Twitpic lives! In 2024 no less.

Is enjoying the colours of autumn (tho’ today’s temp is summer! :))

Twitter may be no more, but twitpic still lives! Photos I posted on twitpic back in 2008 still exist. To see what I mean, check out the link to the photo above with my accompanying tweet that went with it.

Back then, you didn’t have the ability to post photos directly on twitter, so new services like twitpics allowed you to do that. Of course that all died off as twitter grew and added photo posting into their core features.

What’s amazing to me is

the photos that twitpics still exist online
that anyone can see any photo posted by anyone that used that service
that you can just make up a URL to see a photo. For example, the URL of the above photo is https://twitpic.com/g26i but if you enter https://twitpic.com/g262 or https://twitpic.com/g26e or https://twitpic.com/1234 you will see totally random photos.
At one point I had some code to crawl the URLs from 0000 to see if I could just find my own, and I did find some, but at some point I gave up

Anyway, fascinating to me that this archive still exists. Long after Elon ruined twitter and turned it into X. So check it out while you can.

P.S. For more context on twitpic, I wrote about it in 2008 here and here. And here’s one more from me: Saturday coffee at Indigo at yonge and Eglinton, Toronto

All taken from a Blackberry. 🙂

Forty things that have changed in IT and IBM in the last forty years (from 1983 to 2023)

If you were to ask me, on this day, what has changed with regards to computers and IT and IBM in the last 40 years, I would say it’s this:

