* yawn *, I probably should be writing this a little earlier in the day. Since arriving back in Phillips, my internal clock has been slowly adjusting to EST. Just like my trip to Istanbul, I couldn't sleep on the plane. Unlike my trip to Istanbul, I couldn't sleep the night before.
I'm afraid I don't have much to say about headlines in Turkey (although there is a cool article here on Turkish-Russian relations). To be honest, I was too preoccupied with finals and homework. I didn't do as well as I would have liked in Operating Systems, but the credit will transfer, and I'll have one more pre-requisite to the Networks class at UMass out of the way. Also, I did get an AA (the highest grade possible) in Turkish History for Foreigners. Finally, I do plan to order Cellat through Onar Films and donate it to the Cinema Snob.
On another note, I'd like to talk about some of the work I did as part of Operating Systems. As homework for the course, we had to write two Linux kernel modules and some appropriate documentation. My laptop crashed not long after I wrote this section, but I was able to recover the source code, the makefiles, and one of the README files I wrote for the class. The first module, for those of you who use Linux, replicates part of the functionality of the pstree command. For those of you using Windows, it generates a list of all the programs running on your machine. The second module is supposed to run after an I/O bound program (proc2) and a CPU-bound program (proc1) have already started execution. It then collects some statistics on their use of the CPU. To run this module, run proc1 and proc2 in separate terminals, and then insert the proctest module using the same sudo command described in the mypstree module. You can then find the statistics that proctest collected in your /var/log/messages file. If you want to play around with it, try interacting with the I/O bound program while proctest collects data and see how the data changes. IF YOU WANT TO TRY EITHER MODULE, I STRONGLY RECOMMEND DOING SO ON A VIRTUALIZED LINUX DISTRO! Go to VMWare, download VM Player, and insert the module on a virtualized Linux distribution. I developed both modules on an image of Ubuntu version 8.04 using kernel version 2.6.20. The proctest module will likely not work on a more recent kernel, because it references members of the Linux kernel's task_struct structure that have since been phased out. I am not responsible for any damage to your computer caused by these modules.
To wrap this all up, I remember reading something in UMaine's student newspaper, The Maine Campus, with a bunch of jokes about the kinds of people who write op-eds in student newspapers. One of them was the self-explanatory Mr. “I studied abroad and it changed my life”. While I have been beginning quite a few sentences with “In Turkey...” these past few days, I wouldn't categorize the last few weeks as a life-changing event. First, I have been learning about this part of the world ever since the Eurasian Politics course I took at UMaine in the spring of 2008. Part of my mind has been there for the past two years, and so I wasn't shocked by, for example, pictures of Atatürk everywhere, seeing the inside of a mosque for the first time, and...well, finding whoopie pies in Istanbul was a little surprising.
Second, one thing that four years of study in the social sciences teaches you is that, while we may all have different languages, histories, religions, and cultures, people are people. I think a lot of Americans, especially college kids, look at foreign countries as so foreign that they forget that they are inhabited by human beings. It's probably a bad idea to conclude this journal with a quote from an OK late 90's ska song, but it's the most concise way I can think of to make my point:
“Do you think it's strange
That there's a way
Of how you looked and how you act and how you think
pretend they're not the same as you?”
-Less than Jake, “All My Best Friends are Metalheads”
sudo rmmod travel_journal
Wednesday, August 25, 2010
Sunday, August 22, 2010
7-31-2010: Cola Turka is far better than Moxie, and I think I just lost my “from away” certification
I meant to write this entry last week, but my own laziness coupled with the fact that I had midterms in both of my classes on the 22nd and the 27th got in my way. Let's just say I'm aiming for quality over quantity in this journal.
Unfortunately, I don't have any updates on Cellat. However, a few weeks ago, there was a protest in Taksim Square (which is only a short bus ride from Boğaziçi) of the current censorship laws. It obviously wouldn't be appropriate to participate, and it only occurred to me the next day that I could just go and watch. That is probably my biggest regret about my entire trip to Turkey. Anywho, I do have a couple comments regarding the protest based on what I've read in the news.
