Apparently web censorship is so bad in Turkey that blogs are shutting themselves down in protest. According to this TechCrunch post, it started with one blog that shuts itself down and put up a single message:-

Bu siteye erişim kendi kararıyla engellenmiştir

which roughly translates to:

The access to this web site is prevented by its owner’s free will.

After that nearly 200 Turkish blogs made the same move in protest. This is to show web surfers what the Internet would look like if the censorship continues unabated.

Now, that is what I call a protest.

Not some silly shenanigans rising or displaying a graphic image of an upside down national flag on their blog.

Malaysian Prime Minister says that these bloggers are evil. I just think it’s silly, not evil just silly.

The upside down flag is accepted as official signal of distress.

This doesn’t make any sense. Some flag are symmetrical in design which shows no different if the flag is rise the right side up or upside down.

It would obviously be meaningless to invert the French national flag, United Kingdom flag, England, Austrian, and other countries with similar flag design. Their flag looks the same when rise upside down. How would we know if their country is in distress?

So I did some research on this. It seems that most naval flags have the quarterly flag design with the national flag being on the top left conner.

A naval ship flying an upside down naval ensign might be a signal of the ship distress. However this was used very long time ago, back when pirates are always seen with an eye patch, a parrot, a wooden leg and a bottle of rum, not the current pirates that we are familiar with usually seen with portable HD players and are always listening to music online.

Now there are 16 different standardized distress signals used in shipping.

If a crew abandons a ship in distress to save their life, the last thing to do (if they have time to do so) is to turn the flag upside down. This means that they give up any right on the vessel or cargo and anybody who manages to rescue the ship afterwards could keep it.

There are many interpretation of what an upside down flag on a ship means. I hope that the above interpretation is not what these bloggers with an upside down flag had in mind. If it is, then I think someone should kick the feller.