Access: Very few people had access to computers 40 years ago. Those folks used mainframes, minicomputers and the occasional personal computer from Commodore or Radio Shack or this new start up called Apple. Now everyone has access to a computer they carry around in their pocket. (We call it a smart phone, but it’s really a powerful computer that makes calls.)
Ubiquity: Back in the early 80s the vision of everyone having a computer / terminal on your desk was just that: a vision. The few that did have these big monster 3277 or 3298 metal terminals or if you were lucky, a 3279-color terminal. People worked on paper.
email: One of the drivers of having a terminal on your desktop was to access email. Back then IBM’s email system was called PROFS (Professional Office System) and it meant you no longer had to send you three-part memos (yes people did that with carbon paper between the memo paper, so you could give the cc (carbon copy) to someone else). You sent electronic mail instead. Everyone thought it was great. Who knew?
Viruses: Viruses were new. My first was called the CHRISMA exec. In those days every Christmas people would send around runnable scripts (ie. Execs) and they would be the equivalent of digital Christmas cards. The CHRISMA digital Christmas card came from outside IBM. It read your address book and sent itself to all the people you knew. Sounds like fun. In fact it overwhelmed the IBM networks and IBMers around the world and we had to shut most things down to try to purge the network of this thing. It took days. Not fun.
Networks: Companies sometimes had their own networks: IBM had one called VNET. VNET connected all of IBM’s computers worldwide, and it had connection points with outside networks like BITNET too, which is where the CHRISTMA exec was. There was no Internet per se.
Network size: IBM’s VNET had over 1000 VM computers all connected to each other. All of them had an id called OP which was what system operators used to sometimes control the VM mainframe. Once on second shift another system operator and I wrote a program to messages all 1000+ ops in the world the equalivant of “hi hows it going”. To our surprised many of them wrote back! We manually started messaging them back and even became friends with some of them over time. It was like twitter before twitter or gchat before gcchat, etc.
Documentation: Computer documentation was hard to come by in the 80s, and if you had any, you might hide it in your desk so no one else could take it. The operators had a special rack of documentation next to where they worked. I was thrilled in the 90s when you could walk into a bookstore and actually buy books that explained how things worked rather than having to get permission from your manager to order a Redbook from IBM publishing in the US.
Education: In the 80s you could get a job in IBM operations with a high school diploma. Universities in Canada were just ramping up degree programs in computer science. By the start of the 90s most new hires I knew had at least a university degree and more likely a comp sci or engineering degree.
Software: We take Microsoft’s dominance in software for granted, but decades ago Lotus’s 123 was the spreadsheet program we used, just like we used Wordstar or Wordperfect for word processing. Microsoft worked very hard to dominate in that space, but in 1984 when the ads for Macintosh came out, Gates was just one of three people in the ad touting that their software ran on a Mac.
Minicomputers: In between the time of the mainframe and PC, there was the rise of minicomputers. DEC in particular had minicomputers like the VAX systems that gave IBM a run for the money. IBM countered with machines like the 4300 series and the AS/400. All that would be pushed to the site by….
IBM’s PC: The first truly personal computer that had mass adoption was the IBM PC. A rather massive metal box with a small TV on top, it could run the killer apps like Lotus 123. Just as importantly, it could run a terminal emulator, which meant you could get rid of old terminals like the 3270 series and just give everyone a PC instead. Soon everyone I worked with had a PC on their desk.
Modems: modems in the 1980s were as big as a suitcase. If a client wanted one, an IBM specialist would go their location and install one for you. In the 90s people got personal modems from companies that sent data at 9600 bps or 14000 bps or even 56 kbps! Today people have devices the size of a book sitting at home and providing them with speeds unthinkable back then.
Answering machines: The other thing people used to have on their desks besides a PC was an answering machine. Before that every office had a secretary. If you weren’t at your desk the call would go to them and they would take the message. If you had been away for a time you would stop by their desk and get any slips of paper with the name and numbers of people to call back. Answering machines did away with all that.
Paper planners: Once you did call someone back, you would get out your day runner / planner and try to arrange a meeting time with them. Once a year you would buy new paper for it so you could keep track of things for the new year. In its heyday your planner was a key bit of information technology: it was just in paper form.
Ashtrays and offices: it may seem hard to believe but back then smoking in the office was common, and many people smoked at their desk. It was a long and hard process to eliminate this. First there was smokeless ashtrays, then smoking areas, then finally smokers had to smoke outside, then smoke in areas well away from the main door. Likewise people worked in cubicles. It was miles away from working at places like Google or WeWork, never mind working from home.
The rise of Microsoft and the decline of IBM: The success of the IBM PC lead to the success of Microsoft. The adoption of MS-DOS as the operating system for the IBM PC was a stroke of luck for Microsoft and Bill Gates. It could have easily been CP/M or some other OS. With the rise of Microsoft and the personal computer, IBM started to lose its dominance. IBM’s proprietary technologies like OS/2 and TokenRing were no match for DOS / Windows or Ethernet. IBM did better than some computer companies like Wang, but it’s days of being number one were to be over.
The role of the PC: for a time in the 80s you could be a company and not have computers. Paper and phones were all you needed. We used to say that companies that used computers would beat any competitors not using computers. And that became the case by the end of the decade.
The rise and fall of AI: now AI is hot, but in the late 80s and early 90s it was also hot. Back then companies were building AI using languages like LISP and Prolog, or using specialized software like IBM’s Expert Systems Environment to build smart tech. It all seemed so promising until it wasn’t.
LANs: all these PCs sitting on people’s desks needed a way to talk to each other. Companies like Microsoft released technology like Windows for Workgroups to interconnect PCs. Office had servers and server rooms with shared disks where people could store files. There was no SharePoint or Confluence.