First, a comment about numbers. The OpenNet Initiative's post on the protest claims that “thousands” of people were involved in the protest. While there doesn't appear to be a source in the post for that number, it may well be from a post in Cyberlaw Blog (which is on ONI's blogroll) where a reporter at the protest states that there were “approximately 2000” protesters at the march. However, the articles in Hürriyet and Today's Zaman say that the number of protesters was close to a thousand and in the hundreds, respectively. I'm not trying to minimize the protest, but I am more inclined to believe the numbers from these two newspapers, especially Hürriyet's. Doğan Media Group (which owns Hürriyet) has had quite a feud with the Turkish government, and I can't see any reason they'd want to downplay the size of the protest.
Second, I'm a little concerned about the way the protestors seem to view their side of this issue. The press statement read at Galatasaray Square stated that “The Internet is the good news of a full attentive utopia of democracy being possible without a hierarchy.“ I hope that this does not reflect how the anti-censorship people plan to “organize” their movement. Just because the new Web 2.0 platforms have made it much easier to organize large-scale grassroots protests does not mean that fundamental facts about leadership and movements are now obsolete. Evgeny Morozov made this point much more eloquently than I just did in a talk at re:publica 2010 and, to paraphrase him, everyone can't be Atatürk. If Turkey is going to stop blocking parts of the internet, it will take something like what Joost Lagendijk described at the end of a really good op-ed in Hürriyet: “Why not think out of the box and imagine a coalition between the platform, President Abdullah Gül,...and main opposition Republican People’s Party, or CHP, leader Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu who...could take the lead for once in defending freedom of speech and make Internet freedom one of his campaign promises?”
When it comes to real-life internet usage in Turkey, I just spoke with one of my Turkish friends, and I mentioned that I could access Youtube without a proxy. I also passed on the rumor that the Telecommunications Bureau (TIB) has an exemption for university networks. She hadn't heard anything about this. When Lagendijk calls the TIB “an opaque body that is difficult to control”, this is just another example.
I'd like to finish this post with a little discussion about the use of the headscarf as I have observed it here in Turkey. Journeyman Pictures has a short video on the use of the hijab in universities, and while it doesn't name Boğaziçi as the school where a short-lived headscarf ban was relaxed after student protests 2 years ago, it's obvious from the footage. I want to speak to one of the arguments made in the video in favor of the ban, that essentially allowing the hijab in a country that is 99% Muslim will cause young women who don't wear the hijab to wear it due to peer pressure. As I said, it has been two years since the headscarf ban was lifted at Boğaziçi, which, by the way, had never had a headscarf ban before. While I only just started paying attention to this when I saw the Journeyman Pictures video a few days ago, of the approximately seven girls in my Operating Systems class; I have never seen one come in wearing a hijab. While there are girls on campus who wear it, they seem to be fairly well mixed in with those who do not. I for one am glad that I came to a university where all students can come together in support of religious freedom...and the BBC would like to apologize for how sappy that statement sounded. The appropriate people have been sacked.
I'm roasting here. Constant 80+ degree weather is no fun when you don't have ac.
PS. Since I had way too much time on my hands, I looked up the fan pages of a couple political/religious figures on Facebook to compare them with Atatürk's following. Keep in mind, this was done somewhat quickly and in some cases (poor Ike) I'm sure I didn't find the page with the most fans. Here I have the figure and the number of fans
Sarah Palin: 2,015,560
Mustafa Kemal Atatürk: 1,835,170
Martin Luther King, Jr.: 790,990
Jesus: 148,097
Ronald Reagan: 59,189
Abraham Lincoln: 31,419
Bobby Kennedy: 24,962
George Washington: 18,829
John F. Kennedy: 8,825
Franklin D. Roosevelt: 6,254
Dwight Eisenhower: 597
First, I see this as just one way to look at the fact that there is no figure in American political history that can be even remotely compared to Atatürk. George Washington was only one of the Founding Fathers, and he has been dead since 1799. Second, let's hope Atatürk catches up to Sarah Palin.
PPS. Non-Mainahs can click here for an explanation of being "from away".
Unfortunately, I don't have any updates on Cellat. However, a few weeks ago, there was a protest in Taksim Square (which is only a short bus ride from Boğaziçi) of the current censorship laws. It obviously wouldn't be appropriate to participate, and it only occurred to me the next day that I could just go and watch. That is probably my biggest regret about my entire trip to Turkey. Anywho, I do have a couple comments regarding the protest based on what I've read in the news.
