Yeah, I know this is getting old … but no one I know is actually maintaining a history of this deal.

YouTube is blocked again. A newcomer to the blocked list is 50Webs, a web hosting service. A court case in Ankara is responsible for the YouTube ban; a case in Erzurum for the 50Webs ban.

Google Groups are still banned, and WordPress is still accessible

Yeah, it’s getting old … but it’s no less stupid.

On the heels of the Google Groups ban, it appears as though access to WordPress.com (and this blog) has been restored … after an 8 month ban. Whether this lifting of the WordPress ban is a temporary glitch or a real change in policy remains to be seen. The weirdness is not letting up.

Yup. Google Groups has been banned in Turkey. I have no idea why.

That’s French for “Contempt”—as in the 1963 film by Jean-Luc Godard.

I am teaching a film course this term and decided to try to work “Le Mepris”. I just re-viewed the film before my lecture tomorrow. I meant to watch just the first few minutes but ended up watching the whole thing.

The film is so awesomely awesome on so many levels that it always messes me up. It’s revved by brain and my gut into hyper mode. I really should learn to avoid it. And Godard really ought to have made more like it.

What does this have to do with audio? Almost nothing—except maybe that the music for the film is, like much of the rest of the film, awesomely awesome and does a somewhat subtle though effective job of messing with the semiology of conventions.

Someone else is not getting it, but in a much different way. As previously discussed, there is a move to close the AKP here for unconstitutional activities—threatening the secularity of the state in particular. Now, I would think that if a bunch of fundamentalist Christians managed to come to power in the EU and started advocating that the Pope become the One True Leader of EU states, more than one EU government would have a problem with that. But apparently I was mistaken.

I guess the really telling quote is, “‘In a normal European democracy, these kind of political issues should be discussed in parliament and decided at the ballot box, not in the courtroom.’” The statement shows that the EU just doesn’t grasp the depth of the issue. For one thing, true democracy does not yet exist in Turkey. And as long as the friends of fundamentalists are in power, it never will. Friends of fundamentalism benefit from, among other things, the ignorance brought about by an underfunded education system, the increasing politicization and desecularization of the available education system, and a technically illegal but still rampant feudal system in the East.

Another aspect that the statement seems to miss is that the AKP has used the holes found in a battered and beaten constitution to make amendments that consolidate their power and guarantee that they can engage in whatever kinds of activities they see fit. More than one totalitarian state has started along similar lines—even some European ones.

In an ideal world, democracies find thier way and correct their mistakes. And sometimes in non-ideal ones as well.

This is pretty much what I tried to say in my previous post, but Mustafa Özyürek managed to put it much more bluntly: “The approach of ‘I have the majority, I can pass anything in Parliament’ is not correct.’”

According to this report, the AKP’s strategy to avoid closure is to amend the constitution “… to take the authority to file a lawsuit against a political party away from the chief prosecutor and hand it to Parliament instead.” In other words, if you are the party in power you can never be held accountable for illegal activity and you get to badger opposition parties with threats of closure if they get out of line.

Seems like a good checks-and-balances setup to me. <– (note: sarcasm)

This place just keeps getting weirder. First, the fundamentalist-friendly powers in government passed laws opening the way to lifting the headscarf ban in universities on the heels of getting their people into the Higher Education Board. This seemed to be the straw that finally got whatever pro-secularists in government to start playing hardball. (Sorry about the mixed metaphor. It was the only way I could think of the incorporate two links.)

This has sent the fundamentalist-friendly into a tizzy. The word on the street is that the “Ergenekon investigation” is now being used as an excuse to intimidate outspoken opponents of the ruling party. There’s also talk that this is part of a strategy to distract people from an attempt to implement a constitutional ammendment that would make it impossible to close the AKP.

This really reminds me of the destructive histrionics that pissed-off (and maybe a little frightened) children engage in when life doesn’t go their way. They don’t care what damage they do and whom they hurt. They can’t be bothered to be reflective. But I have no doubt that the tizzy-fitters don’t see it this way.