The rise of Ethernet: there were several ways to set up local networks back then. IBM had its token ring technology. So did others. It didn’t matter. Eventually Ethernet became dominant and omnipresent.
Email for everyone: just as everyone got PCs and network access, in the 90s eventually everyone got mail. Companies ditched physical mail and FAXes for the speed and ease of electronic mail, be it from AOL or Compuserve or someone else.
Network computers: one thing that made personal computers more cost effective in the 90s for people was a specialized computer: the network computer. It was a small unit that was not unlike a terminal, and it was much cheaper for business than a PC. To compete, the prices of PCs soon dropped dramatically and the demand for the network computer died off.
EDI: another thing that was big for a time in the 90s was EDI. IBM had a special network that ran special software that allowed companies to share information with each other using EDI. At one point IBM charged companies $10/hour to use it. Then the Internet rose up and ISPs charged companies $30/month and suddenly EDI could not compete with a PC using a dialup modem and FTP software provided by their ISP.
Electronic banking: with personal computers and modems becoming common in homes, banks wanted to offer electronic banking to them. Some banks like the Bank of Montreal even established a specialized bank, mbanx, that was only online. Part of my job in the 90s was to help banks create the software they would give out to allow their customers to do banking via a private network. While most banks kept their branches, most day to day banking now happened online.
The Internet and the web: if the PC changed everything in the 80s, the Internet changed everything in the 90s. Suddenly ISPs were springing up everywhere. Even IBM was an ISP for a time. People were scrambling to get software to allow them to connect their PC and US Robotics 14.4 kbps modems to access FTP sites and Usenet and more. No sooner did this happen than the World Wide Web and browsers bust on the scene. For many people, the Web was the Internet. So long Gopher; goodbye WAIS.
Google: finding things on the Internet was no easy thing. It only got worse as web sites shot up everywhere. Google changed the Web and made it usable. They changed email too. Sites like Yahoo! wanted to make you pay for more storage: Google gave people more storage than they could ever need.
From desktops to laptops: with home networks in place, people wanted to be able to bring home their computers to work remotely. I used to have a luggable computer that weighed 40 pounds that I would bring back and forth daily. As more people did this, computer companies got smart and made the portable computers smaller and better. Apple was especially good at this, but so was IBM with their Thinkpad models. As time went by, the computer you used at work became a laptop you use to work everywhere.
The Palm Pilot: the Palm Pilot succeeded where Apple and others had failed. They had come up with a device you could use to track your calendar, take notes, and more. All you had to do was put it in a cradle and press the sync button and everything would be loaded onto your PC. Bye bye paper planners. Hello Personal Digital Assistant.
IBM Services: One time IBM gave away its services. By the 90s they had a full one line of business devoted to providing their people to clients to help them with their business. People like me moved from helping run IBM’s data centers to going around to our clients helping them run their data centers and more.
Y2K: if Y2K was a non-event, it was only because of the countless hours put in by techies to make it one. Even me. I was shocked to discover that EDI software I wrote for a Quebec bank in 1992 was still running on PC/DOS computers in 1999. It was quickly rewritten before the deadline to keep running on January 1, 2000. Just like countless software worldwide.
E-business: if PCs changed business in a big way in the 80s, e-business changed them in a big way in the 90s. Even with the dot com era crash, there was no going back. With e-banking your retail branch was open 24/7; with e-business, the same was true of your favorite local (or non-local) business.
The resurrection of Apple and Steve Jobs: two things transformed IT and made it cool: one was the Web and two was the return of Jobs to Apple. Boring beige boxes were out: cool colored Macs made for the Internet were in. People were designing beautiful web sites with red and yellow and blue iMacs.And the success of those iMac led the way to the success of the iPod, and the success of the iPod led to so much more.
Blackberry and dominance of smartphones: if the Palm Pilot got mobile computing started, the Blackberry accelerated that. Email, texting, and more meant that just like online banking and e-business, you were reachable 24/7. And not just reachable the way you were with a pager/beeper. Now you could reply instantly. All the computer you needed fit in your hand.
The decline of analog: with the rise of all this computing came the decline of anything analog. I used to buy a newspaper every day I would commute to work. People would bring magazines or books to read. If you wanted to watch a film or listen to a song, it depended on something physical. No longer.
The rise of Unix/Linux: you use Unix/Linux every day, you just don’t know it. The web servers you use, the Android device you make calls on, the Mac you write emails on: they all depend on Unix/Linux. Once something only highly technical people would use on devices like Sun computers or IBM pSeries machines is now on every device and everywhere.
Open Source: in the 90s if you wanted software to run a web server, you might pay Netscape $10,000 for the software licence you needed. Quickly most people switched to the free and open source Apache web server software to do the same job. This happened over and over in the software world. Want to make a document or a spreadsheet? You could get a free version of that somewhere. For any type of software, there is an open source version of it somewhere.
Outsourcing/offshore: if people could work from anywhere now, then the work that was done locally could now be done anywhere. And it increasingly was. No one locally does the job I did when I first started in the computer industry: it’s all done offshore.
The Cloud: if work could be done anywhere by anyone, then the computers needed to do it could be the same. Why run your own data center when Amazon or Microsoft or IBM or Google could do it better than most? Why buy a computer when you only need it for an hour or a day? Why indeed?
The return of AI: finally, AI has returned after a long time being dormant, and this time it’s not going to be something used by a few. Now everyone can use it and be more productive, smarter. Like the PC or the Internet before it, AI could be the next big thing.
Web 2.0/Social Media: One thing to insert in between the Internet and AI in terms of groundbreaking changes in IT is Social Media. Both public social media like this and private social media like Slack and Microsoft Teams. Without social media I couldn’t share this with you.

