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.

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.