These people have a mission more important than man. It gives them strength. And strength with stupidity is a disasterous combination.

P.S. Youtube is unreachable again. Funny how these blockages start on the weekend. I wonder what it is this time and if it has anything to do with the above…

And totally unexpected. Whether the closure goes through or not (I am pretty sure it won’t) it’s still a victory because it shows that there are still some secularists left with teeth and it’s a strong warning to anti-secularists.

Bravo.

On my way into work today, I saw notes posted on all the entrances of the university’s buildings indicating that because of a decision by the Council of State to stay the order allowing the Islamic headscarf on campuses, students would not be allowed to wear headscarves on campus until further notice.

This very tiny victory has me feeling a very tiny bit less glum. It shows that there are still a few people in positions of power willing to stand up against fundamentalist forces. The Council of State is one of the most difficult areas for government to make appointments into, so maybe it only makes sense that the last holdouts should be found there. But it should also come as no surprise that it is only a matter of time before those in the Council of State are also replaced by the fundamentalist-friendly.

And then there’s this. Strange days.

I have begun to think that the only thing that can really save Turkey from this ongoing spiral into fundamentalism is a major economic crisis. It may be the only thing that can reverse the tide of support for this government—which has had the support of middle-liners because they have managed to give the appearance of what is for Turkey a stable economy. The main reason for this is that for the first time in a gazillion years, annual inflation in Turkey has been running at less than 10%. Yet, interestingly, when I talk to people they all seem to complain that years ago they were better able to look after their families, have decent holidays, etc.

But I fear the chances of an economic crisis of the degree needed to get people sufficiently annoyed at the government to demand a change are slim due to the gazillions in support they are allegedly getting from external sponsors. And then there’s the question of the replacement. Would they return to securing secularism here or would they be even more fundamentalist-friendly?

In case you had any doubt about Turkey’s ongoing spiral into fundamentalism, this is a followup to a post I wrote late last year. As feared, the Higher Education Board (YOK) has fallen. Read about these charmers.

I’ve been away from Istanbul for about six weeks. I had originally planned to be away for about two, but a small medical situation forced me to change my plans. I’m all better now, but, oh, how this city has changed.

While I was away, the government passed a law that opens the way to lifting the headscarf ban in universities. This, of course, has been a major goal of the current government from the start, is a huge symbolic victory for fundamentalism, and is a major defeat for secularism in Turkey.

The constitutionality of the changes is being formally challenged, and there is widespread disagreement regarding the enforacbility of the legal changes in its present state. However, the impact that the law as it stands has my head reeling. For one, despite the fact that by Article 17 of the Higher Education Board Law it is still not permissible for anyone to wear headscarves at universities, many univeristies (including—to my shock and horror—the university for which I work) are allowing students to enter classes with headscarves. But never you mind—there is a law higher than man’s law that these people are eager to implement and that others are not sufficiently willing to oppose.

The other major impact that the law is having here is that fundamentalists outside of universities are walking the streets literally and figuratively taking up much more room. They walk with their noses held higher, with greater swagger, often dead in the middle of roads—as though nothing can touch them. Clearly this little victory means a lot to them.

I have yet to fully pull my thoughts together. But I can tell you that seeing the armies of anti-secularists on campus has me depressed beyond belief. It seems like a horrible nightmare, but I am not expecting it to end.

From all indications, the fundamentalists have won. And we have lost … everything.

I got myself a nice new CD today (American Saxophone Music, Alex Mitchell), and this provided me a bit of an excuse to revisit audio ripping on Windows.

