Assault on the Great Firewall of China

So, some of you may have noticed my blog looks a bit different now than it did when I first started it. You might remember I expressed a bit of frustration initially about blogger's site giving me problems, so I went ahead and coded my own page. Coding my own page is all well and good (and a little bit more fun, too), but I realized that as soon as I was away from my own computer with all of my files I wouldn't be able to edit it. So I decided to give this whole blogger thing another shot.

Well wouldn't you know it, no matter what I did I just could not get the site to work. I could get to blogger to create a post, but I couldn't get to blogspot (where the blogs are hosted) to actually see the blog. I asked my friends at home if they were having problems - nope. I figured maybe it was a bug? But nobody else seemed to be complaining about it online. Finally, someone from blogger's help staff emailed me back to let me know that the reason I couldn't access blogspot was that the Chinese government had blocked it. Not only was blogspot blocked, but so were all of the other major blog hosting sites.

Apparently the Chinese government routes all traffic coming from IP addresses in mainland China through several HUGE servers, effectively blocking those with Chinese IP addresses from viewing whatever sites are deemed inappropriate (mainly news websites, sites with information on Tibet independence, places like blogger where people can freely express their political opinions, etc). Check out this article on wikipedia about it if you want to read more about this whole ridiculous endeavor.

After finding out about this firewall (by word of mouth of course - all sites with information on the subject, such as the wikipedia site I linked to above, are blocked), I started attempting to break through. Eventually I found someone who told me about these "anonymizer" programs that will bounce around all traffic in and out of your computer to different servers so that nobody can tell where it's coming from. I ended up using one called Tor, and another guy in my program has been using one called anonymouse.

The whole thing is actually a lot of fun, because I get to feel like I'm putting one over on the government and their whole ridiculous restriction. It's also fun to do google searches, because google automatically detects what country you are coming from and routes you to that country's google site to do a search. However, since my data gets bounced around before it gets to the google server, I get to see where the data was last before google gets it. So far my data's been in Germany, Puerto Rico, Canada, Chile, England, and Italy. Anyway, I just realized it's probably not the smartest thing in the world to talk about putting one over on the Chinese government out in the open on the internet where anyone can see it, but I think I'll count on the fact that I'm a big nobody and I doubt that members of the People's Liberation Army are reading my blog. But while I'm waiting for them to come and hunt me down, I'll just have to enjoy my new blogger-powered blog where I can still fiddle with the design of my site, but I don't have to format everything by hand when I just want to update everyone on my week.

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