Turkey blocks Tor website and YouTube

Turkey may have imposed a DNS block on the Tor project’s website to prevent residents of the country from bypassing web service blocks through the service. At the same time, a new YouTube block has gone into effect due to audio clips.

Turkey’s largest provider, TTNet, is said to have implemented a DNS block on the TOR website reported via the Twitter account of Telecomix Turkey, a collective of internet activists. The message has not been confirmed. The dns block is easy to circumvent, internet users point out in a response, by using an alternative dns server and there are also several mirrors for the Tor site. The potential blockage could be a response to Tor’s massive rise in popularity in Turkey following the Twitter blockage.

The Ankara court has put an end to that blockade, but another blockade is now a fact. According to the BBC, among others, the Turkish telecom authority has now determined that residents of Turkey are no longer allowed to visit YouTube. It would be a dns blockade and not yet an ip block, as was the case with Twitter at the beginning of this week. The reason, according to Reuters, is the appearance of audio fragments of conversations with sensitive information about the situation in Syria, including military operations. It is not the first time that Turkey has blocked YouTube: this has happened regularly in previous years and also for a longer period of time.