ATTN EXPATS! Important Censorship issues.

[Michael]

Yeah, dude, your wife is probably right. I had the same thought about a year ago and tried to censor myself, but that's hopeless...for a good reason. Ultimately, how can you let a bunch of lying thieves control your mind, because if you start doing crimestop on yourself, then well, it's not easy to keep your mouth shut after nearly 40 years of saying what you think. I hope you can bring up important stuff like you usually do, maybe use another board member as your proxy.

[josh]

The ironic part is that prostitution is widely tolerated here....but porn is totally illegal. Go figure. I figure it's just part of the obvious ploy to control all Chinese internet content through the government mandated installation of filtering software on all new computers. Rather than the American tradition of raising the boogie man of "terrorism", the Chinese tradition of late has been to sound the call of a "safe and healthy browsing environment for our children". The software is officially there to block porn but once it's there, it's so totally obvious what it will end up being used for. Sadly, most Chinese are not sufficiently censorship savy. I've not seen any evidence so far that people realize what the repercussions of govt. internet content filitering are...or maybe the evidence has just been censored.

Yes! I am staying in a hotel, and every day, hook... *ahem* "massage girls" are leaving their cards in my door and calling my room, which obviously the hotel staff are complicit in, yet it is Google that is poisoning the minds of the children... unbelievable

[bailewen]

Well at least google seems to have returned.

[Jarek]

I've been experiencing problems with google.com, but google.cn worked fine.

BTW I cannot access the links for fr33gate that Michael provided, apparently they were blocked already. Where else could I download it?

TIA for your help!

Jarek

[Michael]

You probably have to already use some kind of proxy to access the fr33gate downloads, such as the one posted by Omar http://www.vivalaproxy.com/

[bailewen]

If you can't get it with the proxy them pm me an email address and I will send it as an attachment. It's made to run off a flash drive so that you can avoid even having the software on your computer. I don't think that part is relevant for us in China but, for instance, people are using it in Iran and other more violently repressive areas where it might be dangerous even to be caught having it on your computer.

The point being, it's really small.

Oh and yes, my wife mentioned to me yesterday that google had been working fine for her too which didn't make sense until I realized she was surfing in Chinese (duh!) and as mentioned, google.com.cn has not been blocked but all search results for Chinese google are filtered. Basically, google agreed to remove all porn from Chinese search results but not from the English so China just shut down the English engine for a while. Apparently they have done this several times but never permanently like they did to youtube.

[Michael]

Beijing Adds Curbs on Internet Access

HONG KONG — The Chinese Health Ministry on Thursday ordered sharp restrictions on Internet access to medical research papers on sexual subjects. It is the latest move in what the ministry calls an antipornography campaign that many China experts see as a harbinger of a broader crackdown on freedom of expression and dissent.

[Jarek]

Michael and Omar - thanks a lot for help!
Omar - check your PM!

[cdobe]

http://www.saveourassetsnj.com/

[Jarek]

Freegate, Hotspot Shield do not work anymore in China, I cannot access Youtube, Blogspot, Facebook and other sites that are blocked here. Please help!

[grzegorz]

Freegate, Hotspot Shield do not work anymore in China, I cannot access Youtube, Blogspot, Facebook and other sites that are blocked here. Please help!

Some things I'll never miss about China.

Yeah, dude, your wife is probably right. I had the same thought about a year ago and tried to censor myself, but that's hopeless...for a good reason. Ultimately, how can you let a bunch of lying thieves control your mind, because if you start doing crimestop on yourself, then well, it's not easy to keep your mouth shut after nearly 40 years of saying what you think. I hope you can bring up important stuff like you usually do, maybe use another board member as your proxy.

That's true if you keep your mouth shut they win.

[bailewen]

The new and better solution to jumping over the firewal is getting youself a VPN. Most of them are paid for but very cheap. There is one called "FreeVPN" that seems to be working currently. I was having great successs with UltraVPN for a while but that one seems to be down now.

My understanding is that they can never completely block VPN service because if they did they would have to shut down all international money transfers, ATM access and stuff like that. It stands for "Virtual Private Network" and basically means that you log on to a proxy server overseas through an encoded connection that hides your IP and all the data being transferred. Somehow, many VPN's seem to be blocked even though supposedly they can't do that. I just kept fishing around for VPN's that were free untill I found one that worked. Currently I'm using one called "FreeVPN". Just google it and you'll find it about 3 pages back. The name makes it a bit hard to find because there are a lot of free VPN's out there but you need the one actually called "FreeVPN"

[meeks]

sometimes changing the port it uses makes a difference.

[bailewen]

Since the VPN's I have used are set up automatically by software I downloaded, I really don't know how exactly to do that. Some where in the properties of the connection that it creates?

[Jarek]

Meeks - you're right, fr33gate works when I change the proxy, but I've got tired of finding a working one out of dozens, just to find out after a little while that it does not function anymore...

Omar - thanks for the suggestions, freeVPN works OK, but apparently it changes proxy setting every couple of minutes, and in the meantime the internet connection breaks.

I wonder if anybody has used any of the products offered by WiTopia.net - it is a paid service (US60/year) but some say it works very well.