Turkey Blocks Access To YouTube

Turkey has blocked access to YouTube just a day after a court ordered the government to lift a ban on Twitter imposed by the Prime Minister.

The Turkish telecoms authority TIB said today it has taken an "administrative measure" against the Google-owned video site.

Prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan singled out the video-sharing website for criticism on Tuesday after previously accusing Twitter of trying to undermine the personal privacy of those within his government.

"What is this thing called Twitter anyway?" he said on state television. "It is a company, involved in communication, social media, et cetera. Now, you look at it and actually see YouTube behind this. They do not have a representative here, but work with the lawyers of YouTube." Twitter had hired the same law firm YouTube has used during a dispute with Turkish authorities in 2008, when the site was also banned.

Mr Erdogan promised to "rip out the roots" of social network Twitter after a series of tweets appeared on the site that appeared to incriminate him and other top officials in relation to corruption. The site was banned last week, however Turkish users began changing internet settings in order to get around the block.

London-based Turkish journalist Figen Gunes said: "It was only a couple of hours ago the YouTube ban was announced but already in Google when one makes a search by writing 'YouTube ban' in Turkish, the second suggestion that comes up is about 'how to bypass the YouTube ban'. The previous YouTube ban and the recent Gezi movement in Turkey showed how the young generation is tech-savvy and still proves to be.

"The main opponent CHP's president Kemal Kilicdaroglu says Mr Erdogan has been scared of 140 characters so that's why Twitter has been banned.

"Now, the YouTube ban informs us that Erdogan is striving to hold on to power regardless of international pressures reminding him of the importance of the rule of law. The YouTube ban is against the freedom of expression and it should be overturned immediately."

Yesterday a Turkish court overturned the ban on Twitter, ordering the government to restore the service. It was unclear whether an appeal would be lodged, but more court action is now likely following the new YouTube ban. The block had caused uproar within Turkey, with the Turkish bar association and journalists' union bringing the court action citing a breach of freedom of expression.

- Press Association

Continue Reading

Twitter to launch mobile advertising product for apps - report

(Reuters) - Twitter Inc plans to release a mobile-advertising product in the next few weeks that will allow app-makers to encourage downloads of their software, Bloomberg reported citing people familiar with the matter.

The format will lead users to the advertiser's page in a mobile app store where they can download the software, Bloomberg said.

There had been speculation that Twitter and other internet firms would try their hand at this sort of marketing, which has proven lucrative for Facebook.

Twitter expects the app-install advertisements to attract advertisers in the e-commerce and gaming industries, according to Bloomberg.

Twitter representatives were not immediately available to comment.

(Reporting by Rohit T.K. and Narottam Medhora in Bangalore; Editing by Stephen Coates)

Continue Reading

Google Researchers: Journalists, Media Under Attack From Hackers

By Jeremy Wagstaff

SINGAPORE (Reuters) - Twenty-one of the world's top-25 news organisations have been the target of likely state-sponsored hacking attacks, according to research by two Google security engineers.

While many internet users face attacks via email designed to steal personal data, journalists were "massively over-represented" among such targets, said Shane Huntley, a security software engineer at Google.

The attacks were launched by hackers either working for or in support of a government, and were specifically targeting journalists, Huntley and co-author Morgan Marquis-Boire said in interviews. Their paper was presented at a Black Hat hackers conference in Singapore on Friday.

"If you're a journalist or a journalistic organisation we will see state-sponsored targeting and we see it happening regardless of region, we see it from all over the world both from where the targets are and where the targets are from," Huntley told Reuters.

Both researchers declined to go into detail about how Google monitors such attacks, but said it "tracks the state actors that attack our users." Recipients of such emails in Google's Gmail service typically receive a warning message.

Security researcher Ashkan Soltani said in an earlier Twitter post that nine of the top-25 news websites use Google for hosted email services. The list is based on traffic volumes measured by Alexa, a web information firm owned by Amazon.com Inc.

California-headquartered Google also owns VirusTotal, a website that analyses files and websites to check for malicious content.

