Ktunnel

» see ktunnel.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

Ktunnel was a web proxy: one page with a text box, where you typed an address and the site fetched that page for you from its own server. The earliest capture, from 8 November 2006, is in English and promises to help you "get past pesky url or ip based filters". Its About page explains whose filters those were. "I too once went to school," the operator wrote, "and didn't much appreciate being blocked accessing various websites."

That operator signed his name. Gabriel Ramuglia introduced himself as the former owner of Overnight PC, a computer repair shop in Fairbanks, Alaska, and as the author of a browser game called Oil Fight that a school might block too. He already ran an older proxy named Vtunnel, started in 2005. Ktunnel borrowed so much from it that the tunnel photo on its front page kept the file name vtunnel.jpg for years. Money came from ads shown during the proxy session, and the About page promised that access logs were deleted regularly in case a subpoena ever asked for them.

Then a court in Ankara found him an audience. Türk Telekom began enforcing a block on YouTube on 5 May 2008 and it stayed in place until 30 October 2010. On 18 August 2008 Milliyet read the Alexa list for Turkey and found Ktunnel.com at number 37 with Vtunnel at 41, while the banned YouTube itself sat at 17. Writing in 2023, Ramuglia said Vtunnel alone had passed 1.3 million unique visitors a day, most of them in Turkey and looking for YouTube.

~ the chronicle ~

~ thirty months without youtube ~

I spent that block at university on a TTNet line, and in those years a proxy address was as ordinary a piece of knowledge as a bus route. The tunnel sites were the method that needed no settings. There was no DNS server to change and nothing to install, which made them the one that also worked on a lab computer or in an internet cafe. Video through an ad-funded proxy was slow and the player often broke, so people with their own machine tended to move on to alternative DNS servers. The name stayed in the vocabulary long after the habit had gone.

The workaround was no secret at any level. Asked about the block by reporters in November 2008, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan answered, in the translation Wikipedia carries, "I do access the site. Go ahead and do the same."

~ rot13 in the page source ~

The archived HTML shows how the site dealt with filters aimed at itself. The heading and the sales pitch are absent from the source. In their place sits a JavaScript string in ROT13, the letter-rotation cipher from Usenet, which the browser decoded and wrote into the page on load. To a filter reading the raw file, the site's name was Xghaary.pbz. The About page listed two more selling points: no browser configuration, and support for form POST, so that sites with a login worked through it.

Between the capture of 24 July 2008 and the one of 13 September 2008, that hidden string changed language. The new heading read "Ktunnel, çevrimiçi gizliliğinizi korumak için burada!", which is a fair Turkish version of the English line about protecting your anonymity online. The sentence under it came out worse. Getting past "pesky" filters had turned into a promise that you would not have to see annoying addresses. The menu links below were never translated at all.

~ forwarded to somebody else's proxy ~

The site outlived the block by more than five years. By 5 January 2014 ktunnel.com answered with a redirect to ktunnel.net, a second address that had carried the same page since 2007. The Turkish front page was still being served on 26 February 2016. The next capture, from 4 March 2016, forwards to 4everproxy.com, a proxy run by somebody else, and by December the address showed a GoDaddy parking frame. No notice was posted. Ramuglia's 2023 post gives 2016 as the year his proxy business ceased, and says the company carried on as IOFLOOD, the server hosting firm he had started in 2010.

Neither domain resolves today. The name is still in use by imitators. One of them, ktunnel.com.tr, turns up in search results as a proxy site.

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