In 40 years the devices have gotten smaller, the networks have gotten bigger, and the software has gotten smarter. Plus it’s all so much cheaper. If I had to sum it up, I’d say that sums up all the changes that have happened in the last 40 years. And we are just getting started.

Illuminating bad actors on the Internet

The Internet is full of bad actors, though if you lucky, you can easily avoid it, unless you are a celebrity like Chris Pratt or some poor organization struck by ransomware.

Some bad actors are hard to avoid due to their celebrity, like MTG or Joe Rogan. Sometimes you run into them accidentally, like I did when this toxic individual had his troll like followers harass me on twitter for a spell: Ricky Vaughn.

Bad actors can sometimes be relative. Whether you think the site OnlyFans website is a bad actor depends on your views of pornography/sex work. They must have felt they were, though, because they tried to shed the many individuals using the site who were pornographers/sex workers. It did not go well. You can read about it here, here and here. I thought this was shabby of them at best, until I heard that a lot of it had to do with the extremely large payment companies, Visa and Mastercard. This I found especially worrisome because there seemed to be a general censorship being enforced in the dark. This makes the payment companies bad actors, at least in this way. You can read about that here, here and here. Not to be left out, Stripe even discriminated against witches. It’s one thing for a service like OnlyFans to discriminate again who uses their services: that’s within their rights. It gets to be a big problem when payment companies do this, in my opinion. We all lose when this happens.

As for other bad actors, there are still people like the Proud Boys out there with their wink wink nudge nudge racism and fascism. That said, this was not great for them: Huge hack reveals embarrassing details of who is behind Proud Boys and other far-right websites. Speaking of things going badly for bad actors, there is this story: A Michigan woman tried to hire an assassin online at RentAHitman.com. Now she‚Äôs going to prison.

I generally focus on sharing positive and useful information on the Internet. But occasionally it is useful to shine a light on some of the darker areas of it and illustrate some of what is going on.

The Internet has always had its bad parts. You just didn’t know about it

Every so often someone will highlight Something Bad on the Internet and remark that once the Internet was a Good Place but now because of Something Bad, it no longer is.

I am sure they believe that, but they are wrong. The Internet has been a place for Something Bad for as long as it has been around. Case it point, Usenet groups. Before the Web, Usenet was a popular way to read about sports and the news and IT and pretty much anything else. Most of it was pretty mainstream, but some of it, especially the “alt” Usenet groups, was not.

To give you a taste of what I mean, read this: alt.binaries.images.underwater.non-violent.moderated: a deep dive – Waxy.org

There has always been Something Bad on the Internet since forever. (To see what I mean, read about ASCII porn.) There was never a golden era.

