Penetrating the Great Firewall of China

At our gate in the Taipei airport, John and I were furiously writing and uploading photos for our last Taiwan entry, just so we could be finished with Taiwan before going behind the GFC. Our flight was called. John had to click "publish" before he had a chance to put in all the photos.

The more I thought about the situation, the more outraged I became. I vowed to break through the GFC. For non-techies, there is a plethera of anti-censorship services that use tunneling (VPN) or proxy technology. We could always pay for a service, buying our way to freedom. This would be a very good use of our money.

The challenge is that the GFC blocks the websites of anti-censorship services and all information about those services. In between all the CNY festivities, I was searching desperately. Eventually, my breakthrough came when I happened upon an unblocked website of a service that offered a two-day trial.

During those two days I must have tried out 20 to 30 different services. In the end I found a number of free services that are working in China (as of Feb 2012) at least some of the time: SecurityKiss, ProXPN, Psiphon, UltraSurf, Freegate, GPass, GTunnel, FreeU, DynaPass, over half which are supported by the Falungong (I am mentioning this without passing any judgement). The important thing is that we are once again a part of the free world. It is so true how we take freedom for granted until we do not have it.

Rockin in the Free World

Back in Shanghai I had threatened that the first of our post in Taiwan was going to be titled "Rockin in the Free World," as I would finally be outside the "Great Firewall."

I had no idea that I had become clairvoyant in my old age. Here in Taipei, we are visiting with one of John's friends from Intel, watching Sheryl Crow and Chris Botti DVDs and John giving guitar lessons to our hosts. We are literally rocking. The internet is fast and steady and we can get EVERYWHERE. Life is good. Desperate people are easily contented.

Welcome to China Part 1

It has been four years since we lived in Shanghai and two and half years since our last visit. While our escape from the Pudong Airport was ultra smooth (efficient immigration lines and no waiting for a taxi), we have since had a thorough review of the '1984 + Catch 22'-esque China.  

The Great Firewall of China

Wikipedia and Flickr are unblocked compared to when we last lived here. Yeah!  Blogspot.com, home of this blog, continues to be blocked. Before, we could easily enter our blog entries at blogger.com, publish, and then use a backdoor in "settings" to view the blog post.  Now, blogger.com is completely blocked.  We have exhausted our geeky gymnastics just to publish this entry.  I must have tried 30 or 40 proxy servers before John figured out how to use blogger's publish-by-email feature.

Our custom maps (My Places) on Google Maps and our spreadsheets and documents on Google Docs are also inaccessible.  There goes all our trip research.  No google+.  No youtube, not to mention Facebook.  John cannot read many of the blogs he regularly follows, including our good friend Kathy's blog on workpress.  No twitter either.  But imdb?!  Just about all my regular visited sites are blocked.

So, unable to make progress on blogging and trip research, we headed out to do some errands. We had no idea that the time we saved by not surfing would be so valuable later. Stay tuned...

Surfing in the free world

We are transitting in the Bangkok Airport, enjoying the free Wifi signal here, participating in the modern world.

hello from Myanmar

Apparently gmail is not blocked in Mandalay, so expect a few blog updates.