Picking codecs

With the wdespread availability of of high-quality lossy and lossless codecs, it makes no sense to rip to WAV files. I use two codecs as my defaults: FLAC for lossless compression and Windows Media for lossy compression. FLAC works about as well as any other lossless codec (apart from things like the generally unsupported Meridian Lossless Packing), and I love the fact that it’s an open source project. In fact, I am a big fan of open source in general. I routinely use open source software when it does what I need it to do–even if it may not be as smooth or efficient as a commercial or other closed alternative. I have even contributed a few open source programs, and not just for use in education. So FLAC floats my boat.

Then why, you are asking, do you use Windows Media as your default lossy codec? Especially when there are things like Ogg Vorbis around? Simple: at lower encoding rates, I find the damage done by WMA less distracting than the damage done by Ogg or MP3 at similar rates. This is a very subjective issue and one that is not the case (for me) for all music, all the time. But in general, WMA works for me. The fact that it’s supported on just about every DAP, media player, etc. also helps. (In all honesty, it’s been a few years since I have done any careful codec comparisons. It would probably be a good idea to re-do some tests to see if Ogg or MP3 encoding have improved.) I don’t really contemplate using aacPlus or other codecs. While aacPlus can do some amazing things at really low bitrates, it just doesn’t have enough support in hardware and software players to make it a viable alternative for general ripping. (However, I do use aacPlus as my default codec for remote steaming of my music collection, but that’s another story.)

Of course this assumes you are using a newer version of the WMA encoder. To do WMA encoding, I use the gratis command-line based Windows Media Encoder 9 Series tools. Many CD rippers incorporate older WMA tools, and these older tools limit the maximum bitrate, don’t give you options for constant/average bitrate, and probably don’t use the latest encoding models. (Microsoft claims, “[WMA 9's] sound quality is 20 percent better than audio sampled with Windows Media Audio 8 at equivalent data rate.”) I should also mention that I won’t touch Windows Media Player with a ten foot pole. Not only do I find its interface maddening, it also takes control of your media collection by default, changing tags and cover art at will. Sure, you can turn this off, but the whole package just rubs me the wrong way.

Tagging tracks

Apart from encoding the audio data into your desired format, a CD ripper should also let you automatically add tags to ripped tracks. While there are a ton of standalone programs that let you do this, it’s always much better to take care of this from the start. There are two traditional sources of track information used by ripping software: Gracenote and freeDB.org. You can read about the history of the relationship between the two elsewhere, but in summary the technology and database that makes Gracenote got started as an open-source project. Over time, the technolgy was converted to a proprietary, for-profit deal, and that got some people riled up. Thus freeDB.org was born. The quality of data available from Gracenote tends to be better and more comprehensive, but I still prefer freeDB.org because it’s free and for the people and it provides some competition for Gracenote.

Ripper options

So, what this means for me is that my ideal CD ripper will

• Rip FLAC out-of-the-box
• Rip fully optioned Windows Media 9 (or better) out-of-the-box
• Allow the use of external command-line tools for encoding if either of the above are lacking
• Use freeDB.org for tagging data
• Be open source

Sadly, such a ripper does not exist. So here is what I am using anyway.

Winamp (v5.52)

Winamp is a great-grand-daddy of media players. As it is asked to do more and more on top of an ageing codebase it’s getting pretty bloated. However, you can remove the bloating additions if you really want. It is my default audio player because it does ASIO via a thrid-party plugin and it has decent media library abilities. And it will play just about anything you can throw at it. The things I don’t like about Winamp are the previously stated bloat, a UI that is a bit maddening and not really attractive (but usable nonetheless), and it’s not open source.

Winamp also does CD ripping. It encodes to FLAC and Windows Media 9.2 out-of-the-box; however the freeware version of the program limits ripping speeds to 8x. It also uses Gracenotes for track data. While there is no facility for linking to external encoders (except perhaps through a third-party plugin) Winamp is professionally maintained–which means frequent updates of the endocers.

Summary: A reliable, configurable workhorse that is undermined by slow encoding. Works well, but not currently my first choice.

