Andrea Peterson / The Switch:
After Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan banned Twitter in the country late Thursday night, many local users found ways to circumvent the restrictions. But getting around the ban is becoming more difficult, as the government appears to have changed up its technical strategy for blocking the social media platform.
When the block was first implemented, most Internet Service Providers appeared to be using DNS redirects to show users inside Turkey a page citing various court orders Twitter had not responded to as justification for the ban. DNS, or the Domain Name System, is sort of like a phone book for the Internet -- it translates a URL into the numbers of IP addresses so browsers can access the Internet. Local ISPs were essentially changing the record in their digital phone books and redirecting many people in Turkey who were attempting to access Twitter to a different destination.
