After having censored the turkish people via DNS and thus restricting their access to Twitter everyone moved on to other DNS Services like Google Public DNS (8.8.8.8, 8.8.4.4) and OpenDNS. Earlier today an IP-Ban was issued and immediately Tor-Usage from Turkey starts rising. What a magnificent people. Keep on fighting!
It's amazing what humans beings will do for information. This reminds me of a time in 2007 where my friend was a teacher at an elementary school. The school blocked MySpace and Facebook to stop the students from visiting those sites. Somehow, the students figured out how to use proxies and get around the firewalls and what ended up happening is that the teachers were the only ones who couldn't figure out how to get around the firewalls. My friend came to me asking how the kids were getting around the firewall, but my explanation was over his head.
My biggest fear is once dictatorships/governments become aware of the ability to sidestep their bans, they'll begin blocking websites such as torproject.org. Keep in mind this traffic spike is because people who don't normally use Tor, started using it (i.e. they downloaded it). At that point I think we'll begin to see an arms race between the public and government which might finally bring us to decentralization of the Internet - or complete censorship.
Doing my part by hosting a relay, and so can you!<p><a href="https://www.torproject.org/docs/tor-relay-debian.html.en" rel="nofollow">https://www.torproject.org/docs/tor-relay-debian.html.en</a>
Freedom of speech. It always seem to be under attack.<p>I wonder though, do we have more or less freedom of speech over time? I tried to google those things, but I couldn't find the graph of freedomness over time.<p>(No, ancedotes don't count. Our perceptions can be skewed by media bias.)
the Turkish government will eventually figure out how to block Tor, and when that happens the users will need bridges.<p>You can help out by dedicating some spare resources to run as a relay + bridge, takes a minute to install and setup.<p>Share your bridge info to those who require it (not publically).<p>Example install + config:<p><a href="https://gist.github.com/nikcub/9722068" rel="nofollow">https://gist.github.com/nikcub/9722068</a>
Thank you. I looked at other countries' graphs as well. India's [1] make no sense. Distorted sinusoidal wave?!<p>[1] <a href="https://metrics.torproject.org/users.html?graph=userstats-relay-country&country=in#userstats-relay-country" rel="nofollow">https://metrics.torproject.org/users.html?graph=userstats-re...</a>
It's touching that people want and have the means to help the Turks continue to communicate thanks to Tor. But it's too bad that running a Tor exit node, due to what Tor is so commonly used for by nature of anonymity, is such a glaring liability[1] to the operator -- and, due to how easily and commonly Tor exit nodes can be used nefariously, a liability to the users[2].<p>Hopefully uProxy, slated to be released this summer, will address these issues effectively by incorporating a trust model[3] into facilitating circumvention through such censorship walls. Meanwhile, more and more https[4] would be helpful.<p>[1] <a href="http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/11/tor-operator-charged-for-child-porn-transmitted-over-his-servers/" rel="nofollow">http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/11/tor-operator-char...</a>
[2] <a href="http://cryptome.org/2014/01/spoiled-onions.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://cryptome.org/2014/01/spoiled-onions.pdf</a>
[3] <a href="https://www.asl19.org/en/know-more-about-uproxy-live-qa-with-lucas-dixon-from-google-ideas/" rel="nofollow">https://www.asl19.org/en/know-more-about-uproxy-live-qa-with...</a>
[4] <a href="http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2014/03/staying-at-forefront-of-email-security.html" rel="nofollow">http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2014/03/staying-at-forefront-...</a>
Also:
"As the Turkish government’s effort to ban use of Twitter continued Friday, the country’s Internet users rushed to install apps such as Hotspot Shield, which had 270,000 downloads from Turkish users within 12 hours, according to David Gorodyansky, the company’s chief executive."<p>I think Tor's a bit of an overkill. This message sent over Hotspot Shield from Vietnam because of my Facebook addiction (blocked on and off here)
A bit OT, but does anyone know what happened in Australia to cause this: <a href="https://metrics.torproject.org/users.html?graph=userstats-relay-country&start=2011-12-23&end=2014-03-23&country=au&events=off#userstats-relay-country" rel="nofollow">https://metrics.torproject.org/users.html?graph=userstats-re...</a>
Twitter yesterday, TOR tomorrow, what next FB and G+ and then what will they block to stem people speaking things about the Turkish government.<p>From what I understand the whole blocking twitter is due to the Turkish government not liking what is said about them on twitter. Now by their actions they have created more people saying things they will not like on many other platforms and with that, were will it end. Will they block of the entire internet or will they deal with the issues being raised about them in a constructive way beyond effectively gagging everybody as they are unable to put there hands over there ears.<p>Either way, this is a dangerous path they are taking and the fallout will be greater than the problem they perceive too be abating.
More people should be working on making the P2P Twister a reality, sooner:<p><a href="https://github.com/iShift/twister-webkit" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/iShift/twister-webkit</a><p>Centralized Twitter is too easy to stop/block by countries.
What amazes me in this mess is how ignorant the government (and the people running it) about methods to overcome censorship. They are, basically, computer-illiterate. Really very illiterate.<p>After the Tunisian revolution, there were thoughts and plans by politicians to do censorship again. This was dismissed as politicians, officials and government finally recognized that censorship can be overcome no matter what they try. Religious complaining about "porn" and that stuff can ask their ISP for a traffic filter.
I guess what they are going to do when Turkish government will buy some advanced DPI hardware with SVM (Support Vector Machines) which is capable of blocking TOR
It's still nowhere near its peak. I wonder what happened around Sep last year?<p><a href="https://metrics.torproject.org/users.html?graph=userstats-relay-country&start=2013-06-23&end=2014-03-23&country=tr&events=off#userstats-relay-country" rel="nofollow">https://metrics.torproject.org/users.html?graph=userstats-re...</a>
I wonder if twitter alternatives have also become more popular in Turkey lately - it seems like if people are willing to setup Tor, they might also try App.net (you're of course loosing your network of followers, but your followers in Turkey can't see twitter anyway).<p>Of course then you can just block that other service as well.
<a href="https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/tor-flashproxy-badge/" rel="nofollow">https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/tor-flashprox...</a> - host a Tor bridge from Firefox.
I hope my tor bridge relay is helping:
Mar 23 13:44:08.000 [notice] Heartbeat: Tor's uptime is 9 days 17:59 hours, with 2 circuits open. I've sent 894.13 MB and received 1.04 GB.
I'd like to help, but without also facilitating paedos. Is there an easy way to limit my tor exits to Twitter and its subdomains? I.e., can I do the configuration in Tor rather than messing with routes/firewall on the OS?