CDex (v1.70 beta 2, zip archive version)

I get the feeling that this open source project is floundering a bit. It’s popular alright, but its develpoment seems intermittent. It’s got all the basic features that you want in a ripper, and the interface is ok. The latest beta version does FLAC out-of-the-box, and it also does WMA–but the bitrate is limited to 160bps and you’re given no options other than bitrate, which makes me think they are using an older encoder. It does let you use external encoding tools, but I could not get WMA9 to work. It uses freeDB.org for tagging data.

Summary: Good for ripping FLAC. Ripping with external encoders is available but unreliable. My current choice for FLAC.

BonkEnc (v1.0.6)

This is another open source offering. Like CDex, this project seems a bit stalled, but the (one) developer makes it clear that devleoping this program isn’t a top priority in his life. It does FLAC out-of-the-box, but it supports neither WMA nor external codecs. However, the developer promises a plugin system in a future release that may address both issues. It uses freeDB.org for track data. The interface uses a toolkit I am not too familiar with, and while it’s aesthetically not unappealing, usablilty suffers a bit because the buttons, etc. are so tiny. A promising start that I would love to see mature some more.

Summary: Good for ripping FLAC. Ripping with external encoders is unavailable. Worth keeping an eye on.

Audiograbber (v1.83)

Audiograbber may be the most interesting of the bunch. This is an old shareware title that went freeware in 2004. It does not do FLAC out-of-the-box, and while it has WMA built-in, it is only version 8. However, it’s ability to use external encoders works–at least with Windows Media Encoder 9. (You can download a pdf of the enhanced batch file I am using that does tagging automatically here). It also works with FLAC. It uses freeDB.org for track data. The interface takes a bit of getting used to, but once you adjust to it, it’s quite usable. But if I can get external WMA encoding to work with CDex, I will probably retire this title. I really wish the owner of the code would open it up so that it could be updated because this has proven to be quite a solid workhorse.

Summary: Good for ripping WMA and FLAC via extenal encoder. Internal encoders are mostly obsolete, but support for external encoders is good. My current choice for WMA.

Untested

There are a couple possibilites that I have not yet thoroughly explored. First is foobar2000, a gratis audio media player that like Winamp supports ripping and has ASIO support built in. I’ve sometimes considered using foobar2000 instead of Winamp, but the thing that gives it power (i.e., tons of flexibility and configurability) is also its Achilles heel. Doing anything in foobar2000 is an exercise in the non-intuitive. And Winamp’s media library just works much better. I gotta say, using other media players really makes you appreciate how well Winamp’s media library database manager works. It updates very quickly, without the user’s intervention, and doesn’t get in your way when it’s doing so. All other similar things I have tried really blow in comparison. But I digress…

Finally, while this is probably totally in my head, I think Winamp–even in ASIO mode–sounds more correct than foobar2000. I really didn’t want to mention this until I had a chance to do bit-for-bit output comparisons and other testing, but I mentioned it anyway.

Still foobar2000 has a couple things going for it that make it hard to dismiss it altogether. One of those is that foobar2000’s support for external encoders appears quite good. Another is that the filetype icons are way cooler than Winamp’s.

The second option is Exact Audio Copy, a gratis ripper that claims to do a better job of reading your bits without error than anything else out there. They make a huge deal about this, but I have yet to find that any of the other ripping solutions mentioned here suffer from bit-reading issues of any kind. Maybe if you’ve got a really crappy drive or a marginal disk… Anyhoo, EAC is a bit of a bear to set up, but it seems to be active, so it’s also worth a closer look.

I’ll report back if I have any world-altering experiences with either foobar2000 or EAC.

Getting covered

Of course, once you’ve ripped your CD, you’ll want to put some cover art into the CD’s folder. There are all sorts of software titles to help you with this task, but I just Google around until I find what I’m looking for. In my opinion, anyone who says this isn’t fair use has a really warped view of the concept.

YouTube is back.
(And there was much rejoicing.)
WordPress.com is not.
(The rant goes on.)

