See no evil, read no evil
Apparently WordPress.com has been blocked in Turkey.
I don’t understand why people are still seriously considering Turkey’s accession to the EU, considering that they keep doing shit like this. Most famously, they also blocked YouTube last March after someone posted a video claiming Atatürk was homosexual (which is probably the most ironic way they could have dealt with that), though that only lasted two days.
Turkey’s Great Firewall isn’t nearly as extensive as China’s, obviously, nor is it as hard to circumvent.
It just works on DNS level, so if you can specify different DNS servers than Turkey’s national ones, or you can access a website through its IP (which it probably isn’t, in WordPress.com’s case; subdomains can be odd), it’s trivial to get around the block.
If you can’t do that, you can just use Google as a proxy, or any of the countless proxy providers out there. Or you could use Tor or similar networks, which more people need to familiarise themselves with.
Still, since all of these things are likely to be beyond the average user still, and considering the influence of blogs and the influence of the blogosphere in keeping tabs on governments in general, this is a significant blow to freedom of speech (which, of course, is a basic human right, and the most important indicator of a free society) in Turkey.
Fewer people use WordPress.com than YouTube (I’m pretty sure), but the protest will probably be significant enough to repeal this block relatively quickly. Still, the fact that the Turkish government thinks they can get away with this (and without explanation) is a very bad sign.
Terras said,
August 18th, 2007 at 5:15 pm
Turkey would’ve been banned from WordPress eventually~ People need to stop thinking Turkey is a civilized country just because they compare to other Middle Eastern countries.