.
Feeding men into the wood chipper isn’t progress. Fight smarter, not harder.
It works better if you don’t announce it in advance.
That’s a senseless analogy. There was no game with structured rules about number of rounds, etc.
That’s like claiming someone only won a war because they kept fighting until the other side gave up and didn’t want to fight anymore.
Khrushchev and Stalin readily admitted that they would have been quickly overrun by the Germans without the US basically flooding the Eastern front with fuel, trucks, munitions and other support. US readymade military support to Russia amounted to something like a seventh of Russia's GDP.
Between 1943 and 1945, the United States built more ships than had existed in the world before 1939. The US built and crewed more aircraft than the rest of the world combined. The US provided a third of the raw materials, tools, and transport the Soviet Army used. It was the industrial backbone of all of the Allied armies. It brought the Allied to Axis GDP ratio to 5/1 by the end of the war.
Which is just a mere footnote, if your model of warfare completely discounts the importance of logistics and materiel. Or if you believe that the industrial warmaking capacity of your opponent is irrelevant to whether or not you sue for peace.
I know it's tempting to say that contributions don't "count" unless they involve deaths, but, as one notable WWII participant once said, "No dumb bastard ever won a war by going out and dying for his country. He won it by making some other dumb bastard die for his country."
Stalin put it this way: the British bought time, the Americans brought gold, and Russians provided blood.
To be fair, it would be distortative to diminish any of those contributions.
With apologies to: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0066206/ and https://www.quora.com/How-was-the-American-contribution-in-W...
People should learn more about lend lease: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lend-Lease
Arguing over who did the most good in WWII is as pointless as arguing over whether Hiroshima or Dresden or Bataan or Unit 731 was the greater atrocity. The only lesson that endures is that humanity shouldn't do any of this stuff again, ever.
This is an interesting time to be following along, as SpaceX just completed an in-flight abort test last weekend which was - by all appearances - a success.
According to spaceflightnow.com, the manned follow-up mission which will launch astronauts to the ISS on a Crew Dragon capsule, DM2, could happen within the next 50-100 days[1]:
> The schedule for the Demo-2 launch with Hurley and Behnken will partly be determined by a NASA decision in the coming weeks on whether to extend the length of their mission at the space station from a short-duration stay of about a week to an expedition that might last as long as several months.
> Bridenstine said the Demo-2 crew will have to undergo additional training to perform duties on the space station if NASA extends Hurley and Behnken’s mission.
> Kathy Lueders, NASA’s commercial crew program manager, suggested Friday that the Demo-2 mission might be ready for launch as soon as the first half of March.
> But it’s more likely to happen in April — at the soonest — when the space station’s crew is downsized to three people through October, assuming no U.S. crew launches in that period.
For those who missed it, the in-flight abort test itself was interesting[2].
[1]: https://spaceflightnow.com/2020/01/19/spacex-aces-final-majo...
Another good example is Ken Shirriff's recent blog entry, which includes some notes comparing the degree of IC technology in US versus Soviet space hardware of similar vintage: http://www.righto.com/2020/01/inside-digital-clock-from-soyu...
[1] https://old.reddit.com/r/space/comments/38kfhn/new_photos_of...
I have never meant a person that was not aware of the other fronts, and did not know at least the broad strokes of France/normandy/etc.
I guess that's our fault, huh. It always is.
And unless your name is Pheidippides, there's not much point in winning a marathon if you die on the other side of the finish line.
A level of individualism is probably the most important factor and fairly incompatible with totalitarian regimes but wide access to information isn't nearly as crucial as infovores assume.
In the end the Soviets produced a very small amount of organic peer-reviewed cutting edge research in contrast to the west. Worse, the politics impressed on its academics lead to Lysenkoism.
That said, wikipedia specifically would be a massive loss to anyone.
I guess I’ll put it in your terms: I have a hard time buying that.
If your suggestion is that it’d be better to go back to a centrally controlled publishing industry... I also don’t buy that.