Today, The New Anatolian is carrying this story, and Hurriyet is carrying this (in Turkish). The YouTube block has been in place for at least 60 hours yet there is nothing about it at Turkish Daily News or Today’s Zaman. Does this mean that this kind of thing is no longer news?

Last night I was not able to connect to YouTube through my Internet regular connection. This morning it became clear why: “Access to this web site has been suspended in accordance with decision no: 2008/55 of T.R. Ankara 12th Criminal Court of Peace.” Way to go.

This is not the first time that YouTube has been blocked here. I don’t know what the reasoning behind blocking YouTube this time around is, but I can say in no uncertain terms that this is getting really old.

A gob of years ago, I was on a school bus on my way to another day of 3rd grade. I was thinking about some song or another that I really liked–“Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey” by Paul and Linda McCartney possibly–and I wondered what kind of music I would be reacting to in the same way that people of my parents’ generation reacted so negatively against but that I loved so much. I took it for granted that in spite of my best efforts to stay “with it,” the generation gap would slowly slide so that I became the old fogey, complained that all this new music sounds the same, and would you please turn it down.

That day didn’t happen for many, many years.

That was then.

I like a lot of David Bowie’s repertoire, but I don’t think he is/was a musical genius. In spite of this, there is at least one spot in Nicholas Roeg’s “The Man Who Fell to Earth” where someones genius was showing. The spot I have in mind starts with Thomas Newton (Bowie’s character) nuzzled up against a spheroid device listening to some really inane music. We are lead to think that he’s listening to the very linear, scalar, repetitive, oscillator-driven stuff because it reminds him of home–at least until he removes the sphere from the device (stopping the music) and says something like, “I hate this shit that Farnsworth sends me.” It’s genius because of the way it plays on a number of the viewer’s expectations–both about Newton’s character and about what we are “supposed to” think space music/music-of-the-future sounds like.

It’s also genius because that very linear, scalar, repetitive, oscillator-driven, inane shit is what I am now hearing in a lot of places. Case in point: the music in the supermarket I was in yesterday. God, I wanted to run screaming from the place by the time I was done with my shopping. The same moronic thing, over and over and over and over again for 10 or more minutes. In this case it was a disquieting hybrid of a Latin beat and some Germanic melody. It was like salty chocolate, rammed into your mouth over and over again for ten agonizing minutes. Not want.

I really wanted to stop ranting, but I just can’t.

The WordPress blockage here is having an impact on many other sites. The sites in question have non-WordPress URLs, but these URLs are actually cloaks for WordPress-hosted blogs. Yup. They get sucked up into the farce as well.

Topping the list of effected sites is the ever dear http://icanhascheezburger.com/. If you have not visited this manifestation of the best that the Internet can be, I suggest you click in due haste and have a taste. Unless you are in Turkey, in which case you are just poo out of luck.

Another effected site is http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com. Yup, that CNN. You’d think they would host their own blogs on their own servers, but then again I suspect they never suspected that something as silly as the kind of blockage we’re seeing here would ever happen.

This led me to wonder what other sites might be blocked in Turkey, and after a thoughoghly unscientific and non-thorough bit of Googling, I was able to find a handful that were blocked and yet had no relationship with WordPress. The sites in question are pipicik.com (Turkish porn), thepiratebay.org (torrent-based filesharing), turkish-delights.com (amateur porn), and zevce.com (Turksih celebrity porn).

Now you might feel that the loss of none of the above sites is a major loss to humanity, however I think it’s important to recognize that from the list above it seems that the courts here are actively targeting certain kinds of sites: namely ones that don’t comply with a certain concept of “family values.” Someone might try to convince you that that the sites in question are blocked and/or were shut down for publishing or facillitating the trade without permission of copyrighted materials, but it’s really hard to imagine that this is the case with a site like turkish-delights.com.