First, a comment about numbers. The OpenNet Initiative's post on the protest claims that “thousands” of people were involved in the protest. While there doesn't appear to be a source in the post for that number, it may well be from a post in Cyberlaw Blog (which is on ONI's blogroll) where a reporter at the protest states that there were “approximately 2000” protesters at the march. However, the articles in Hürriyet and Today's Zaman say that the number of protesters was close to a thousand and in the hundreds, respectively. I'm not trying to minimize the protest, but I am more inclined to believe the numbers from these two newspapers, especially Hürriyet's. Doğan Media Group (which owns Hürriyet) has had quite a feud with the Turkish government, and I can't see any reason they'd want to downplay the size of the protest.
Second, I'm a little concerned about the way the protestors seem to view their side of this issue. The press statement read at Galatasaray Square stated that “The Internet is the good news of a full attentive utopia of democracy being possible without a hierarchy.“ I hope that this does not reflect how the anti-censorship people plan to “organize” their movement. Just because the new Web 2.0 platforms have made it much easier to organize large-scale grassroots protests does not mean that fundamental facts about leadership and movements are now obsolete. Evgeny Morozov made this point much more eloquently than I just did in a talk at re:publica 2010 and, to paraphrase him, everyone can't be Atatürk. If Turkey is going to stop blocking parts of the internet, it will take something like what Joost Lagendijk described at the end of a really good op-ed in Hürriyet: “Why not think out of the box and imagine a coalition between the platform, President Abdullah Gül,...and main opposition Republican People’s Party, or CHP, leader Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu who...could take the lead for once in defending freedom of speech and make Internet freedom one of his campaign promises?”
When it comes to real-life internet usage in Turkey, I just spoke with one of my Turkish friends, and I mentioned that I could access Youtube without a proxy. I also passed on the rumor that the Telecommunications Bureau (TIB) has an exemption for university networks. She hadn't heard anything about this. When Lagendijk calls the TIB “an opaque body that is difficult to control”, this is just another example.
I'd like to finish this post with a little discussion about the use of the headscarf as I have observed it here in Turkey. Journeyman Pictures has a short video on the use of the hijab in universities, and while it doesn't name Boğaziçi as the school where a short-lived headscarf ban was relaxed after student protests 2 years ago, it's obvious from the footage. I want to speak to one of the arguments made in the video in favor of the ban, that essentially allowing the hijab in a country that is 99% Muslim will cause young women who don't wear the hijab to wear it due to peer pressure. As I said, it has been two years since the headscarf ban was lifted at Boğaziçi, which, by the way, had never had a headscarf ban before. While I only just started paying attention to this when I saw the Journeyman Pictures video a few days ago, of the approximately seven girls in my Operating Systems class; I have never seen one come in wearing a hijab. While there are girls on campus who wear it, they seem to be fairly well mixed in with those who do not. I for one am glad that I came to a university where all students can come together in support of religious freedom...and the BBC would like to apologize for how sappy that statement sounded. The appropriate people have been sacked.
I'm roasting here. Constant 80+ degree weather is no fun when you don't have ac.
PS. Since I had way too much time on my hands, I looked up the fan pages of a couple political/religious figures on Facebook to compare them with Atatürk's following. Keep in mind, this was done somewhat quickly and in some cases (poor Ike) I'm sure I didn't find the page with the most fans. Here I have the figure and the number of fans
Sarah Palin: 2,015,560
Mustafa Kemal Atatürk: 1,835,170
Martin Luther King, Jr.: 790,990
Jesus: 148,097
Ronald Reagan: 59,189
Abraham Lincoln: 31,419
Bobby Kennedy: 24,962
George Washington: 18,829
John F. Kennedy: 8,825
Franklin D. Roosevelt: 6,254
Dwight Eisenhower: 597
First, I see this as just one way to look at the fact that there is no figure in American political history that can be even remotely compared to Atatürk. George Washington was only one of the Founding Fathers, and he has been dead since 1799. Second, let's hope Atatürk catches up to Sarah Palin.
PPS. Non-Mainahs can click here for an explanation of being "from away".
Friday, August 20, 2010
7-9-2010: It followed me here...