The thing is, when you have access to both truth and misinformation, you still stand a non-zero chance of filtering out trash and getting to the truth. In that scenario, misinformation has to step up its game and compete with real information. It cannot be too wild and out there to capture the minds of the majority. Whoever spreads the misinformation has to carefully balance the strength of their misinformation vs. appearing legitimate.
On the other hand, when the truthful info is all blocked completely, the quality of misinformation and propaganda doesn't matter. If it is the only source of info, then that's what the population will consume. It can be as wild as possible, and it won't matter at all, people will eat it up. No need to balance the strength vs. legitimate appearance, you can put all your chips on strength.
One can argue about how much truth people are able to consume when it is mixed with tons of misinformation, but if truthful sources are blocked, the answer to "how much" becomes "almost none". And the situation is made even worse by how much more wild and more dishonest the misinformation can become if there is a vacuum of sources of truth due to them being completely blocked.
As an example, in countries that tend to block major sources of truth and where we tend to think that a lot of people are just mindless sheep eating up government propaganda, I personally don't think people there are just naturally too dumb to not figure out they are being lied to or they are predisposed naturally to be more susceptible to propaganda.
When you have a vacuum of info, it has to be filled by something. If all that's on the plate is wild misinformation, then that's all you will eat, it isn't like you have any other choice, aside from completely isolating yourself from society.
Considering the censorship that goes on in Britain, Germany, Japan, Singapore, Taiwan, etc, I'm not so sure about your claim.
> Regimes that block access to the truth
Lets not kid ourselves and pretend wikipedia is the "truth". Jimmy Wales has come out as being partisan and agenda-driven like much of tech. Wales/Wikipedia represents "truth" no more than Google or Facebook does. Not only that we know that there are unsavory actors ( including government, ngos and especially PR groups ) who are manipulating wikipedia articles.
Same thing with DRM - its scariest because one day it will work
If corps really needed DRM to work well, it would work well already. The reason that it doesn't is that there is no business case:
1. The music industry has mostly (heavy emphasis on "mostly") woken up to the fact that DRM does not stop piracy. Only a good user experience stops privacy. Hence why piracy stopped being a big problem once streaming services like Spotify became available.
2. The movie and game industry only rely on DRM protecting the initial wave of sales right after the initial release. When the DRM of a AAA game gets cracked 90 days after release (as is usual for Denuvo afaik), it doesn't matter much because 95% of sales are already done at this point. Same for movies. The long tail is impacted a bit by the movie or game being available on piracy sites, but most customers still go through the official sales/streaming channels unless they're absolutely atrocious.
I disagree. Blocks like this work.
China started this way. The Firewall was weak and easy to circumvent, but people just didn't go around it.
If you Google something and get multiple results will you chose the one you can read straight up or the one that takes work. One click beats two. And one click kicks ass on typing.
Android chrome is removing editing URLS as a general idea for instance. Google considers URLs as redundant. They are not right, but also not wrong.
Yet ongoing demonstrations in France and England are usually ignored and violently suppressed without support from elites. I'm curious why
Say what? AFAIK, Cuba and Venezuela, the only remaining "military regimes in Latin America" are not "western supported".
It's kind of a bad look for the leader of a country that supposedly was fighting ISIS to have a close relative that is supporting them. So he blocked Wikipedia in his country instead of doing something honest, like acknowledging the bad press, investigating the issue, and stopping his relatives and his country's oil companies from funding terrorism.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State-sponsored_terrorism
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Block_of_Wikipedia_in_Turkey#c...
Then later on Apr17* it was two terrorism articles that caused internet blockages and this was given as the official reason for blocking wikipedia.
https://www.haaretz.com/middle-east-news/turkey/revealed-the...
Oct16*
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RedHack
Apr17*
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_involvement_in_the_Syr...
If I were a billionaire philanthropist I would try and find ways to get as much Internet connectivity into the hands of impoverished people.
So very concretely, if China says "hey US of A, please don’t bring uncensored Internet to my citizens: it would be a shame if all this manufacturing and trade suddenly stopped", and the US gov agrees, then Elon Musk will not provide uncensored Internet access to Chinese citizens. Else, Elon Musk will cease to be a billionaire and the Internet access will stop working anyway.
