Like ten days ago, I learnt that one of the leading free-blogging services Wordpress.com was blocked in Turkey. Censoring certain sites in Turkey is not something new: On March 7 2007, in a court case, Turk Telekom (leading DSL provider - well, the monopoly of internet in Turkey) had to ban youtube.com with the pretext that the site included videos disrespectful to Ataturk - the founder of Turkish Republic. The ban was removed two days later (probably due to all that press/online publishing pressure).
As for the wordpress.com ban, after a few days the ban was lifted. [You can read details of this and comments to it here] However, when I wanted to check wordpress.com again, I saw it is still inaccessable. When it was first banned and it was lifted after, we learnt that the ban was again DNS based (meaning you can avoid it by using non-Turk Telekom DNS’s but the average user won’t know these) and it was a mistake: they wanted to ban thesubdomaintobebanned.wordpress.com but they instead banned the whole site.
Now, I see the ban is still in its place and also a Turkish lawyer (or whatever) sent a letter to Wordpress staff.
Well, this is crap!
29 Sep 07
13:22
There are some interesting information about internet censorship around the world on Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship
Be sure to check the links at the bottom to see detailed information.
19 Jan 08
13:49
[...] it is no big deal to pass the ban. But, as you know, that’s not the point. Wordpress.com is still banned, and probably this new ban on Youtube will get nice mainstream press coverage, so it will be lifted [...]
24 Jan 08
9:52
[...] altri, ricorda poi che nel Paese della Mezzaluna Wordpress.com è vittima ormai da tempo della censura. Secondo il codice penale turco (ancora una volta l’articolo 301) la pubblica denigrazione [...]
07 Mar 08
12:07
[...] when users type imdb.com’s address wrong. The ban, like the old ones on Youtube and Wordpress, is DNS-bansed - which means it is easy to pass the ban by changing the DNS [...]