Turkey still continues imposing bans to the websites.

A court of Ankara has issued an order denying access to the file-sharing websites Rapidshare (a Swiss-owned one click hosting pay- and free-service (with certain restrictions and limitations) website that operates from Switzerland and is financed by the subscriptions of paying users.) and FileServe.

Both websites are very popular among Turkish internet users.

The court order was issued today and most internet users logging onto the site in Turkey are met with a holding page with a Turkish message, which translates as: “Access to this site has been denied by court order”

By the way, thousands of Turks gathered in some 40 cities and towns around the country last week, marched organized on Facebook against state Internet censorship.

The trigger for the protests was a decision by Turkey’s Internet regulator, the Information and Communication Technologies Authority, or BTK, to introduce a selection of filters that Turkish Internet users would choose from before browsing the Internet, beginning in August.

As far as remembered, Turkish Information and Communication Technologies Authority has been imposing bans to a mass amount of websites for the last 3 years. The biggest video website Youtube was banned in 2008 and last 2 years.

Turkey continues imposing bans to the websites.

Today the very popular online music streaming site Fizy.com is banned by Turkish authorities. Fizy is also a successful Turkish entrepreneurship.

Fizy.com, the world’s most popular category of social media news site Mashable.com Mashable Awards, held this year by the fourth “Best Music Discovery Service” was a finalist in the category by entering the top five sites.

As far as remembered, Turkish Information and Communication Technologies Authority has been imposing bans to a mass amount of websites for the last 3 years. The biggest video website Youtube was banned in 2008 and last 2 years.

Turkey continues imposing bans to the websites.

Now the website of the very famous Playboy magazine is banned in Turkey, according to the leading newspapers.

The ban of this mag website is based on an ‘’a legal evalulation and a technical investigation carried out in the scope of index crimes according to the concerned law no. 5651’’

As far as remembered, Turkish Information and Communication Technologies Authority has been imposing bans to a mass amount of websites for the last 3 years. The biggest video website Youtube has been banned since 2008. Youtube has been banned because of  ‘’hosting contents against Atatürk’’ but Playboy ban has something more to discuss according to vary of  Turkish internet users.

Another  interesting point is that Playboy website is banned just before the religious holidays in Turkey.

There are also thousands of websites which have  low traffic and have been banned in Turkey because of their explicit content.

After U.A.E., Saudia Arabia, Jordan, Lebanon and India banned Blackberry mobile phones from using email, instant-messaging and web-browsing services, now Turkey is prepared to do the same.

The continuing inspection by the Turkey’s Information and Communication Technologies Authority is about to set, according to leading newspapers in Turkey.

As rumoured, the government asked Blackberry for a specifically designed protocol to provide corporate customers with the ability to transmit information wirelessly while also ensuring them with the necessary confidence that no one, including RIM (Research in Motion service), could access their data.

There will be more spesific and secure solutions like moving the servers to Turkey and run them in a high secure specialized protocol. By all means all Turkish Telecommunications Provider’s such as Turkcell, will help the process on this issue.

Two hundred thousand users are at risk

If the negotiations gone too far, Turkey may be 6th country to ban Blackberry services. Blackberry is very popular and there are approximately 200.000  users in Turkey. This may also affect the visitors come to Turkey.

As I mentioned about the global risks of cloud computing in one of my articles, this example can be considered as one of them.
You can read it from here.

Altough Turkish people are familiar with the latest bans such as YouTube.com and many other websites but it will be the first hardware ban related to it’s services.

As well known, Cloud Computing is online-based computing, whereby shared resources, software, and information are provided to computers and other devices on demand, like the electricity grid.

Cloud computing allows you to host your files on the web, run your own applications, launching operating systems and scale them.

Amazon.com the Online shopping site from the earth’s biggest selection of books is also one of the biggest cloud computing services on the market. Also there are other big boys on the park as Appistry-Cloud computing middleware, GoGrid, Flexiscale, Microsoft Live Mesh, Force.com, 3Tera and more familiar;  Google App Engine.

One of the biggest advantages of cloud computing is it’s global, private hard disk across the Internet; accessing from any computer and smartphone or even cell phone. Cloud computing offers you world class accessibility.

Is it really so?

This is fact that internet is global, but the laws are not.

Not long ago, Turkey has coincidentally blocked access several Google services, including Google Docs and its translation service because Turkey already blocked YouTube and some of the Google services use the same ips with YouTube. According to users in the country, docs.google.com, translate.google.com, books.google.com, google-analytics.com and tools.google.com are affected by the ban.

On another note, Turkey wants Google to pay 30 million lira (about $18.7 million) in taxes.

Users couldn’t access their Google Docs spreadsheets and documents. They couldn’t measure their web sites using Google Analytics.

Today, Iran, UAE, Thailand, Morocco, Iraq, Brazil, Australia (in schools) are blocking YouTube.  Do you see how many people can be affected with their cloud computing services?

Same had happened in 2009, because The Great Firewall of China blocked some of the Google Apps services.

China’s internet authorities blocked many Google searches for terms and websites deemed politically sensitive.

These are just popular issues and can be multiplied. People who use cloud computing services around the world, cannot always benefit from it’s global Access as it was told. As IT budgets pointing to the cloud computing this is still risky.

So far the issues are about Google App Engine but it’s clear that the risks and trust building mechanisms of cloud computing should be reconsidered.