Posts Tagged “Turkey”

Turkey’s two largest gay and lesbian Internet communities, hadigayri.com and gabile.com, have been shut down by the Turkish Telecom Directorate. The newly-created body is permitted to shut down websites without a court order if it believes they violate the Turkish law in any form. The web sites have more than 200,000 members combined. According to its administrators and members, the sites do not contain any criminal or even pornographic content. The directorate blocked the sites without providing any information to the owners or issuing a demand to take down certain content, site mangers said, calling the action unlawful and arbitrary. Read the full story at Pink News

Those who get into a rant about censorship in Muslim countries should keep something in mind ‘tho: Many Western states are about to build a web censorship system right now and those who already have one do block mostly gay websites instead of Child Porn, while the latter is the alleged reason behind the whole enterprise. And in times where portraits of fully clothed teenagers are called “child porn” it won’t take long till sites like this will end up on such lists (we had the honour to be on the Australian “child porn” censor list with Count Candy for a while already).

The worst case, of course, is when some countries don’t even have to come up with such censorship laws – like the USA – because their local companies are so hysterical about everything that doesn’t fit into the norm that its gets deleted anyways. Blogger is a good example here, they started to delete hundreds of perfectly legal gay blogs in August and no, we’re not talking about blogs like milkboys but about blogs with buff 30 year olds.

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Many Countries (like Sweden, Denmark, Finland, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Italy, New Zealand, Brazil, Turkey and Germany) are using censor lists to keep you away from certain sites like some image boards (e.g. 12chan), file sharing sites (e.g. The Pirate Bay) or in some cases even whole communities like Blogspot, WordPress and YouTube.

It’s pretty easy to bypass these filters though. All you need to do is using a neutral DNS server. A DNS server maps the domain name you enter in your browser (like www.milkboys.org) to the IP of the site you want to enter (like 205.196.16.242). If a government tries to keep you away from a site they just keep a list of domain names and if you enter one of the domains on the list in you browser the local DNS server doesn’t resolve the name so you can’t get to the site.

But nobody can prevent you from using a DNS server outside of your country. OpenDNS for example. Just change the IP of your name server to OpenDNS (watch video below  to see how) and enjoy your regained freedom.

Artikel auf Deutsch

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