"TIP OF THE ICEBERG"

Several U.S. news organisations have said they have been hacked in the past year, and Forbes, the Financial Times and the New York Times have all succumbed to attacks by the Syrian Electronic Army, a group of pro-government hackers.

Huntley said Chinese hackers recently gained access to a major Western news organisation, which he declined to identify, via a fake questionnaire emailed to staff. Most such attacks involve carefully crafted emails carrying malware or directing users to a website crafted to trick them into giving up credentials.

Marquis-Boire said that while such attacks were nothing new, their research showed that the number of attacks on media organisations and journalists that went unreported was significantly higher than those made public.

"This is the tip of the iceberg," he said, noting a year-long spate of attacks on journalists and others interested in human rights in Vietnam, including an Associated Press reporter. The attacks usually involved sending the target an infected email attachment masquerading as a human rights document.

While many of the world's biggest media players have been targeted in these attacks, small news organisations, citizen journalists and bloggers were also targeted, Huntley said, noting hacking attacks on journalists in Morocco and Ethiopia.

The problem, Marquis-Boire said, was that news organisations have been slower than other businesses in recognising the threat and taking action. "A lot of news organisations are just waking up to this," he said.

Many journalists are now taking individual action to protect their computers and email accounts, he said. "We're seeing a definite upswing of individual journalists who recognise this is important."

(Editing by Ian Geoghegan)

Continue Reading

Proposed NSA Reforms Vindicate My Data Leaks, Says Edward Snowden

By Jon Herskovitz

AUSTIN, Texas (Reuters) - Former security contractor Edward Snowden, addressing a sympathetic crowd at a tech-heavy event in Austin, Texas, on Monday from a secret location in Russia, said proposed reforms at the National Security Agency show that he was vindicated in leaking classified material.

Snowden, who faces arrest if he steps foot on U.S. soil, spoke via a video link to a packed house at the annual South by Southwest (SXSW) gathering of tech industry experts, filmmakers and musicians. He said the U.S. government still has no idea what material he has provided to journalists.

"I saw that the Constitution was violated on a massive scale," Snowden said to applause, adding that his revelations of government spying on private communications have resulted in protections that have benefited the public and global society.

NSA officials declined to comment on the Snowden remarks.

Last year, Snowden, who had been working at a NSA facility as an employee of Booz Allen Hamilton, leaked a raft of secret documents that revealed a vast U.S. government system for monitoring phone and Internet data.

The leaks deeply embarrassed the Obama administration, which in January banned U.S. eavesdropping on the leaders of friendly countries and allies and began reining in the sweeping collection of Americans' phone data in a series of limited reforms triggered by Snowden's revelations.

Major companies also tightened up safeguards. But Snowden said the efforts are still not enough to protect privacy properly, calling for stepped-up encryption that would make mass government surveillance too costly to conduct.

"The government has gone and changed their talking points. They have changed their verbiage away from public interest to national interest," he said, adding that this poses the risk of losing control of representative democracy.

He said the government's priority has been an expansive and ill-executed system of massive information collection instead of protecting the vast amounts of intellectual property that support the U.S. economy.

"We've got the most to lose from being hacked," Snowden said.

U.S. Representative Mike Pompeo, a Republican from Kansas, wrote to SXSW organizers, calling on them to withdraw the invitation to Snowden, who he said deceived his employer and his country.

"Rewarding Mr. Snowden's behaviour in this way encourages the very lawlessness he exhibited," Pompeo wrote.

To many in government and at the NSA, Snowden is a traitor who compromised the security of the United States. But for many at the conference he is a hero who protected privacy and civil liberties.

"To me, Snowden is a patriot who believed that what he did was in the best interests of his country," said Roeland Stekelenburg, creative director at the Dutch Internet firm Infostrada.

Snowden fled to Hong Kong and then to Russia, where he currently has asylum. The White House wants him returned to the United States for prosecution.

(Reporting by Jon Herskovitz; Editing by Jonathan Oatis and Leslie Adler)

Continue Reading