TekinWEBlog

Well the rumors are official as of yesterday. In the last few days we have been experiencing connection problems accessing some of the services of Google. At first it did not seem persistent but more of an on-and-off issue, but as of yesterday morning the officials finally out did themselves.

The Information Technologies and Communication Institution of the Ministry of Telecommunication and Communication of the Republic of Turkey has published an official statement explaining the latencies and/or unavailabilities of certain sites owned and operated by Google. The ground of their actions is “due to legal reasons.”

This has been done before

In the past YouTube and Google Sites services have also been banned. Despite the bans for these sites on the DNS query level, their new trick is now banning on the Internet Protocol (IP) address, which is a lower level and cannot be easily solved by using external DNS services such as OpenDNS, etc., which most of the Internet users have been accustomed to using.

Now here is the part that sucks; Google does not use static IP addresses to their services, but a pool of them. Since the requests for such domains are handled from this pool of availability, the number of banned services are quite few.

Below you may find the banned and/or lagged services due to this new “lawful action:”

• http://code.google.com
• http://pages.google.com
• http://video.google.com
• http://translate.google.com.tr
• http://docs.google.com
• http://sites.google.com
• http://books.google.com
• http://chrome.google.com
• http://sketchup.google.com
• http://froogle.google.com
• http://labs.google.com
• http://mars.google.com
• http://moon.google.com
• http://notebook.google.com
• http://toolbar.google.com
• http://browsersync.google.com
• http://catalog.google.com
• http://codesearch.google.com
• http://dir.google.com
• http://earth.google.com
• http://groups.google.com.tr
• http://shopping.google.com
• http://sky.google.com
• http://support.google.com
• http://tools.google.com
• http://wap.google.com
• http://answers.google.com
• http://google-analytics.com

Disturbing!

I have switched my company from MS Exchange to Google Apps Premium service about six months ago. This strategic change had significant performance increase for our project development, team collaboration and agility. It seemed like a move in the right direction, until yesterday.

“Like China?”

Upon the statement from the Ministry, I have called the Google call center and reported the issue. The agent’s comment was quite right, but disturbing, “Like China.”

Unlike China, we have democracy. People are not told what they are and can do, but decide for themselves, or so I thought! It is now official, we are run by a dictatorship, censoring all controllable source of information, like China. Most of the services of Google is now contraband!

Wake up! Companies are running these web based applications for their everyday businesses.

In the past, DNS lookup did not work. People have found work arounds as I have mentioned above. This recent action, banning IP addresses will not work either. People will start using other network configurations such as VPN (Virtual Private Network), Proxy servers, SSH (Secure Shell) tunnelling, which are, by the way, already in place by businesses with world-wide operations.

One wonders…

What would they do next, jail the ones that use work arounds for accessing these services?

English, Poli-Critics, Techno-Critics Google, Google Apps, ignorance, internet, technology, Turkey