Yes, I took two weeks to update. My bad. Anyway, international travel is nowhere near as exciting as it sounds. You sit down, stand up, wait, get in line, later, rinse, and repeat until arriving in Istanbul. I took a cab to Boğaziçi and crashed in my new dorm after a very small amount of unpacking. I had been traveling for about 20 hours (counting car and air travel), and I barely dozed on the flight from Boston to Paris. I went to sleep at about 9pm, and I didn't feel even remotely rested until I woke up at about 5:30 pm. However, by the time the weekend rolled around, my internal clock had adjusted and I went with a couple friends for a trip around Istanbul.
I could talk about a lot of things from that trip, but the thing that sticks out the most is when we visited several mosques on the Asian side of the Bosporus, including the Mihrimah Sultan Mosque. It is one thing to understand that in most Muslim traditions, iconography is prohibited. It is one thing to see video footage of a Muslim prayer service on the news and know that everyone is bowing down in the direction of Mecca and to understand the significance of that city in Islam. It is a completely different experience to actually take off your shoes, wash up at a nearby fountain, and see the inside of a mosque for the first time. Robert Kaplan writes in Balkan Ghosts about his visit to Mosque of Mustapha Pasha in Skopje “My eyes became lost in the arabesque wall designs. The patterns went on and on, indecipherably, in a linear fashion. Like the contours of the desert, Islam is a world of abstraction, mathematical in severity, fearsome and alienating to the most mystical of Eastern Christians.” (p. 50) I was raised Catholic, and I've known Protestants who shied away from iconography, and I've known Eastern Catholics who encouraged much more elaborate displays than I could find in rural Maine. Even then, I still had to take a minute to adjust to the abstract nature of a mosque that Kaplan describes.
Ok, down to business. I can access Youtube through my wired connection on Boğaziçi's network. Rumor has it that the telecommunications ministry has granted an exemption to universities, but I haven't been able to find anything in the news to back that up. I submitted a report to Herdict, and the reports are mixed as to whether the site is accessible. As of this writing, there is one other report from a university network: Doğu Akdeniz University in Northern Cyprus, which is technically not part of Turkey. Hey Berkman Center (more specifically, Herdict), it wouldn't hurt to add separatist territories to your list of countries. In addition to Northern Cyprus, it would be interesting to see what's accessible in Nagorno-Karabakh and compare the results with Armenia. Anyway, the report from Northern Cyprus states that Youtube is inaccessible. Furthermore, I have been able to access richarddawkins.net (which, as we saw in my link in the last post, was banned after Muslim creationist Adnan Oktar argued that he has been defamed on the site) and metacafe.net (which was banned (article in Turkish) after a video that allegedly caught former CHP leader Deniz Baykal with his pants down was posted to it). I'm not surprised that universities may be exempt from the bans, or that enforcement is just inconsistent(1). What I am surprised about is the fact that I haven't found any other source for this possible exemption EXCEPT my own observations and what other students have told me. I've got half a mind to ask one of my Turkish friends about this, and I'll keep you posted.
In less serious news, I heard back from Brad “The Cinema Snob” Jones a few days ago. He's all set except for, brace yourselves, Turkish Death Wish, aka Cellat. A little research on my part shows that the film is available with English subtitles from Onar Films for about $25. I might get it later if I can't somehow pick up a copy for less here in Istanbul, although that doesn't seem too likely given the lack of video stores in the neighborhood.
Classes are going reasonably well. I only discovered when I got to Istanbul that International Trade conflicted with Operating Systems, so I replaced it with History of the Turkish Republic for Foreign Students. Operating Systems is...ok. The professor is certainly better than some instructors I've had at UMass, and he's fairly easy to follow. Overall, the academic side of things is working out.
Returning to terrifyingly bad music, while I appreciate the media's place in American soft power, there are some parts of American pop culture that really, really don't need to follow me anywhere I go. While waiting in the lobby a few days ago, I had to sit through about a minute of “Eenie Meenie” by Sean Kingston and...it...Justin Bieber's career can't fizzle out soon enough.
Footnotes:
(1) For example, I just went back (8-15-2010) and looked at the Herdict reports for Youtube in Turkey, and they stand at 26 inaccessible reports and 30 accessible reports.
