Explore the Web From China 165
An anonymous reader writes with this excerpt from Download.com:
"It slows down your browsing. It makes some Web sites inaccessible for no discernible reason. It doesn't even offer you any xiao long bao or pu'er tea for your troubles. But if you want to know what life behind the Great Firewall of China is like, then the Firefox plug-in China Channel is the cheapest and fastest way to experience using the Internet in China without actually being there."
Fear (Score:5, Insightful)
Can it recreate the fear that making the wrong post on a blog will get you arrested?
Or, for Aussies... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Meh (Score:1, Insightful)
Were you doing this during the Olympics? Because, y'know, they did a crap load of PR work during the Olympics, including making internet browsing much easier, so that foreigners would get a positive impression and spread anecdotes like yours.
Re:Meh (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah, no intimidation for the locals with an officer walking around. Could you imagine that at a public library or Starbucks in the US? Oh, wait, we do have to show ID before we can use the computer at our local library. But no police walking around.
No doubt you had full access due to your foreign ID/passport that I'm sure you were required to show before you were given access.
If you were in China during or up to the Olympics, you experienced a totally different internet than before and again now with things back to normal. Things were wide open at the internet cafes - but of course they still had all the IDs of whatever citizens were foolish enough to do something or try something they shouldn't. They needn't arrest them in the cafe, they'll just wait for them to go home and arrest them there.
Re:Forthcoming Update (Score:4, Insightful)
Actually, telling the truth is more often than not "in poor taste" ... at least according to how I see the world. You might or might not agree, but most of the population is either afraid or ignorant of the truth. Sure, that puts this close to a tin foil hat argument, but as my grandfather used to say "there is no smoke without fire" and there is usually a fire burning behind a tin foil hat story.
Life really is not how the MSM portrays it. They will lie to you without thinking twice, and smile when they do it. If it was not for the Internet, most Americans would have no readily accessible access to 'real' news. I'm not saying the BBC or Al Jazeera are absolute poster children for good news sources, but they do a hell of a better job most days than network news in the USA.
So yes, that might have been in poor taste... so lets celebrate someone that wants to poke fun by hinting at the truth. Most Chinese citizens under the age of 25 do not know what they are looking at when presented with a photo or picture of 'tank man'... hence the real value of the humor.
Re:Forthcoming Update (Score:4, Insightful)
never even found after he left the street
You're right, that is much more comforting. I'm sure he's fine.
Re:Answer: Proxy (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Answer: Proxy (Score:5, Insightful)
Are people really going to develop web applications for Chinese users and not host them in China? Do they think Chinese users surf a lot of English language content on budget shared hosts?
Not to trivialize the censorship issues involved, but if someone really wants to know what surfing the Internet is like for Chinese people, they should learn Chinese and read their complaints in person. There are plenty of sites that offer language lessons basically for free these days. My favorite is Popup Chinese [popupchinese.com] because their hosts speak standard mandarin and they have a great popup dictionary plugin.
Once you know the language you can get out into the actual Chinese Internet. Find out the difference between Baidu and Google. Have Tencent screw up your computer. Watch videos on youku and surf chat forums. It takes time to get to the point where this is comfortable for second language speakers, but Chinese is looking a lot more valuable than banking at this point.....
Re:Just got back from a nine day trip... (Score:1, Insightful)
I'm suprised about your comment on China being homogenized. Dalian is pretty diverse and a popular place for working laowai.
Last year the net in china for westerners was much different (no wikipedia for example). Things got better leading up to the games, then radically better and I haven't seen any negative changes since (I still took the opportunty to download the wiki database export;)
CNN.com works for me right now, i even have CNN on my tv (not that I watch it). I will regularly read very negative articles about China on western news sites without trouble. I can use tunneling (VPN/SSH) back to australia and move big files without trouble. Tor works okay (but the download page doesn't ;), but i never use it.
The firewall seems to block things sometimes based on a blacklist (url, host, words in url) and sometimes on content (one article on a news site, but the rest of the site will work, or even the content of one frame within a page).
Popular porn sites are blocked (i do look ;) but less popular or obscurely named sites will work (again, individual pages maybe be blocked due to content). P2P ftw btw...
The system varies from city to city, to the point where one city had a kind of 'you've been blocked' landing page complete with cutesy cartoon policemen.
One thing this plug-in wont show is the speed. sites outside of mainland China are generally slow and occasionally unreliable, even for nearby hosts (taipei, HK, tokyo). But domestic chinese sites generally friggin rocket in. Better than local sites when I lived in sydney (haven't tried recently obviously) and better pings to domestic game servers than what I could get in Sydney.
Another killer is bandwidth, for home internet, 1M (or 512k) is pretty much all I can get. Its quite affordable though (delivered here as fiber to the door, but some flavor of VDSL is quite common also - never seen dial up).
The feeling of being stared at disapears after a while, but you're always aware that you're most certainly not a local no matter how comfortably you settle into the surroundings / situation. If you speak chinese, people will still respond in english if they can (or barely can), prices for anything will be higher, and taxi drivers will occasionally try to take you the scenic route.
The main misconception I hear about China you mentioned; People here are people like anywhere else... some awesome, some assholes and everything in between.