After more than 7 years of enduring variously crappy Chinese Internet connections....
after 2 years or so of massive censorship interference and steadily disappearing web-based proxies....
after several months of gradually disintegrating functionality with Tor/Privoxy/Firefox....
finally, I have signed up to Witopia.
And, oh my good god, it's FAST.
[Not without a few teething problems, though: the installation was fiddly. Connection to the chosen server often seems to fail first time. And Explorer has got its knickers in a knot with "the new add-on" and crashed a couple of times. Moreover, many of the problems that have been bugging me lately - limited user interface in Blogger, inability to leave blog comments - are still plaguing me, so I must assume that the problem lies with Firefox rather than with Tor. But, you know, overall - WOW! This is a brave new world of Net-browsing!!]
2 comments:
Congratulations -- I know the connection issues have been driving you batty!
Must confess that I'm a little mystified by the whole VPN thing. At work, we suffer (if that's the word) many of the same types of blockage that you've reported. And I sympathize with the problem from the employer's perspective: a municipal government, supported by citizens' taxes and fees, does NOT want employees to spend even part of their days snuffling around porn sites, overthrow-the-government sites, and so on. But it's terribly annoying to follow a link to something you know is innocent and find it blocked because someone has identified it as a "sex" site (probably because of some advertising). Worst of all, of course, is the broad category of sites deemed "personal/social networking" in nature, i.e., any sites hosted at wordpress.org, livejournal.com, etc.
(Blogger for some reason is a special case. You can get to [most] sites at blogspot.com; however, blogger.com is blocked. Since most images at Blogger-powered sites are hosted at the latter, even though the blogs themselves are at blogspot, this has the odd effect of passing the text content through but blocking the images.)
Yes, we can request that a blocked page or site be unblocked. And yes, as long as we provide a valid business reason. (On top of which, one doesn't want to draw undue attention to OTHER sites one is allowed to frequent because some permissive glitch in the blocking software lets one.)
Anyhow, I am pretty sure the official employee policy handbook also forbids the use of anonymizers, proxies, etc. -- anything designed to defeat their blocking tools. It'd be tough to rationalize such use on grounds such as, "Oh, gee, it was an accident -- I didn't know!" Local governments these days (in the US, anyhow) aren't inclined to be forgiving.
At least you can have - free - unfettered access when you go home at night.
Who was it that supposedly wrote on his US visa or landing card paperwork, under that question where they ask if you have any intention of subverting the Constitution of the United States, "sole purpose of visit"?
That would be pretty much my declaration to the Chinese authorities - if they ever thought of asking.
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