I could talk about a lot of things from that trip, but the thing that sticks out the most is when we visited several mosques on the Asian side of the Bosporus, including the Mihrimah Sultan Mosque. It is one thing to understand that in most Muslim traditions, iconography is prohibited. It is one thing to see video footage of a Muslim prayer service on the news and know that everyone is bowing down in the direction of Mecca and to understand the significance of that city in Islam. It is a completely different experience to actually take off your shoes, wash up at a nearby fountain, and see the inside of a mosque for the first time. Robert Kaplan writes in Balkan Ghosts about his visit to Mosque of Mustapha Pasha in Skopje “My eyes became lost in the arabesque wall designs. The patterns went on and on, indecipherably, in a linear fashion. Like the contours of the desert, Islam is a world of abstraction, mathematical in severity, fearsome and alienating to the most mystical of Eastern Christians.” (p. 50) I was raised Catholic, and I've known Protestants who shied away from iconography, and I've known Eastern Catholics who encouraged much more elaborate displays than I could find in rural Maine. Even then, I still had to take a minute to adjust to the abstract nature of a mosque that Kaplan describes.
Ok, down to business. I can access Youtube through my wired connection on Boğaziçi's network. Rumor has it that the telecommunications ministry has granted an exemption to universities, but I haven't been able to find anything in the news to back that up. I submitted a report to Herdict, and the reports are mixed as to whether the site is accessible. As of this writing, there is one other report from a university network: Doğu Akdeniz University in Northern Cyprus, which is technically not part of Turkey. Hey Berkman Center (more specifically, Herdict), it wouldn't hurt to add separatist territories to your list of countries. In addition to Northern Cyprus, it would be interesting to see what's accessible in Nagorno-Karabakh and compare the results with Armenia. Anyway, the report from Northern Cyprus states that Youtube is inaccessible. Furthermore, I have been able to access richarddawkins.net (which, as we saw in my link in the last post, was banned after Muslim creationist Adnan Oktar argued that he has been defamed on the site) and metacafe.net (which was banned (article in Turkish) after a video that allegedly caught former CHP leader Deniz Baykal with his pants down was posted to it). I'm not surprised that universities may be exempt from the bans, or that enforcement is just inconsistent(1). What I am surprised about is the fact that I haven't found any other source for this possible exemption EXCEPT my own observations and what other students have told me. I've got half a mind to ask one of my Turkish friends about this, and I'll keep you posted.
In less serious news, I heard back from Brad “The Cinema Snob” Jones a few days ago. He's all set except for, brace yourselves, Turkish Death Wish, aka Cellat. A little research on my part shows that the film is available with English subtitles from Onar Films for about $25. I might get it later if I can't somehow pick up a copy for less here in Istanbul, although that doesn't seem too likely given the lack of video stores in the neighborhood.
Classes are going reasonably well. I only discovered when I got to Istanbul that International Trade conflicted with Operating Systems, so I replaced it with History of the Turkish Republic for Foreign Students. Operating Systems is...ok. The professor is certainly better than some instructors I've had at UMass, and he's fairly easy to follow. Overall, the academic side of things is working out.
Returning to terrifyingly bad music, while I appreciate the media's place in American soft power, there are some parts of American pop culture that really, really don't need to follow me anywhere I go. While waiting in the lobby a few days ago, I had to sit through about a minute of “Eenie Meenie” by Sean Kingston and...it...Justin Bieber's career can't fizzle out soon enough.
Footnotes:
(1) For example, I just went back (8-15-2010) and looked at the Herdict reports for Youtube in Turkey, and they stand at 26 inaccessible reports and 30 accessible reports.
Wednesday, August 18, 2010
6-22-2010: Prologue, “Turkey declares 'war on salt'”
> sudo insmod travel_journal.ko
[root password for peter]: *************
I'm writing this prologue from my mom's house in Phillips, Maine, and, night owl that I am, I should have gone to bed a few hours ago. I've got a travel itinerary that spans one day and 5,000 miles. I'm flying from Boston to Istanbul and the Summer Term at Boğaziçi University, where I'll take two courses in Operating Systems and International Trade. Like every college kid, I'm self-absorbed enough to keep a travel journal and upload it to the interwebz for all to see, but what do I hope to get out of this trip?
