That's easy to fix, Twitter sets their TTL to 5 minutes and changes their frontend address every 5 minutes.
Now if they block Google Public DNS, that's a problem, but again, that involves very carefully tweaking route advertisements (since it's anycast). You can also always grab the DNS record out of the root nameservers.
Ultimately, filtering the Internet only works if you filter all of the Internet.
They should be able to watch Twitter's frontend address and ban it accordingly.
Right now the solutions are VPN, Tor and opera mini style proxy services. It's expected that they may go after these too. AFAIK the law requires ISP's to take measures against censorship avoidance methods.
The PM acts against the social media as if it's an existential threat for him.
I am not sure if he rationally calculates these actions or he just can't handle any speech that is not controlled directly by him.(as the leaks indicate, he practically controlled the traditional media for years since)
Last time they accidentally blocked google analytics while they blocking youtube. voila, all turkish websites goes down because non-async analytics code.
Usually you can get around proxy and firewall blocks of IP addresses by using the Decimal equivalent.... for instance, here is the decimal version of the IP address for google http://74.125.224.72/http://1249763400
So here's an idea that's been forming in my head over the last few days - a distributed version of twitter.
The problem with twitter as it currently stands is that it relies on a centralised server (well, servers). That's easy to block, or legally compel to remove content. Imagine instead that every user on twitter had their own "stream" replicated on both their own computer and those of all of their followers. If you choose to follow someone, you get access to their stream either directly from the person themselves, or any of their other followers.
This would partition the system according to popularity. The more followed a person is, the more replicas of their tweet stream available. When someone retweets something, it appears in their own stream, so retweets benefit from this replication. Any tweets that are particularly important and popular would be virtually impossible to suppress.
To prove that tweets had originated from a particular user, every user would have a public/private key pair generated when they first begin using the system, and all tweets would carry an associated cryptographic signature. "Registering" for the system would be a matter of generating an identity using a key pair and a username. Clashes and impersonation of usernames is something I haven't yet thought of a solution to, though usernames would be for display purposes only; the real identity would be the public key.
Replica discovery is another challenge, but there's much in the existing P2P literature and practice (esp bittorrent) that could possibly be of help here.
As far as business models are concerned, Twitter's current one wouldn't work, as it relies on the centralised nature of the system. However it would be possible for developers of individual clients to make money by providing various value-adds, and these could co-exist with open source clients.
Thoughts?
Side note: There seems to be a bug in the comments system where the last paragraph is omitted. Is anyone else experiencing this?
The first time you have to say "key" to an end-user, you have lost. Key management (including, critically, movement between devices) is the primary reason email encryption is rare.
(And if the solution to key management involves letting a website deal with it, you've just invited re-centralization of the system, since users are going to gravitate to the service everyone else uses, not set up their own server.)
Yes, one: this idea has no chance. Also it's been tried. App.net, diaspora, etc. If there aren't any people there there's no reason to join. If you think your engineering buddies will be the catalyst, look how well that's turned out for Google+, and Google+ is made by Google and they forced it down millions of people's throats and it's still not being used by normal people. You think selling it as "it can't be banned in Turkey" is going to be appealing to many people?
This is how it's going to go down, you're going to make some minimal app, a few people will use it once and never check it again, then you get burned out and go back to fixing some problem in your day job.
My money is on internal BGP route announcements that blackhole twitter's IP address as this technique has been used for IP filtering in China and Pakistan and doesn't require any special equipment or overhead.
Unix-like operating systems commonly implement IP address blocking using TCP Wrapper, configured by host access control files: /etc/hosts.deny and /etc/hosts.allow
A brief glance at the news doesn't give me much information, but the first thing that comes to mind when I see service blocking like this is, "when do the protests start?"
Perhaps I only know of the examples that confirm to this pattern, but internet limitations seems to often lead to MUCH higher levels of societal discontent. Could someone who understand the politics/social climate there give me a tl;dr on the situation in that light and what's reasonable to expect?
Allow me to tell you about the worst kind of problem: getting used to government being naughty. When quirky and nasty stuff happens so often, it is commonplace. When everything is so rotten, one first questions "what is their benefits from this" about every thing someone does.
Also, what you see and what we experience here is just a game on actuality, to turn away people's looks from problems that are deeper and nastier. It is all done in order to feint reality and get it to go under the dark curtain of a scandal.
Basically, we're told "Look! What's over there," and then are slapped in the face.
[+] [-] jrockway|12 years ago|reply
Now if they block Google Public DNS, that's a problem, but again, that involves very carefully tweaking route advertisements (since it's anycast). You can also always grab the DNS record out of the root nameservers.