... then again that reinforces the existing system, not a descent to feudalism.
1. Stopping trade with America would completely destroy China. They could bluff, but they have very little actual leverage. Their economy is hugely dependent on the US.
2. The US government is not really a fan the Great Firewall or of the Chinese government. It's unlikely it'd just be cowed into submission, especially with Trump in office.
3. Even if the government wanted to not upset China, I don't see how it could stop Starlink legally. You think a law would pass that would make it criminal to distribute uncensored information in China? There would be so much public outrage at that. I can't imagine either party supporting it at all. Plus, I can easily imagine that being struck down as unconstitutional. It would spend forever in the courts at the least.
4. Even if it did pass, Starlink would just move to Canada or South Africa or somewhere before it services China. In no scenario can Musk lose his billions. The US loses half its space economy, but there's no mechanism to take his money or to actually stop Starlink.
No, US is really only 10-15% of China's export if you consider that a lot of USA trade on paper is not actually going to USA
Smaller, third-world countries, maybe there are more chances there. Citizens would likely need to import and manufacture their own antennas illegally that connect to the constellation.
(SpaceX has claimed the cost to build and launch a single Starlink satellite is already under $500,000)
We'll get there eventually.
[0]: https://spacenews.com/spacex-plans-to-start-offering-starlin...
So, a regressive country can just control the import of such antennas.
I'd love it if the US gave Musk the diplomatic/military cover to make Starlink available globally, but we might end up with issues (ITU or jamming/military) if that happened. Might still be worth it though.
That's potentially true for GEO systems. It's not at all true for LEO/MEO systems, where ⓐ that "range of spots" is rapidly moving over the surface of Earth as the satellite does, ⓑ you have AOS/LOS when the satellite crosses the horizon, and ⓒ you can get enormously improved bandwidth for a given power budget by using highly directional antennas on the satellite as well as the groundstation. Starlink is LEO.
Aren't the various cultural groups that seem to have sprung up online (including social media) a counter point to that?
So the censorship is effective for >99% of the population, and if you've got one friend that knows how to get around the censorship and starts blabbing about coverups going on in your country, then they sound a lot like a nutjob. And there are also the people that just don't care about the censorship as long as their daily life isn't directly affected.
But there are now countries that are willing to shut down the internet completely, at least for short terms. Cashmere still has no internet if I'm not mistaken, and Iran also had several shutdowns of about a week each in the past months.
Unfortunately, the track record of technology isn't that great when it comes to technology. A functioning court system, independent press, and strong civil society are far more useful than tor, encryption, bitcoin, or any other attempt in that direction.
Except people can't see the entire internet every day, which leave the information that people actually see in the hands of the curators, just like it always has been.
Their tweet: https://twitter.com/Wikipedia/status/1221513346781982722
Could it be the Turkish regime DDoS-ing their servers?
Deny a whole country for more than 2 years then allow them to view the site. Suddenly you have 80+ million people all trying to catch up.
this is all assuming that with nation state resources they can identify use of VPNs at the user level.
1. All this "1st / 2nd / 3rd world" is from cold war time and not really relevant anymore.
2. Turkey is NATO member since 1952 so it's would be your first world country.
PS: Of course Turkey is not a rich country, but everyone there can certainly afford $3-5 a month for VPN.
UPD: s/user/use/
seems like there's actually two "three worlds" labelings, one by mao, and one by a french demographer.
>As political science, the Three Worlds Theory is a Maoist interpretation and geopolitical reformulation of international relations, which is different from the Three-World Model, created by the demographer Alfred Sauvy, wherein the First World comprises the US, Great Britain, and their allies; the Second World comprises the Soviet Union, the People's Republic of China, and their allies; and the Third World comprises the economically underdeveloped countries and the countries, including the 120 countries of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM).[3]
> In the time that the block was in effect, we heard from students, teachers, professionals and more in Turkey about how the block had impacted their daily lives. For many students, the block had occurred just days before their final exams.
So no effect on those students then.
https://mailman.nanog.org/pipermail/nanog/2019-December/1050...
