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Porn in Turkey: It's for Work Purposes

I have writ­ten a few days ago about some is­sues with SSL cer­tifi­cates.

This post will de­scribe the strangest thing I have done or work pur­pos­es in the last year, year and a half.

We get re­ports that users of Ubun­tu Pre­cise Pan­golin, in Turkey, are get­ting a SSL cer­tifi­cate er­ror. I sus­pect it may be be­cause there is a gov­ern­ment fire­wall there (the "Ha­lal In­ter­net") So, we try de­bug­ging it with them. And we get nowhere yet. So, I had the idea of try­ing to get a turk­ish IP ad­dress and de­bug from there.

I start­ed look­ing for a VP­S, could­not find any, then Rod­ney Dawes found a Turk­ish VPN provider. Which is weird in that a mil­lion Turks are us­ing VP­Ns to get out of the Turk­ish cen­sor­ing fire­wal­l, but hey, I will do things for the user­s.

So, I get that, I make it work, and then I de­bug. No er­ror. So, how do I know if I am be­hind the Turk­ish fire­wal­l? I tried to open a porn site, ex­pect­ing it to fail. But it did not.

So, ofi­cial­ly I saw like 10 sec­onds of porn while work­ing, for work pur­pos­es.

BTW: the cor­rect way to know is to try to ac­cess http://www.rolling­stone.­com

Ardnam / 2012-05-15 01:18:

The Internet is mostly uncensored in Turkey, you are mistaking the country for Iran. The one exception is Youtube, which was blocked for a long period of time because someone made fun of the Ataturk, but that has been reverted.

Roberto Alsina / 2012-05-15 01:25:

I spent almost two months in turkey last year. There are tons of sites that are either censored by the ISP or lead to fake error pages (try www.rollingstone.com, for instance).

conejotano / 2012-05-20 00:12:

why keep removing the FAP comment?

Roberto Alsina / 2012-05-20 01:37:

I only removed it once. Reason is: arbitrary rejection.


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