(Photo by Leon Seibert on Unsplash )

Yes, you can run broadband over wet string (which is how my home internet feels lately)

Remember tying two tin cans together with string to communicate? Well according to this article at BBC News…

Engineers at a small British internet service provider have successfully made a broadband connection work over 2m (6ft 7in) of wet string.

The connection reached speeds of 3.5 Mbps (megabits per second), according to the Andrews and Arnold engineer who conducted the experiment.

The point of the experiment appears to have been purely to see if it was achievable.

Cool! See the article for details.

For the meantime, I think I’ll stick with copper and fiber.

(For more on tin can phones, check out: Tin can telephone – Wikipedia)

John Stuart Mill on why you should not argue with people on the Internet (and especially twitter)

I have long tried to not get into arguments with people on the Internet*. This has served me well. If you are struggling with that, I recommend this piece:
150 Years Ago, a Philosopher Showed Why It’s Pointless to Start Arguments on the Internet

Mill makes the case for why trying to argue with people won’t get anywhere.

Read it. Practice it. Enjoy a better Internet.

(*Especially Twitter. Even debating with reasonable people is awful on Twitter due to the format of the medium.)

What is going on with Google and Facebook in Australia and why you should care

Have you been following what is happening with Google and Facebook in Australia? I found it interesting for a number of reasons. One, it seems Facebook and Google have taken very different approaches, with Google coming to an agreement with the Australian government while Facebook has not. (At least not as of Feb 20, 2021.) Two, I believe whatever happens in Australia will have an effect on what is happening in Europe and the United States when it comes to the big digital giants.

I’ve read a number of pieces on it, but I found this one especially detailed: Australia’s Proposed “Fox News Tax” | by James Allworth | Jan, 2021 | Medium

If you want to get a deeper dive into what is driving things with regards to Facebook and Google in Australia, start there.

(Photo by Joey Csunyo on Unsplash)

What is the Internet?

I have long ranted against people who confuse the Internet with the (World Wide) Web or social media or basically the part of the Internet they are familiar with.

Well now I no longer have to rant. I can just point people to this: The internet, explained – Vox.

The writers are Vox have done a fine job of explaining what the Internet is. Take a few minutes and read it. I’ve been on the Internet since the late 80s (email was the main use back then). While it is constantly evolving, the fundamental aspects of the Internet don’t change much. Read that piece and you will be good for a few decades.

Can you break the Internet?

Short answer: no. Longer answer can be found here: What Would It Take to Shut Down the Entire Internet?

It’s possible to mess up the Internet, but it is a lot harder than you think. Read the piece and find out why.

What the Internet is (and what it is not)

This is what the Internet is:

The internet is the wider network that allows computer networks around the world run by companies, governments, universities and other organisations to talk to one another. The result is a mass of cables, computers, data centres, routers, servers, repeaters, satellites and wifi towers that allows digital information to travel around the world.

The Internet is a network of networks. Much of what people believe the Internet is actually runs on top of it: the Web, social media, email, gopher, what have you.People often say “I liked the Internet when..”. They are talking about the platforms they use on the Internet. Things popular on the Internet now — hello Facebook! — will be a relic in the future. Technologies running on the Internet come and often go, but the Internet itself is relatively constant and changes slowly.

The quote highlighted above is from this article: What is the internet? 13 key questions answered | Technology | The Guardian. It’s a good introduction to the Internet at a basic level.

Finding your way with maps (via @austinkleon)

Austin Kleon has a great piece here on the importance of maps, and not as a means of getting around: Finding your way with maps

I love maps too. Especially hand drawn maps. And ancient maps.

I worry that our phones may be ruining hand drawn maps. When I used to take my son to hockey, I would draw my own maps to get to various obscure rinks. Later, I found out about Waze and it was so superior I stopped drawing my own maps. It’s too bad: it would be fun for my son years from now to have those old maps (which I never kept).

This is a map too.

