Interestingly, they actually briefly mention something on the topic in the article:

> In the time that the block was in effect, we heard from students, teachers, professionals and more in Turkey about how the block had impacted their daily lives. For many students, the block had occurred just days before their final exams.

> For many students, the block had occurred just days before their final exams.

So no effect on those students then.

Why? That's the period when most learning happens!

Yes, in theory.

Universities in Turkey have different internet infrastructure network called ULAKBIM (National Academic Network and Information Center). Therefore Wikipedia was never blocked for universities.

You seem to think that all knowledge is transferable to or indicative of different areas of knowledge. That's not the case.

Also there are a lot of mirrors. Easiest I can always remember is 0wikipedia. Just add a 0 before the hostname, no block.

You assume a vpn service (or even an ssh tunnel) is something a grad student in a third world country can afford? Often this is not the case.

I think you shouldn't use terminology you don't understand:

1. All this "1st / 2nd / 3rd world" is from cold war time and not really relevant anymore.

2. Turkey is NATO member since 1952 so it's would be your first world country.

PS: Of course Turkey is not a rich country, but everyone there can certainly afford $3-5 a month for VPN.

UPD: s/user/use/

yes, the three worlds concept was actually invented by mao and has more to do with bloc alignment and less with economics. it is outdated and new terms are needed.

>yes, the three worlds concept was actually invented by mao

seems like there's actually two "three worlds" labelings, one by mao, and one by a french demographer.

>As political science, the Three Worlds Theory is a Maoist interpretation and geopolitical reformulation of international relations, which is different from the Three-World Model, created by the demographer Alfred Sauvy, wherein the First World comprises the US, Great Britain, and their allies; the Second World comprises the Soviet Union, the People's Republic of China, and their allies; and the Third World comprises the economically underdeveloped countries and the countries, including the 120 countries of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM).[3]

Very well said. There are no worse people than those who trash their own country with ludicrous arguments.

Sounds like there would be worse people than that.

There are free VPNs, although most are probably spyware. If you need one both free of charge and free of malware, btw, you should get Psiphon ( https://psiphon.ca/ ), which came out of the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto.

Free VPNs are not always spyware. Some just going to use your PC as proxy server for someone else instead like Hola / Luminati which is extremely shady, but on other side dont need to spy on you since their commercial customers pay them well for residential proxy servers.

yes, but not all countries smile on use of VPNs. i don't know about turkey but in others you can get in some trouble.

Turkey actually has a GFW equivalent and it is spread across multiple layers.

More like inconvenience than trouble, I would say, as most prominent VPN providers are blocked at IP level.

i am told by expats that you can use VPNs in china to get access to blocked sites; i am also told that the government generally turns a blind eye, especially to foreigners using VPNs. how they deal with chinese users, in terms of social credit score, is something that is opaque. it seems like an inherently "antisocial" activity by the standards of their governance.

this is all assuming that with nation state resources they can identify use of VPNs at the user level.

that's assuming they can catch you, which they most likely can't.

with nation-state resources, are there not traffic analysis options that could work?

there are ways of circumventing them - China has very sophisticated traffic analysis options but they are not too hard to get around as long as you're not using one of the big popular VPNs.