Any news stories about such development? Or do they only care about Turkey?
But yes, I would like to see their reasoning for this decision. How many people were using <= TLS1.1? If it was near-0 then it should be fine, but if a lot of people were using it (probably yes), then they should have a strong reason to block them. This page[1] seems to say the reason is for PCI-DSS compliance. I dislike compliance-based decisions. We should base decisions on real user impact, not on compliance.
[1] https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/phame/post/view/111/wikipe...
Blocking poor people is the only thing that is accomplished by this policy employed by Wikipedia. It's very sad that everyone's celebrating all these actions, instead of calling Wikipedia out for widening the digital gap, and quite literally expiring your right to read.
But there are certain risks from supporting the old versions. Take a look at this table[1]. In the TLS 1.0 and TLS 1.1 columns not a single cipher is listed as secure. Some can be secure with mitigations, but I'm not familiar with the difficulty of those mitigations, and whether the mitigations would have to be serverside or clientside. If clientside, then by blocking old versions, they might actually be closing vulnerabilities.
Supporting more stuff means more surface area for new attacks. Also the older stuff was designed with less knowledge of current attack strategies, so there might be a higher likelihood of vulnerabilities being found there.
Just because new browsers disable old TLS versions doesn't mean everyone is safe. As you've already pointed out, some people use old browsers, so to protect those people there might need to be serverside changes.
> Blocking poor people is the only thing that is accomplished by this policy employed by Wikipedia.
That seems like an exaggeration. One thing they accomplished was PCI-DSS compliance. I don't value that, but some people probably do.
> It's very sad that everyone's celebrating all these actions
I'm not celebrating their actions.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transport_Layer_Security#Ciphe...
Put it simply, it's literally a big dump of unverified information, even if some of it appears to be relatively reliable and of good quality most of the time; how is preventing me from accessing it from my iPad or Android magically makes it so great and "secure"? Don't they have any bigger problems to worry about?
And what does PCI-DSS compliance has to do with an encyclopaedia? How does it benefit Wikipedia from being PCI-DSS compliant? What's next — is Wikipedia going to adopt EDD-KYC, too?
There's only one link for words "donate", and it leads to https://donate.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:FundraiserRedirect..., which is an entirely different site from en.wikipedia.org.
Or are you saying there's something in PCI-DSS that would prohibit creating a link from an insecure website to a secure one?
The most sensitive thing on Wikipedia I would think is the passwords. People often reuse passwords, so a password stolen from Wikipedia could maybe be reused against the victim's email or bank account.
Another possible sensitive item is the mapping of a username to an email. If there's an edit or account that a government doesn't like, that government might want to find what email is associated with the account, and then use information on that email to arrest the person. (Email accounts often contain phone numbers.) This reminds me of this comment[1], in which a vulnerability in Twitter allowed the Chinese government to map a username to a phone number, and then use that phone number to arrest the person.
Edit: In case it is not clear, this is a (poor taste) joke. The track record for beating those who dissent even when outside of Turkey is well established.
Is it your opinion that the government was right to do this?
I’ll link to the Wiki, as that seems right. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018_Turkish_presidential_el...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_Turkish_local_elections
You are entitled to have your own opinion, not to the facts.
Edit: My link was to the 2018 presidential election, yours is to the more recent 2019 elections.
Edit 2: I’m not sure what you find reassuring about the 2019 elections - is that the link you intended to post? The bit titled “Controversies and issues” is completely terrible.
How? By what methods are you measuring that?
This is a regular pattern with right-wing populist governments. When they get into power they institute a set of economic policies that lead to wide-spread prosperity in the short term, but in the long-term are a disaster.
As far as elections go, the government pretends to be in favor of free and fair elections, but its political philosophy is a set of arguments as to why they are a terrible idea and ought to be eliminated. Which is just what the Ergogan goverment has been attempting to do in a step-by-step fashion.
Left-wing populist governments have been known to do that, too.
And left-wing populist governments have also been known to place a thumb on the scales of elections, in order to make sure that they come out "correctly".