It would be cliché to say that I want to experience a different culture or broaden my horizons or blah blah Bob Lablaw Law Blog. I didn't come to Turkey for any of those reasons anyway. Those of you who know me well enough know that I'm trying to combine my interests in politics and computer science and somehow pursue a career related to internet censorship in the CIS. While Turkey was never a Soviet republic, it shares a common Turkic heritage with all but three of the former Soviet countries in the Caucasus and Central Asia, and it does censor parts of the internet. Youtube has been blocked since 2008 because a couple kids in Greece decided to make some videos poking fun at Atatürk. Also, just last year the Information Technologies and Communication Board (BTK) announced that it would develop a national search engine that, unlike other search engines, would not be “deaf to [Turkic and Muslim] country's sensitivities”. Furthermore, the same article describes a national email system, the “Anaposta”, where, according to the chair of the BTK, “Every child will have an e-mail address written on his/her identity card since birth. So, will have a mobile network that can be used thanks to id number match and foreign networks [sic], such as Yahoo, Gmail and Hotmail, will not be used anymore”.(1) With the understanding that I'm not here to preach the gospel of free speech, can I learn anything more about how Turkey censors and monitors the internet?
More serious goals aside, I might try to find one of the infamous “remakesploitation” movies from the late Yeşilçam era. Brad “The Cinema Snob” Jones did a video review of Dünyayı Kurtaran Adam, aka Turkish Star Wars, a few months ago and, as I recall, said on a live Ustream that he was thinking of doing a “Turkish month” of said reviews. Being a huge Cinema Snob fan, I emailed him to see if there are any Turkish films he's been trying to find. Expect some updates on how this works out.
And now for some rest...
Footnotes:
(1) I didn't see or hear anything related to these projects in my seven weeks in Turkey. In any case, I think it helps to mention these projects to help illustrate what I knew about Turkey and internet censorship before I came to Istanbul.
[root password for peter]: *************
I'm writing this prologue from my mom's house in Phillips, Maine, and, night owl that I am, I should have gone to bed a few hours ago. I've got a travel itinerary that spans one day and 5,000 miles. I'm flying from Boston to Istanbul and the Summer Term at Boğaziçi University, where I'll take two courses in Operating Systems and International Trade. Like every college kid, I'm self-absorbed enough to keep a travel journal and upload it to the interwebz for all to see, but what do I hope to get out of this trip?
It would be cliché to say that I want to experience a different culture or broaden my horizons or blah blah Bob Lablaw Law Blog. I didn't come to Turkey for any of those reasons anyway. Those of you who know me well enough know that I'm trying to combine my interests in politics and computer science and somehow pursue a career related to internet censorship in the CIS. While Turkey was never a Soviet republic, it shares a common Turkic heritage with all but three of the former Soviet countries in the Caucasus and Central Asia, and it does censor parts of the internet. Youtube has been blocked since 2008 because a couple kids in Greece decided to make some videos poking fun at Atatürk. Also, just last year the Information Technologies and Communication Board (BTK) announced that it would develop a national search engine that, unlike other search engines, would not be “deaf to [Turkic and Muslim] country's sensitivities”. Furthermore, the same article describes a national email system, the “Anaposta”, where, according to the chair of the BTK, “Every child will have an e-mail address written on his/her identity card since birth. So, will have a mobile network that can be used thanks to id number match and foreign networks [sic], such as Yahoo, Gmail and Hotmail, will not be used anymore”.(1) With the understanding that I'm not here to preach the gospel of free speech, can I learn anything more about how Turkey censors and monitors the internet?
More serious goals aside, I might try to find one of the infamous “remakesploitation” movies from the late Yeşilçam era. Brad “The Cinema Snob” Jones did a video review of Dünyayı Kurtaran Adam, aka Turkish Star Wars, a few months ago and, as I recall, said on a live Ustream that he was thinking of doing a “Turkish month” of said reviews. Being a huge Cinema Snob fan, I emailed him to see if there are any Turkish films he's been trying to find. Expect some updates on how this works out.
And now for some rest...
Footnotes:
(1) I didn't see or hear anything related to these projects in my seven weeks in Turkey. In any case, I think it helps to mention these projects to help illustrate what I knew about Turkey and internet censorship before I came to Istanbul.
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