The return of an unworkably CRAPPY Internet

Maybe it's earthquake damage. There are famously only 3 or 4 cross-border cable links to the Internet in China, and one of them, I guess, runs through the western areas hit by last week's earthquake. Even if the cable isn't completely down, I imagine there could be a lot of localised damage to the Internet architecture there, which is reducing effective bandwidth for the whole country.

Maybe it's just that, because of the earthquake, everyone is trying to get on the Internet all the time here, hungry for the latest news.

Maybe it's that the government censors, nervous of any possible adverse comment on the earthquake relief efforts, are ramping up their filtering on the Internet to ridiculous levels.

Or maybe it's completely unrelated to the recent earthquake. Maybe it's just the return of the annual Internet blitz we always suffer in the middle of the year, for 2 or 3 weeks either side of June 4th (and if you don't know what that's the anniversary of, go look it up - if you can; in China, it's difficult!).

Whatever it is, the Internet - at least in my humble home - has become just about unusable over the past 48 hours. It doesn't actually appear to be targeted censorship (though I'm sure I'd get into far worse trouble if I tried doing any Googling on topics related to that anniversary); it's just a case of the whole network being so compromised - whether by earthquake damage, overuse, or government monitoring - that almost every site is becoming unworkably slow and glitchy: you often have to hit 'Refresh' or 'Retry' 3 or 4 times to move between one page and another. E-mails are often lost completely. So are Blogger posts. Blogger hasn't previously suffered any interference here in China, as far as I know; but in the past few days it has become very, very troublesome. Yesterday's two posts on here took about half an hour to write and 12 hours to post!!

So it might be another light week (or six weeks) or so of posting from me.

I'm sure you'll survive somehow.