You may not care at all about the loss of a handful of porno and porno-trading sites. However, the important thing to recognize is that if the courts get into the business of legislating “family values,” with essentially invisible due process to boot, and are legitimized in doing so, then the total loss of democracy is only a few rulings away. And it worries me no end that no one is talking about this here.

It’s the first day of the new year. I wish it began on a cheerier note.

(This is yet another installment in what is now my ongoing rant.)

Earlier this week TRT fell to the fundamentalists, and it looks like YOK is headed in the same direction. (In case you don’t know, Zaman is a conservative newspaper and Ahmet Necdet Sezer was one of the last advocates of democratic secularism left in government with any power.) Earlier this evening I saw on television the results of a comprehensive national poll that shows a large majority of people here probably think this is a very good thing. Some of the poll’s highlights include:

• 70% of all women in Turkey now wear a headscarf (or turban).
• A majority of people feel the ban on headscarfs on public employees and in universities should be lifted.
• A majority of people feel that resaurants should not be allowed to be open during the day in Ramazan.
• A majority of people feel that places that serve alcohol should not be allowed to be open at all during Ramazan.
• A majority of people feel that men and women should not be allowed to pray together at funerals.

I am now watching a talk show (not on TRT) with a panel of women who are discussing the headscarf issue. The panel consists of four seemingly liberal women: a totty 20-something model, a somewhat older journalist, a 50-ish former sex-symbol movie star, and the grandma of the bunch–a novelist/feminist. The totty thinks that it would be really sweet if the ban on the headscarf were lifted. The resident elder objects to this on the basis that it would mark the beginning of inescapable social pressure to conform and conserve. I agree with her.

The journalist points out that thirty years ago women had no problem walking around Erzincan and Erzurum (in eastern Turkey) wearing miniskirts, but today in many places in Istanbul a women can expect to get crap for just showing a bit of leg. I can second this with my own observation that there has been a significant shift in the way this country “feels” since I first started getting intimate with it ten years ago. Back then it was becoming liberal, albeit in a very goofy way, and it was fascinating to watch. Today it is becoming something else.

Toward the end of the discussion, the totty tried to defend her “lift the ban” position with something about cultural relativism and how she had gone to Egypt and covered herself up there to feel comfortable and didn’t feel at all weird about it. The resident elder then pointed out that that’s what’s in store for Turkey if the turbanists have their way, and upon her saying that, the hugely massive token that had been hovering over the totty’s head finally dropped and forced her into deep silence, along with everyone else.

It took a long time for the totty to get it. She’s one of the 30% of women here who don’t cover up. “Turbanists” are waging a cultural war in which the headscarf issue is a symbolic battle, and that forces the ever-decreasing advocates of liberalism to treat it as the same. World War II showed us that appeasements don’t work. Attention.

This is a continuation of my Disgusted rant.

I was in a taxicab today, and the driver (a fairly unpleasant smelling and behaving lad, but that’s another issue) had some talk radio show on the, er, radio. The talker was warning us about all sorts of Internet dangers we didn’t know about, including (shock/horror/awe) how some people assume false identities and even promote false information on the Internet. He then went on to insist that it was self-evident that some kind of censorship was needed to safeguard against this kind of “behavior that goes against the principles of your religion: Islam.”

The talker then told us that if you find such a site where someone is saying something inappropriate, it is possible to make a complaint, and that if your complaint is found warranted, the site would be shut down or blocked. He even gave us the URL for a site (purportedly run under the auspices of the Istanbul police) where you could anonymously report any kind of behavioral nasties you observe.

When the talker was finished, he wished us good day and hoped that our actions would be “accepted within the realm of the Master.” I couldn’t help but wonder if the talker wasn’t Adnan’s friend. Then another talker came on and told us in reverberant richness about the goodness of goodness, and that was followed by some music that I recognized as spiritual.

At this point I asked the fragrant lad behind the wheel to turn off the radio so I could start my day without weeping.