Tag: christ-what-an-asshole

Turkey orders block of Twitter’s IP addresses

Just a few days after Turkey’s scandal-rocked government banned Twitter by tweaking national DNS settings, the state has doubled down by ordering ISPs to block Twitter’s IP addresses , in response to the widespread dissemination of alternative DNS servers, especially Google’s 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4 (these numbers were even graffitied on walls ). Following the ban, Turkey’s Twitter usage grew by 138 percent. Now that Twitter’s IP range is blocked, more Turkish Internet users are making use of Tor and VPNs, and they continue to use SMS for access to the service. It’s interesting that Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has singled out Twitter for his attacks (“Twitter, schmitter! We will wipe out Twitter . I don’t care what the international community says.”) Why not Facebook or Google Plus? I’m not certain, but my hypothesis is that Facebook and Google’s “real names” policy — which make you liable to disconnection from the service if you’re caught using an alias — make them less useful for political dissidents operating in an environment in which they fear reprisals. According to the Internet activist collective Telecomix, there also were reports that devices configured to use Google’s DNS service or other DNS providers outside the country were being hijacked to a local DNS server by the Wi-Fi network at Istanbul’s airport. The move has driven up the usage of VPN services and the Tor anonymizing network in Turkey. Telecomix has been providing a list of Tor gateways for Turkish users. Tor network metrics show a huge spike in users directly connecting to the Tor network over the past few days, growing from 25,000 users to 35,000 since March 19. Downloads of VPN software have also exploded with VPN apps for Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android becoming the most downloaded apps from their respective app stores in Turkey. After DNS change fails, Turkish government steps up Twitter censorship [Sean Gallagher/Ars Technica]        

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Turkey orders block of Twitter’s IP addresses

FBI agent tries to copyright super-secret torture manual, inadvertently makes it public

The ACLU has spent years in court trying to get a look at a top-secret FBI interrogation manual that referred to the CIA’s notorious KUBARK torture manual. The FBI released a heavily redacted version at one point — so redacted as to be useless for determining whether its recommendations were constitutional. However, it turns out that the FBI agent who wrote the manual sent a copy to the Library of Congress in order to register a copyright in it — in his name! (Government documents are not copyrightable, but even if they were, the copyright would vest with the agent’s employer, not the agent himself). A Mother Jones reporter discovered the unredacted manual at the Library of Congress last week, and tipped off the ACLU about it. Anyone can inspect the manual on request. Go see for yourself! The 70-plus-page manual ended up in the Library of Congress, thanks to its author, an FBI official who made an unexplainable mistake. This FBI supervisory special agent, who once worked as a unit chief in the FBI’s counterterrorism division, registered a copyright for the manual in 2010 and deposited a copy with the US Copyright Office, where members of the public can inspect it upon request. What’s particularly strange about this episode is that government documents cannot be copyrighted. “A document that has not been released does not even need a copyright,” says Steven Aftergood, a government secrecy expert at the Federation of American Scientists. “Who is going to plagiarize from it? Even if you wanted to, you couldn’t violate the copyright because you don’t have the document. It isn’t available.” “The whole thing is a comedy of errors,” he adds. “It sounds like gross incompetence and ignorance.” Julian Sanchez, a fellow with the libertarian Cato Institute who has studied copyright policy, was harsher: “Do they not cover this in orientation? [Sensitive] documents should not be placed in public repositories—and, by the way, aren’t copyrightable. How do you even get a clearance without knowing this stuff?” You’ll Never Guess Where This FBI Agent Left a Secret Interrogation Manual [Nick Baumann/Mother Jones] ( via Techdirt ) ( Image: FBI , a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike (2.0) image from 10542402@N06’s photostream )        

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FBI agent tries to copyright super-secret torture manual, inadvertently makes it public