Day of celebration, day of mourning

I didn't notice at the time, but yesterday evening's long post in praise of Wile E. Coyote (my 'avatar'!) was No. 300 here on the increasingly prolific Froogville.

Alas, the celebratory mood this instils in me is quickly crushed by the discovery this morning that Kafka Central has resumed its campaign of obstruction against us denizens of Blogspot.

The really bad news is that the Kafka Boys appear - for now - to have worked out how to block Anonymouse too. (I hope that's only going to be very temporary; they have in the past managed to interfere with the operation of Anonymouse, at least for selected destination sites; but those fine German anonymizers always seems to have got one step ahead of them again quite quickly, and restored their proxy service within a few days or so. I shall miss Wikipedia, if they don't.)

The really, really bad news is that the hacker 'workaround' for Firefox - being widely circulated and adopted in blogging circles here in China over the last couple of weeks (see the rather interesting English-language Chinese blogger Yee for details) - also seems to be no longer functional. Or maybe I'm just crap at tweaking my browser settings. But no - it seems like a fairly straightforward, idiot-proof procedure: I'm sure even I can handle that. I must suppose that the recommended proxy IP addresses for fast and secure re-routing to top blog sites have been noted by the Kafka Boys (that's the trouble with posting this stuff publicly: the censors are bound to cotton on to it almost as quickly as the 'underground' blog fans who are seeking to evade them) and targeted for blocking also.

I understand that there is a constant battle for the control of the Internet between would-be censors and the censorship-defiers, and that usually the censorship-defiers come out on top, mostly sooner rather than later. Let's hope that continues to be the way of things. I haven't previously had such an intimate personal interest in the struggle.

Strange to reflect that, in this instance, the Kafka Boys assume the role of Wile E. Coyote, constantly unwrapping their new and ever more elaborate censoring toys from The Acme Corporation (well, I'm told most of them come from Cisco, actually - check out their less-than-convincing defence here, and some of the accusations against them summarized here), but always being quickly outstripped by the astonishing speediness of response from the Chinese hackers and bloggers. For once in my life, I am praying for the Coyote to get splatted by his own technology!!

At least, for the moment, Blogger is open again. It's just that neither I, nor any of my friends in China (the vast majority of the tiny readership), would seem to be able to view them.

I am annoyed. Very annoyed. And plotting my revenge.....