It’s not really about how to get around. It’s a map showing the relationship between things. In this case, the organizations and their computers that made up the Internet in 1969. It does something old maps do: they show us the two dimensions of space and the one dimension of time.

Read Kleon’s piece. You’ll want to go look at maps afterwards, and you’ll be glad.

I create a super simple set of tools to secure your Ubuntu server

And you can get it here: blm849/supersimplehardening: A super simple way to harden your server.

I create a lot of Ubuntu test servers, and I find that as soon as I create a Ubuntu server on a cloud environment, it gets immediately attacked by automated software. This is obviously a concern. A bigger concern is that when I went searching for recommendations on how to harden such a server, I found a wide variety of recommendations! It can be hard to know what to do. Still, I needed something. As a result, I created this package of scripts. The scripts do a number of things:

prevent direct root login to your server via ssh. This was one of the things I saw consistently happen and once someone cracks the root access on your machine, it’s game over.
stop some basic security holes, like IP spoofing
download some useful software, like logwatch, ufw and others
upgrade all software on the server

This is just a very very limited number of things to prevent attacks. But it is better than nothing.

If you install Apache, PHP, MySQL or other software on your machine, there are even more attacks that will be launched against it. I recommend you get a firewall up and running and at least run logwatch on a regular basis to look for potential attacks being launched against you.

Finally, if it is important for you to secure your server, don’t stop with my scripts. Go out and consult with IT security specialists right away.

Good luck!

Want to send a fax without a fax machine? Now you can!

How? By using: Free Fax • Free Internet Faxing. I haven’t used it, but you can send free faxes to anywhere in the U.S. and Canada, apparently.

If you are dealing with organizations that refuse email as a valid way to receive information and insist on a fax, this could save your day.

The timeline of the World Wide Web

If you are going to talk about the Web or the Internet, it pays to know the history of it. The people at Pew put together the key dates and events of the World Wide Web here: Web History Timeline | Pew Research Center. Of course the history of the Internet is even older.

A very useful thing to consult whenever you read some think piece on “The Internet used to be X or Y”.

That story during the Paris attacks recently about a man named Zouheir, a Muslim, who saved thousands of lives? It’s mostly false.

As Snopes.com says:

An uplifting social media rumor about the purportedly heroic actions of a security guard named Zouheir during the Paris attacks was largely inaccurate.

For the details, see Zouheir: The MUSLIM Who Saved Thousands of Lives? : snopes.com.

More and more, whenever I see something viral, I check Snopes.com.

Why aren’t we becoming more productive with all this new technology?

Vox raises that question here: All this digital technology isn’t making us more productive – Vox, and it implies that because people are slacking off on the Internet. I think that is incorrect, and here’s why.

The chart that Vox piece has shows big producitivity gains from 1998-2003 and smaller gains after that.

From 1998-2003 was the peak adoption of the Internet by companies. In the early 1990s, companies started to adopt email. In the later 1990s companies started adopting the Web. To me it is not surprising that companies would become more productive and they shifted away from snail mail and faxes to email. And then companies shifted further and started offering services over the Web, I imagine they became much more productive.

Slacking off on the Internet has been a problem since the Web came along. I know, because I used to monitor web server traffic. I don’t think that is the issue.

I think it is more likely that companies grabbed the big productivity gains from the Internet at the beginning, and then those gains slowed down after.

So what about smartphones? Have they made people more productive? I think they have, but I also think that the gains in being able to access information remotely may have been overtaken by the sheer amount of information to deal with. Being able to deal with email remotely makes you productive. Having to deal with way more email than you ever had to in the 1990s because now everyone has it makes you unproductive.

Furthermore, many of the features on smartphones are aimed at personal use, not professional use. I think smartphones make us more productive personally, but less so professionall.y

In 1996, James Fallows wrote about Microsoft, the Internet, and even something called Java

I remember all this, but for those of you who feel like the Web has always been with us, it’s worthwhile reading his piece, The Java Theory in The Atlantic.

