How to access the blocked Twitter in Turkey
Turkey's courts have ordered that the social messaging service Twitter to be blocked in the country after Turkish prime minister Erdogan vowed to wipe the service out.
The official reason for the ban is that Twitter had ignored requests to remove contents in the past, and that Turkey was protecting its citizens from further victimization.
Anyway, Twitter is banned in Turkey at the time of writing.
After the ban hit, users from Turkey who could not access the social messaging site anymore used Google DNS to bypass the ban.
A DNS-level ban is relatively weak in comparison to other blocking methods. The main reason for that is that users can bypass it easily by changing the DNS provider their system uses.
The default DNS provider is usually the user's Internet Service Provider, but it is possible to change DNS servers with just a couple of clicks.
DNS is being used to look up IP addresses of domain names. So, if you type in twitter.com and hit enter in your browser, it is used to look up Twitter's IP address and establish a connection to the service.
According to The Verge and other news outlets, Google DNS and Twitter's main IP addresses are now all banned and cannot be used anymore.
If Twitter's IP addresses are really banned in Turkey, switching to another DNS provider won't allow access to the site anymore.
Alternatives
So what can you do instead if you are in Turkey and want to access Twitter or other sites that may be banned?
Note: I'm not in Turkey and cannot therefor test the validity of the methods listed below. They are known to work in many circumstances where countries block access to specific websites though. If you are from Turkey, be so kind and test them on your end to let everyone know what works and what does not.
Since DNS is out of the question, we have the following options instead:
- Try the Opera web browser with Off-Road Mode enabled, or Google Chrome with data compression enabled. The two features direct all web traffic through a proxy server that compresses the data. What this means is that you are not connecting directly to Twitter anymore, but through Opera's or Google's server instead.
- Use the anonymity client Tor, and make sure that Turkey is not the exit node of the program.
- Use a virtual private network service such as Hotspot Shield . Alternatives are Private Tunnel, OkayFreedom VPN, CyberGhost VPN, JustFreeVPN, proXPN, itshidden VPN, SecurityKISS, or VPNBook. Like a proxy server, a VPN sits between your computer and the Internet. All requests you make made through the VPN.
- Set up your own web proxy server that is hosted outside Turkey. This requires some technical expertise and hosting space.
- You could also try other web proxies.
Doesn’t Windows 8 know that www. or http:// are passe ?
Well it is a bit difficulty to distinguish between name.com domains and files for instance.
I know a service made by google that is similar to Google bookmarks.
http://www.google.com/saved
@Ashwin–Thankful you delighted my comment; who knows how many “gamers” would have disagreed!
@Martin
The comments section under this very article (3 comments) is identical to the comments section found under the following article:
https://www.ghacks.net/2023/08/15/netflix-is-testing-game-streaming-on-tvs-and-computers/
Not sure what the issue is, but have seen this issue under some other articles recently but did not report it back then.
Omg a badge!!!
Some tangible reward lmao.
It sucks that redditors are going to love the fuck out of it too.
With the cloud, there is no such thing as unlimited storage or privacy. Stop relying on these tech scums. Purchase your own hardware and develop your own solutions.
This is a certified reddit cringe moment. Hilarious how the article’s author tries to dress it up like it’s anything more than a png for doing the reddit corporation’s moderation work for free (or for bribes from companies and political groups)
Almost al unlmited services have a real limit.
And this comment is written on the dropbox article from August 25, 2023.
First comment > @ilev said on August 4, 2012 at 7:53 pm
For the God’s sake, fix the comments soon please! :[
Yes. Please. Fix the comments.
With Google Chrome, it’s only been 1,500 for some time now.
Anyone who wants to force me in such a way into buying something that I can get elsewhere for free will certainly never see a single dime from my side. I don’t even know how stupid their marketing department is to impose these limits on users instead of offering a valuable product to the paying faction. But they don’t. Even if you pay, you get something that is also available for free elsewhere.
The algorithm has also become less and less savvy in terms of e.g. English/German translations. It used to be that the bot could sort of sense what you were trying to say and put it into different colloquialisms, which was even fun because it was like, “I know what you’re trying to say here, how about…” Now it’s in parts too stupid to translate the simplest sentences correctly, and the suggestions it makes are at times as moronic as those made by Google Translations.
If this is a deep-learning AI that learns from users’ translations and the phrases they choose most often – which, by the way, is a valuable, moneys worthwhile contribution of every free user to this project: They invest their time and texts, thereby providing the necessary data for the AI to do the thing as nicely as they brag about it in the first place – alas, the more unprofessional users discovered the translator, the worse the language of this deep-learning bot has become, the greater the aggregate of linguistically illiterate users has become, and the worse the language of this deep-learning bot has become, as it now learns the drivel of every Tom, Dick and Harry out there, which is why I now get their Mickey Mouse language as suggestions: the inane language of people who can barely spell the alphabet, it seems.
And as a thank you for our time and effort in helping them and their AI learn, they’ve lowered the limit from what was once 5,000 to now 1,500…? A big “fuck off” from here for that! Not a brass farthing from me for this attitude and behaviour, not in a hundred years.