How did I miss that?

After more than a week with bothersomely limited Internet access, the nice people at Witopia were able to sort me out yesterday evening with a promptness that was downright embarrassing.  

I should probably have consulted their e-mail support desk earlier, but.... the added frustration of the past week has been that, lacking a credit card of my own these days (and for more than a decade now), I had to rely on one of my friends to renew my subscription to their VPN service.  And the friend I'd chosen is one of my least reliable friends: he'd been promising to do it and then, er, 'forgetting' to do it almost daily for the past 10 or 12 days.  My expiry date was Tuesday.  I managed to get nearly a day's grace (it's probably just that they run on US time, and don't cancel the expired accounts until the beginning of office hours the next day - which is late at night for us here in China), and then my frustrating friend finally got around to renewing for me.  But I didn't have time to check if the renewed account was having the same problems as the original one (it was) and get in touch with the help desk until Thursday evening.

Anyway, I hadn't thought there was any point in consulting them when my account was about to expire in a day or two.  And, to be honest, I hadn't anticipated that their support service would be so QUICK (replies to my queries within minutes!), or that my problem would be so straightforward to solve.

And the problem was basically this: if you're using crappy old Windows, you need to select the 'Run as administrator' option every time you launch the VPN program.

Now, having been a regular Witopia user for a year now, and having consulted several other - more techie-minded - friends who also use this VPN here in The Jing, and having spent at least an hour or two reading through all of Witopia's online help wikis.... how had I managed to miss this?  The oversight bugged me more than the interruption of service.

On reviewing my thought process through all of this, though, I don't think I can blame myself too much.  It is a truly bizarre combination of circumstances that had led to my misperception of the problem and overlooking of the solution.

1)  The onset of the problem coincided with a major ramping up of Internet censorship by the Chinese authorities in the middle of last week, following on from Liu Xiaobo's Nobel Prize Award Ceremony.  This had begun with a few days of occasional problems - both for myself and other Witopia users here in China - in connecting to certain of the VPN's overseas servers (luckily they have lots, and the glitches only ever seemed to be affecting a handful, temporarily; but it was an ominous sign that the Kafka Boys were trying to target the service).

2)  I had ascertained that the problem was specific to me, and specific indeed to one computer (a fairly new and fast Dell Studio model).  However, I was inclined to think that the censors must have 'spiked' this computer - perhaps by somehow red-flagging it when I tried to connect through local servers, or even by smuggling some sort of invisible trojan program on to it.  This is not such a far-fetched notion, since the censors here are pretty inventive; and I have suffered special supervision/harassment/interference - with phone and e-mail as well as general Internet access - once or twice before.  During the really crazy censorship regime we had here in the early summer of 2008, I had experienced a very similar problem where my main computer became completely useless (on any network), while my creaky old back-up was mysteriously unaffected.  And back then, I was attempting to use a selection of web-based proxies or the Tor or Xerobank proxy services, not Witopia; so... it seemed not unreasonable to assume that I was again the victim of some individually targeted censorship interference, rather than that there was just some problem with the setup of my computer.

3)  The problem with more recent versions of Windows being glitchy in running the Witopia VPN is well-known, and is mentioned in several places on the Witopia advice pages.  However, these pages do not (as far as I recall) explain exactly how these glitches manifest themselves.  Nor do they emphasise - not with sufficient prominence, anyway - the necessity of using the 'Run as administrator' option every time you launch the program.  I had thought this warning applied only to the initial installation!  However, it seems that every time you shut down your computer, the VPN icon is removed from your toolbar, and to get it back you have to do a mini-install from the desktop shortcut to the program - this stage also requires you to 'Run as administrator' every single time.  (And, if you've inadvertently launched the icon to your toolbar without using 'Run as administrator', you have to 'exit' the program before you can correct your error; and that also is a slow and glitchy process.)

4)  This requirement to 'Run as administrator' is easy to overlook, if - as I have - you've been using the Witopia VPN program trouble-free without bothering with this for an entire year.  Moreover, mind-buggeringly irritating bloody Windows freezes your computer to demand 'administrator' confirmation almost every time you try to use a non-Microsoft program.  Well, with just about every single non-Microsoft program I've got except this one.  When you've got used to being asked for 'administrator' authorisation to run a program half a dozen times a day, it is particularly difficult to train yourself to remember that you actually have to manually select the 'Run as administrator' option whenever you relaunch Witopia.

5)  Most bizarrely of all, if you inadvertently launch Witopia without having selected 'Run as administrator', it gives you a 'false positive' display: i.e. it appears to launch as normal and go through the rigmarole of connecting to the secure network; and it even gives you a notification that you are successfully connected; heck, it even appears to assign you an overseas IP address.  But, apparently, none of this is real.  WTF???

6)  However, perhaps 'inappropriate activation' of this kind does in fact sometimes give you some sort of 'partial connection' to the service - because I was getting some strangely erratic results over the past week when using the VPN in this way (e.g., sometimes being able to connect to English-language Google.com with uncensored results, but more often being redirected to Chinese-language Google.com.hk with heavily censored results; or, even more strangely, sometimes being able to reach IMDB and sometimes not).  Then again, maybe these inconsistencies were just down to the vagaries of the censorship apparatus here (I found - using the same Net connection, only a few minutes apart - that one of my ancient back-up computers was able to access Blogger and IMDB without a VPN while the other wasn't; and then, with the VPN [which should have been fully functional on these pre-Vista computers], that one of them was able to access Blogspot and Wordpress, while the other was only able to access Blogger.  Bizarre, no?).

All very, very, very vexing and confusing.

And how come - given that this is one of the most longstanding and well-known of Witopia's shortcomings - I had remained so long in blissful ignorance of it?  I had been using this VPN for a year without bothering about any of this 'Run as administrator' malarkey!

Well, the thing is - the thing I'd missed in my endless ruminations about my connection problems - that I'd never had to bother with this 'Run as adminstrator' stuff because I'd disabled Windows' 'User Account Control'.  The feature just seemed utterly bloody pointless to me.  It interrupts your computer use every few minutes to ask if you're really sure you want to do something; and it does it in the most ominous, terrifying way - freezing your computer and dimming the screen as if you're about to suffer a catastrophic crash.  It is the most colossal pain-in-the-arse.  It might be a useful option for computers shared between multiple users, particularly in a business environment (or, I suppose, for parents concerned to limit the programs their kids can download or use); but I am the sole user of this laptop, there is only one user account; of course I am the bloody 'administrator'; and when I click on a program, yes of course I'm bloody sure I want to use it!  Even by Microsoft's perpetually dismal standards, this seems like a particularly wretched piece of system design.  Sigh.

I'd only finally decided to try activating this 'User Account Control' feature again last week.  I forget now exactly why.  I think it was probably that I needed it to download some Windows updates, and I was becoming concerned that being so out-of-date with my operating system might possibly be increasing my vulnerability to Net blocking or hacking (my Internet access was already getting a little troublesome before this).  I'd soon forgotten just when I'd done this.  It never occurred to me that this could be in any way connected with the sudden catastrophic breakdown of my formerly very steadfast VPN.

Sorry.  Very boring, techie post.  Just needed to get it off my chest.  There'll be a llama along in a minute...

[And I hope this might conceivably be of some interest to someone who's been having similar problems.]