Ultimately, filtering the Internet only works if you filter all of the Internet.
[+] [-] mrtksn|12 years ago|reply
Right now the solutions are VPN, Tor and opera mini style proxy services. It's expected that they may go after these too. AFAIK the law requires ISP's to take measures against censorship avoidance methods.
The PM acts against the social media as if it's an existential threat for him.
I am not sure if he rationally calculates these actions or he just can't handle any speech that is not controlled directly by him.(as the leaks indicate, he practically controlled the traditional media for years since)
[+] [-] onurozkan|12 years ago|reply
Last time they accidentally blocked google analytics while they blocking youtube. voila, all turkish websites goes down because non-async analytics code.
[+] [-] diorray|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sitkack|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] czbond|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ffk|12 years ago|reply
The IP address is in a binary format long before it hits the routing tables on the Internet.
[edit: cleaning up wording]
[+] [-] peterkelly|12 years ago|reply
The problem with twitter as it currently stands is that it relies on a centralised server (well, servers). That's easy to block, or legally compel to remove content. Imagine instead that every user on twitter had their own "stream" replicated on both their own computer and those of all of their followers. If you choose to follow someone, you get access to their stream either directly from the person themselves, or any of their other followers.
This would partition the system according to popularity. The more followed a person is, the more replicas of their tweet stream available. When someone retweets something, it appears in their own stream, so retweets benefit from this replication. Any tweets that are particularly important and popular would be virtually impossible to suppress.
To prove that tweets had originated from a particular user, every user would have a public/private key pair generated when they first begin using the system, and all tweets would carry an associated cryptographic signature. "Registering" for the system would be a matter of generating an identity using a key pair and a username. Clashes and impersonation of usernames is something I haven't yet thought of a solution to, though usernames would be for display purposes only; the real identity would be the public key.
Replica discovery is another challenge, but there's much in the existing P2P literature and practice (esp bittorrent) that could possibly be of help here.
As far as business models are concerned, Twitter's current one wouldn't work, as it relies on the centralised nature of the system. However it would be possible for developers of individual clients to make money by providing various value-adds, and these could co-exist with open source clients.
Thoughts?
Side note: There seems to be a bug in the comments system where the last paragraph is omitted. Is anyone else experiencing this?
Extra last paragraph
[+] [-] nknighthb|12 years ago|reply
(And if the solution to key management involves letting a website deal with it, you've just invited re-centralization of the system, since users are going to gravitate to the service everyone else uses, not set up their own server.)
[+] [-] yukichan|12 years ago|reply
Yes, one: this idea has no chance. Also it's been tried. App.net, diaspora, etc. If there aren't any people there there's no reason to join. If you think your engineering buddies will be the catalyst, look how well that's turned out for Google+, and Google+ is made by Google and they forced it down millions of people's throats and it's still not being used by normal people. You think selling it as "it can't be banned in Turkey" is going to be appealing to many people?
This is how it's going to go down, you're going to make some minimal app, a few people will use it once and never check it again, then you get burned out and go back to fixing some problem in your day job.
[+] [-] _glass|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] joyofdata|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] puppetmaster3|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] EthanHeilman|12 years ago|reply
My money is on internal BGP route announcements that blackhole twitter's IP address as this technique has been used for IP filtering in China and Pakistan and doesn't require any special equipment or overhead.
[+] [-] xtacy|12 years ago|reply
http://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/support/docs/ip/access-lists/26...
[+] [-] sgy|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] acd|12 years ago|reply
Anyhow here is how to circomvent the filter https://www.hidemyass.com/proxy/ type in twitter
Background is Turkeys prime minister and leaked audiotapes. http://www.todayszaman.com/news-340552-full-transcript-of-vo...
[+] [-] p1mrx|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] existencebox|12 years ago|reply
Perhaps I only know of the examples that confirm to this pattern, but internet limitations seems to often lead to MUCH higher levels of societal discontent. Could someone who understand the politics/social climate there give me a tl;dr on the situation in that light and what's reasonable to expect?
[+] [-] gkya|12 years ago|reply
Also, what you see and what we experience here is just a game on actuality, to turn away people's looks from problems that are deeper and nastier. It is all done in order to feint reality and get it to go under the dark curtain of a scandal.
Basically, we're told "Look! What's over there," and then are slapped in the face.
[+] [-] adenner|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] theverse|12 years ago|reply
[1] https://github.com/rakyll/tyyp
[+] [-] unknown|12 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] puppetmaster3|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|12 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] mattbarrie|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|12 years ago|reply
[deleted]