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Today (3rd May 2011), we saw a rise of a strange hash tag on twitter and it literally went up like anything on twitter and crossed many hash tags of Justin Bieber. So, is it some celebrity, who is famous than Justin or is it another Rebecca Black? No it isn’t any celebrity, it isn’t any Rebecca or Justin. We don’t report them, we report censorship and internet freedom and it is something about internet freedom.
#22agustos refers to the recent announcement of internet censorship in yet another country which is half in Asia and half in Europe, Turkey. Turkey has recently announced all its plans of Halal Internet in the country even before Iran, which is considered as the father of Halal Internet.
From 22 August, 2011, Turkish netizens will have to choose 1 out of the 4 packages offered by the government to surf the internet. Packages are Family Pack, Children Pack, Standard Pack and Domestic Pack.
According to these new internet laws in Turkey, netizens their will be deprived to surf any website that is prohibited by the Turkish government in that respective plan. Initially, the websites which will be banned include Skype and its applications, Pornographic websites, blogs and websites against the government or Turkish culture and some newspapers with respect to the plan you select.
This announcement comes after a recent ban of Turkish Internet Authorities on 138 search terms, which include many such terms which are normally used and has nothing do with any thing against the government. The ban include terms like Animal, Pic, Beat, Homemade, Hot, Free and various other terms which differ in meaning in Turkish and English.
Turkish netizens are already planning to bypass this ban through Proxy and virtual private network (VPN), but obviously Proxy sites will also be banned. People planned to bypass it through DNS, but Turkish Govt. will block the IPs of the websites that it intends to block hence making it impossible for netizens to unblock it by changing DNS settings. The only option remains the all famous and all time savior VPN Services.
Can we also see something similar to China here ? Can we see something similar to Piraty Party Canada here ? Comment.
Update: Click Here to See Top 10 VPN Services for Netizens in Turkey !!
Update: How To Bypass Turkey Internet Ban & Censorship from #22agustos
Update: Is #22agustos Halal Internet or to Block Por* Only !! No !!
We are waiting to see further developments on the Censorship in Turkey and will update you as soon as we get further updates.
In the meantime click here to visit Bestvpnservice.com or Top 10 VPN Providers Listings Page.
Mark is a Technology and VPN Expert. He is working as an author and asst. editor at Bestvpnservice.com. He is more into giving his views on current news and exploring new technologies in Internet Security arena. He has been enjoying writing not with the pen but with the keyboard at an average speed of 40 words per minute.
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25 Responses to What is #22agustos? Internet Censorship & Ban in Turkey
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How people can call it ‘it is the end of the internet’ ?
Obviously the porn sites will be blacked so why it should be such a big deal? I never knew so many turkish is addicted to porn.
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You are right porn sites can be or have high probability to be blocked. In my opinion it is not being addicted to porn or some other thing. It is about the freedom. Not only porn (which I will say, Not many Turkish will have problems with) but many other sites like a hardware store site will be blocked only for the reason that it contains a banned keyword. Which is not at all fair. Plus they plan to ban many online newspapers that do not support the government. Which is why many Turkish call it the rise of something similar to Great Firewall of China.
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Because they will not just ban “porn”, they’ll ban wordpress, so you wont read and learn, they’ll ban myspace, twitter, facebook, they will ban online shopping, they will ban sourtimes.org online dictionary, youtube, and a lot more. They are trying to close your eyes so you wont explore, learn and improve.
World… wait for Turkey to become another Iran in no time.
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I would agree to that. Don’y know why countries try and do that. Porn is just a cover-up for them. They are doing it to ban social networks which can cause revolutions like we saw in Egypt and other countries.
I hope we don’t have this in Turkey.
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Turkey will newr be another Iran be sure abut that…
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This ridiculous censorship is not related to army. It is related to government.
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Army or Government. Why do they have to censor everything and call it Halal !! why do they have to bring religion in everything, when everybody knows, it is their interests that they are safeguarding here.
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It is the most shameful thing in the turkish history. This is not the first ban on the internet it starts with blogs then twitter then final touch is a new law about it. Its nothing to do with the porn or turkish peoples interests of porn. Its about freedom of speech freedom of access to knowledge. But now there is a law suit against it which states that there is no reasonable grant for this ban. we are waiting for high courts response about.
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We seriously hope here that the High Court throws this ban into the bin !! They have turned the entire youth against them through this ban !!
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[...] Blog > Top 10 VPN Providers > Is #22agustos Halal Internet or to Block Por* Only !! No !! What is #22agustos? Internet Censorship & Ban in Turkey [...]
It is no surprise from a government who does a great job of taking away its people’s liberties, selling off all national assets, driving the country blindly into islam, making fascism popular again while the people pay $11 a gallon for gas. Turkey is going through a very interesting stage of dynamics which will change its future forever. The Internet ban is just another piece of the puzzle.
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Agree !!
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The funny part is the way they pick the sites to ban. someone from tib (government section that authorized to decide what is right and wrong (!) and do whatever they want) said that “we type “porn” to Google and start banning every single result” on the phone conversation with the lawyer of eksisozluk which was subject to ban because of “porn” term included in the site too.
