After YouTube, Turkey authorities have now banned the entire wordpress.com domain in the country - the Turkish bloggers can neither post new articles on their Wordpress.com hosted blogs nor can they read any other blogs.
[The ban does not affect self hosted Wordpress blogs since they don't have wordpress.com in the URL]
Ozkan Erden, a Turkish blogger, says that the Wordpress ban was enforced after some insulting remarks were posted on a WordPress blog against Adnan Oktar (Harun Yahya), a religious leader and author based in Turkey.
To bypass the government ban, Wordpress.com bloggers and blog readers in Turkey can configure the internet connection settings of their web browser and point the DNS server to that of OpenDNS instead of using the default DNS server of the Turk Telecom ISP. (see screenshot)
Alternatively, they can try other anti-censorship workarounds listed here - How to Access Blocked Websites
Find this article at: http://labnol.blogspot.com/2007/08/how-to-read-wordpresscom-blogs-in.html
web: http://www.labnol.org/ email: amit@labnol.org
Reader Comments
I've been using OpenDNS since before the ban, and I'm sorry to report that it does not get around the ban. My router uses OpenDNS and all computers in the house use the router, but just to be sure I changed the individual PC settings to OpenDNS and it still comes up as blocked.
Written on 3/9/07 9:22 PM
Disregard. Apparently my particular router, the USR 9110 ADSL/wireless router, doesn't respect the DNS settings. If it can resolve an address with Turk Telecom, it doesn't bother with OpenDNS. Once I switched each individual PC's DNS to OpenDNS and cleared the browser cache, everything workes fine again for now.
Written on 4/9/07 8:55 AM