Turkey Blocks Access to Tor Project Website
Turkish Prime Minister, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, has continued going forward with the censor spree and is now blocking access to the Tor Project website. Just two days ago, Turkish Prime Minister, Erdoğan, blocked access to YouTube, and the week before Twitter. Now Erdoğan is continuing his censor reign targeting the Tor Project.
As Turkish ISP’s are begin forced into censoring users, Turkish netizens are finding ways around the internet blackout. Turkish users were using Google DNS to evade the censorship and access some of their favorite websites. Turkey has also enforced a ban on Google DNS. As Turkey continues to block popular networks, Turkish citizens are forced into using a VPN or Tor to access some of the largest networks in the world.
Now Turkish users are begin denied to access to anonymity and the ability to evade government censorship. Users residing in Turkey are begin forced to user mirror sites to download Tor. The Electronic Frontier Foundation, and many others have set up trusted mirror websites to download the Tor project. If you are in Turkey and wish to have access to Tor, trusted mirror sites are listed below.
EFF hosts its own mirror at https://tor.eff.org/.
Some other mirrors include:
- https://tor.spline.inf.fu-berlin.de/
- https://tor.myrl.net/
- https://www.tor.lu/
- https://tor.crazyhaze.de/
The Tor project is a free tool to evade internet censorship and encrypt your internet packets. The Tor network is a network of thousands of nodes worldwide serving users total anonymity, while unlocking access to globally censored networks. Tor project is especially useful in areas today where Turkey can decide that they want to block access to Twitter, and YouTube overnight.
Tor packets go in depth when encrypting internet traffic routing your network through multiple nodes. As the internet traffic is deeply encrypted, it is exceptionally difficult to filter Tor traffic.
Be careful downloading TOR: As the Tor project is a great tool, cyber criminals and governments worldwide have maliciously targeted downloaders. Eff has noted,
When the official distribution channel for a security or censorship circumvention tool is blocked, there is a very real danger of fake or backdoored copies of the tool being distributed under the guise of real tools. Be sure to download your tools only from websites using HTTPS, and only from trusted sources such as the sites on this list. Beware of software which is distributed via IM, Skype message, or email, as well as links posted to Facebook groups.