He didn’t know it at the time, but everything was about to change. I enjoyed reading it, first with hindsight, and then reading it while imagining/remembering what it was like then.

Worthwhile.

ifttt 101. Yes, you need to take this course. It will change your life.

Of all the things on the Internet, ifttt is one of my favorites. It could be yours too. Simply, it is a way to take two of your favorite things on the Internet and combine them into something even better.

First, to learn more about it, go here: How to Supercharge All Your Favorite Webapps with ifttt.

Second, once you read that, go to the site and browse the recipes. Or try and create your own: it isn’t hard.

I especially encourage it for anyone trying to update several forms of social media at the same time. You can link Facebook, Instagram, WordPress, Tumblr, Google, Blogger…you name it. With some practice, you will find recipes that help you keep all your social media in sync and working automatically.

I also encourage people who are interested in the Internet of Things. Or people who want to supercharge their phone. Or…well, just browse the recipes and you’ll likely see one that makes things easier for you.

To all the journalists that think Internet censorship in Turkey is a new thing

I found this in less than a minute: Censorship of YouTube – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Here is the extract for Turkey:

Turkish courts have ordered blocks on access to the YouTube website. This first occurred when Türk Telekom blocked the site in compliance with decision 2007/384 issued by the Istanbul 1st Criminal Court of Peace (Sulh Ceza Mahkeme) on 6 March 2007. The court decision was based on videos insulting Mustafa Kemal Atatürk in an escalation of what the Turkish media referred to as a “virtual war” of insults between Greek, Armenian and Turkish YouTube members. YouTube was sued for “insulting Turkishness” and access to the site was suspended pending the removal of the video. YouTube lawyers sent proof of the video’s removal to the Istanbul public prosecutor and access was restored on 9 March 2007. However, other videos similarly deemed insulting were repeatedly posted, and several staggered bans followed, issued by different courts:

the Sivas 2nd Criminal Court of Peace on 18 September 2007 and again (by decision 2008/11) on 16 January 2008; the Ankara 12th Criminal Court of Peace on 17 January 2008 (decision 2008/55);[72]

the Ankara 1st Criminal Court of Peace on 12 March 2008 (decision 2008/251);

the Ankara 11th Criminal Court of Peace on 24 April 2008 (decision 2008/468). the Ankara 5th Criminal Court of Peace on 30 April 2008 (decision 2008/599);

again, the Ankara 1st Criminal Court of Peace on 5 May 2008 (decision 2008/402);

again, the Ankara 11th Criminal Court of Peace on 6 June 2008 (decision 2008/624).

again, based on “administrative measures” without court order following corruption scandal, relating several govermental officials including Prime Minister Erdogan on March 27th, 2014 The block in accordance with court decision 2008/468 of the Ankara 11th Criminal Court of Peace issued on 24 April 2008, which cited that YouTube had not acquired a certificate of authorisation in Turkey, was not implemented by Türk Telekom until 5 May 2008.

Although YouTube was officially banned in Turkey, the website was still accessible by modifying connection parameters to use alternative DNS servers, and it was the eighth most popular website in Turkey according to Alexa records. Responding to criticisms of the courts’ bans, in November 2008 the Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan stated “I do access the site. Go ahead and do the same.”

In June 2010, Turkey’s president Abdullah Gül used his Twitter account to express disapproval of the country’s blocking of YouTube, which also affected access from Turkey to many Google services. Gül said he had instructed officials to find legal ways of allowing access.[75] Turkey lifted the ban on 30 October 2010.

In November 2010, a video of the Turkish politician Deniz Baykal caused the site to be blocked again briefly, and the site was threatened with a new shutdown if it did not remove the video.

In March 27, 2014, Turkey banned YouTube again. This time, they did so mere hours after a video was posted there claiming to depict Turkey’s foreign minister, spy chief and a top general discussing scenarios that could lead to their country’s military attacking jihadist militants in Syria.

It’s not a new thing: stop writing about it like it is new.