Censors win by accident.
Drowning in treacle.
I have been without an effective Internet connection for most of this week.
All the proxies I've relied upon in the past now seem to be failing me. (Well, all but one - and I'm not going to mention which one that is, for fear of jinxing it. And alas, it is not one that allows me to 'sign in' to sites like Blogger.) Even the supposedly censor-proof Tor has been letting me down - although I fear that might be mainly because of the antiquity of my computer and the slowness of my Internet connection rather than the new thoroughness of the government's filtering techniques. I've always found it a bit dicey because of connection speed issues, even when the rest of the Chinese Internet is functioning somewhere near its best - which, of course, it isn't at the moment. When there's this much blocking and monitoring going on, and this much huffing-and-puffing by China-based netizens to try to circumvent the blocking, the network gets hopelessly overloaded and everything starts grinding to a halt. Even my Yahoo mail accounts, accessed without Tor via Internet Explorer, are sometimes taking minutes to download a new page..... and are frequently freezing or crashing altogether. This has become an all too familiar problem during my years in China, and I am convinced it is mostly an indirect rather than a direct effect of the government's censorship efforts - an unhappy accident.
However, I have also found that a couple of web-based proxies recommended to me by friends as being easy and efficacious in the current Internet environment in China have refused to load for me (when I didn't have Tor or Firefox running, and only had one or two windows open). This is rather alarming, and makes me suspect that perhaps I am being more specifically targeted for interference by the powers-that-be (as I am fairly sure did happen for a while around the time of the Olympic torch relay protests last year). I notice, for example, that while my Tor connection doesn't usually have much problem delivering other Blogspot sites to my desktop, it regularly trips up over my own dear Froogville and Barstool Blues. And I've had a terrible time trying to get into Blogger. I haven't yet tried using another computer; I just haven't had the time. (Last year, an IT geek of my acquaintance suggested that perhaps my Net access was being monitored on the basis of my home Internet account. However, a little experimentation revealed that I was having exactly the same problems with wi-fi networks in neighbourhood coffee shops; yet my old laptop still worked fine on my home connection. It would seem therefore that the censors can perhaps target an individual computer. A spooky thought!)
So, I fear I must take a bloggy 'holiday' for a while. I have been working like a dog for the past couple of weeks, and suffering the first ominous signs of summer tummy troubles. I just don't have the time for spending hours piddling around on the computer as well - endlessly crashing and restarting it, Googling for other proxy options, waiting around for long, long minutes to see if requested webpages will get 'timed out'.
And most of the time, they are indeed getting 'timed out'. And most of the time, each of these 'time outs' seems to me like another victory for the censor, another unworthy victory for injustice and oppression. And that makes me very, very angry. And, since there's not really very much I can do about it, that anger soon morphs into depression. I have quite enough prompts for depression in my life as it is - especially around this time of year - without staring frustratedly at an unresponsive computer screen for hours every day.
So - damn it - I'm going to throw in the towel.
Only for a while, you understand. I will be back. Oh, yes - sooner than you think. I am looking into VPN options. And when I get that sorted, these bastards are going to be SORRY.
4 comments:
Froog,
I'm not here to say that you're not being "specifically targeted for interference by the powers-that-be", but I offer an alternative explanation:
My experience of operating behind the great firewall was that sites would often load successfully the first time, or even the first few times. Then, within minutes, they would be blocked.
I took this to mean that the system worked on a reactive basis: by default, all (or at least most) content got through. No-one was pro-actively trawling the web for content to block. Content was assessed for blocking only when it was requested. When a URL was first requested, the system had a look at it, and if it didn't like the look of it, subsequent requests for that URL would be denied. Sometimes I had the impression that a single request would not trigger the "system", but that the system would be triggered once a threshold number of requests was reached.
It is possible that your own blogs are sufficiently accessed by yourself and others in China that they've got themselves looked at and logged by the system; possibly the other blogs you have looked at are still available because they're not generating enough requests in your part of China to trigger the "system".
I used to move around China a lot and from this I got the impression that much of the filtering was done on quite a local level: moving from one province to another, sometimes even from one county to another, would give different results.
These are merely my observations based on personal experience and experimentation from a couple of years ago, which I share for what they're worth.
Sorry, Froog, I meant to add -
Chin up! Take a break, but don't throw in the towel. The Great Firewall can be one of the most frustrating things in China - I know, I've spent enough days in near-tear-wrenching frustration banging my head against it. Try imagining that at least today you can get SOME stuff on the web. Fifteen years ago you would have had NOTHING. Those were the days, huh...?
Go take san bu, munch on a mantou, at least you can do that, write your haiku in a nice notebook (that was one of my China joys, buying nice notebooks from the 1001 little stationers' shops they still have there), and lay them out, one per page, with ink and paper, rather than HTML and CSS, there's some joy in that too...
Then some day when they switch the internet back on, maybe you can photograph them and post them, I'll be looking forward seeing them.
Well, thanks for the encouragement, Ed.
I know how the GFW works in general, with the kind of evolutionary, reactive filtering, and the huge local variations.
What nurtures my paranoia is that I don't seem to be able to access sites that other people I know in Beijing are having no problem with!!
It's very spotty even within Beijing; it can vary based on ISP, local ISP office, etc. I wouldn't say you have to worry about being important enough to warrant special treatment just yet.
...and get Witopia.
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