I
know we all have freedom of speech, but unfortunately it’s not free,
especially in the countries govern by the governments where they are
ready to kill our voice anyhow, even by censoring the
social media.
The same happened few days before, when
Twitter,
the biggest Social Media platform, was banned by the Turkey government
after an audio clip was leaked on YouTube and Twitter about the massive
corruption of Turkey Prime Minister
Recep Tayyip Erdoğan instructing his son to dispose of large amounts of cash in the midst of a police investigation.
The Prime minister of the
country, Erdoğan has full control on the old media, the television and
the printing press, but he failed to stop the Ten Million Turkish
citizen on twitter from sharing the audio all over the social media
site, when Twitter itself reportedly refused to delete the incriminating
audio of him.
But it doesn't work very well, since
the users have all way out. Millions of Turkey users began using
Google’s DNS service to bypass censorship that briefly helped Turks stay
connected to Twitter. But, Turkey Government wanted to close all the
possible loopholes that had allowed users to circumvent the ban and
finally the authorities also
blocked the Google DNS service.
On Saturday, Google claims that Internet Service Providers (including TTNet and SuperOnline) in
Turkey have set up servers that are masquerading as Google’s DNS
service, in order to block services such as YouTube and Twitter which
are banned by the government across the country.
Google carried out their own research and cites them as “
credible reports”. “
We
have received several credible reports and confirmed with our own
research that Google’s Domain Name System (DNS) service has been
intercepted by most Turkish ISPs,” Carstensen wrote in a blog post.
Google’s Public DNS resolution service lets people use the DNS servers (
8.8.8.8 & 8.8.4.4)
of the Google search engine as an alternative to their DNS provider,
very often an ISP. This service offers people in the area of both
performance and security benefits over many IPS DNS services.
“
Google
operates DNS servers because we believe that you should be able to
quickly and securely make your way to whatever host you’re looking for,
be it YouTube, Twitter, or any other,” Carstensen wrote. He then added,
“But
imagine if someone had changed out your phone book with another one,
which looks pretty much the same as before, except that the listings for
a few people showed the wrong phone number.”
This is exactly what Turkish
ISPs have done. On Saturday, the government accused YouTube for a
recording posted on it of a government official discussing possible
military action in Syria. Turkish government ordered YouTube shut down,
less than a week it had
blocked Twitter.
Now, it can be imagine that by
intercepting Google DNS, one can direct the users to any fraudulent site
and can also apparently infect the users.
This was not the first time,
when a government has been censoring the voice of their people. In 2011,
the regime of Hosni Mubarak in
Egypt attempted to turn off the internet in a fruitless bid to stop the building revolution against him.
In February 2011, in the wake of the uprisings against Libyan dictator
Muammar Gaddafi, his son Muhammad, who was in charge of telecommunications at the time,
cut off the internet. Also Syria’s one-party Baath dictatorship banned Facebook and some other social media in 2007.
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