That is the proof that the section doesn’t know anything about internet, and even the mail they sent to the hostings is funny; “it’s an order to stop hosting those sites if not you’ll have to face the consequences!”
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literally there have been so many sites that are facing this problem due to “un-thought out” way of banning the keywords. It clearly shows their knowledge of internet. Threatening will not solve this issue, what i know. It will only worsen the situation further.
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What about tor?
Could it be as easy as setting up a connection with a Turkish valid IP, that would then re-route to wherever?
All that needs to be done is create a bunch of such IPs?
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Hello Gideon,
A valid suggestion of using Tor and although, I agree that Tor is a great resource being given to us by US military, but that to unfortunately is not the the solution. Tor may provide you access to the free world but your privacy is almost zero. Tor is basically a network of computers just as you suggested and at the exit node of that network, your unencrypted information can easily be intercepted and taken away with out you being even aware of that. Be it your credit card number, passwords or anything more personal. you might be anonymous but you won’t be having any protection with your information whatsoever, even if you are using SSL encryption, it can easily be decoded by launching man-in-the-middle attack.
Plus, recently Tor Team has confirmed that Tor can easily be hacked and your information can easily be taken away. They are still working on making Tor more secure.
Moreover, Tor is only preferred for nothing more than reading your mail. You will have very slow speed and bandwidth, which will only make your surfing experience worse.
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This ban is much more serious than blocking porn (even blocking porn is terrible enough though)
Even with so called standard plan tens of thousands sites will not be accessible. And no one can guarantee more sites won’t be banned. In fact I can guarantee much more sites will be banned.
It will also affect e-commerce as well. So many sites will be blocked because of containing mainstream words.
Shortly after 22 August 2011 government will decide what sites we can visit or not. Imagine a country where individuals older than 18 can obtain guns, vote, driving cars and etc but can’t decide which sites they can visit or not.
Yes people with enough knowledge can bypass this non sense human right violation with VPN but it won’t change the reality. This is FASCISM.
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I would agree to that. If you could refer to my another post here: http://www.bestvpnservice.com/blog/is-22agustos-halal-internet-or-to-block-porn-only-no
I have clearly said there, that this is just the start. Government will obviously want complete control over the internet, so that nothing against them can be said or shared. It’s just that they want to safeguard their interest and nothing more.
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This is Furious !!
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Actually what the law will bring in August 22 is that every internet service provider will have to offer 4 options to its customers, one of them being the current standart service and other three for filtered internet. So if you dont choose filtered options you can surf the internet as you do now and nothing will change for you.
This whole 22agustos thing is much ado about nothing.
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Many confuse the issue. The problem here is not related whatsoever to the fact that some (or many) websites will be censored or banned. That is already present; more than 62000 websites have been terminated or banned in the last 3.5 years (as the spokesperson of The Turkish Telecommunications Department [TIB] stated in April 2011). The problem is about the whole Internet users living in Turkey being forced to use a government-driven system that results in violation of information and expression.
The new policy allows this institution to track user navigation and block websites without any explanation. This blocking policy first started with an information on the court of decision, case details and date of decision on the page of the blocked. Then they found it unnecessary to give that much information (!) and reduced it to ‘Access to this website has been forbidden by the decision of the court’. In the upcoming regulation, those websites will simply not be accessed. Moreover, although users will still be able to use alternative ways to access the banned websites, this action will constitute a criminal act hence violation of freedom of information. Don’t rely on the explanations of the institution; valid and legal sources are written regulations/laws.
But the main unacceptable point here is the fact that this whole package (blocking) system is imposed by the government to each and every ISP and individual. This is an optional service in the developed countries and otherwise is explicitly discouraged. Just like these countries there are optional services by some Turkish ISP’s built explicitly for protecting kids. What, for example, if I don’t have a kid? Why is there a need for such a controlling mechanism for me? Am I not free to collect information on any subject I am interested or involved in? Not in this Big Brother system, unfortunately not.
If the purpose of this filtering -as the institution claims- is the protection of kids, I believe the primary responsibility of the institution should be to promote these already existing services. Otherwise it is parents’ responsibility to educate their kids.
It is frightening to witness and to feel obliged to fight against all these issues in the 21st century. It is also shameful to be administered by a government that does not respect the freedom of its citizens.
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As a British ex-pat living in Turkey I have been watching this with ‘interest’. Turns out the implementation date has been pshed back to November and there will now be 2 options, Home and Business. If you dont select either when presented then you WILL NOT be subject to any additional filtering.
However, there are plenty of sites that are already blocked, mainly pornographic but plenty of normal sites too. Youtube is now freely available after the countries President, Abdullah Gul admitted he still browsed the site using a proxy service.
Using a proxy allows me to visit most sites but there are still a few that get caught up and I get a warning page about it. Mind you, pressing F5 normally loads the page normally. The proxy I use lets me watch iplayer, itvplayer and 4od from the UK without significant issues so despite all the doom and gloom merchants predictions the internet here in Turkey is actually quite usable for most things.
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