The Kafka Boys win?

I hate it when that happens.

But it does look rather as if they have.

I have just spent the entire afternoon.... wading through Wikis on VPN problems and connection speed issues in China; re-installing my VPN software (complete with some updates I seem to have missed, and lots of lovely new servers available); tweaking my DNS settings; and experimenting with every f***ing server (and every local wi-fi network I can tap into) to see if ANY of them still work for me.

And NO, they don't.  None of them.

Half of the Witopia servers do not even seem to be accessible to me any more.  And the ones I can get on to.... no longer seem to be providing me the immunity from Chinese government Internet tampering which they are supposed to.

Blogger, Blogspot, Wordpress, IMDB (what the f***???!!!), and parts of Wikipedia (parts only??!!) are thus denied to me; and Google is very erratic, very heavily filtered.

And the most paranoia-inducing aspect of all this is that nobody else seems to be having too much of a problem.  The chaps down at Kafka Central have been ramping up their efforts to piss us off since the end of last week (I hear even Google searches on 'Noel' have been getting blocked because it's too close to 'Nobel' - no, really); but their efforts haven't amounted to much more than occasional irritation to those of us on VPNs - the occasional glitch in service, a few of the dozens of server options going offline temporarily (scary lapses from our formerly "censor-proof" darling; but not too much of a hassle).

Well, until today, that is.  Except for ME, that is.

Am I really getting special attention??  [Er, no, it seems not.  But the problem - not quite unique to me, and muddied though not caused by the censorship regime here - was very, very strange.  It took me a week to sort it out.]