Another Quick Note About China Net

Greetings all,

A little over a month ago, I made a post notifying people about YouTube being blocked (note: it still is). Well it turns out, as of this morning blogger and blogspot have been blocked as well.

You may be asking yourself, "How are you posting then?", and if you weren't, then, surely you need to do a bit of thinking. Well after ranting about it on twitter my friend Ryan (aka thehumanaught) turned me onto a service called Hotspot Shield. For those of you who don't know what it is, it is a VPN (Virtual Private Network) which are designed to both keep your network secure, but also to circumvent any firewalls, including the most comprehensive in the world, The Great Firewall of China, which periodically bans like (like YouTube and blogger, and all sorts of other fun stuff).

Hotspot Shield is a free service, and so far, so good. I can access my blog (obviously) and other sites which were previously blocked. It is a free service, so it occasionally throws up ads as either pop-ups or at the top of a window, but it is far from disruptive. If that bothers you too much, there are several more that you can find and pay for.

Either way, I would highly recommend you make use of one of these services....which I realize, that if you are in China then you can't access such a thing, but it could be coming back on later. This is especially important given that a few weeks from now is a certain anniversary of a certain event at a certain square, where nothing important happened...

So expect further delays for anyone trying to access any amount of truth within this interesting nation.

Safe journeys,

G

For further info on The Great Firewall, check out Wired magazine excellent article on the subject.