Nerd Alert

This post is dedicated to all the nerds out there...

Recent goings on with Google have highlighted the lengths to which corporations are prepared to go to in order to get a slice of the action in China. In a nutshell, in order to enter the massive Chinese market Google agreed to censor results on its new Chinese search page. An example, as pointed out on another site, is the result when you type the word ‘Tiananmen’ into Google China versus Google.com. Quite an incredible difference.

It’s been fairly well documented that the Chinese Government censors internet content and I can admit that when I first arrived here I experienced it first hand. I was irritated to find that I wasn’t able to access my own blog (ie. the site you are now reading) and a number of other sites.

Some sites that I have found that I can’t access in China include:

- Anything in the blogspot.com domain (ie. this website that you're now reading)
- Anything in the BBC News domain
- Wikipedia
- Richmond Hill Clinic (my GP in Melbourne... goodness knows why?)

Of course others are blocked including sites about Tibet, Taiwan, Falun Gong, other religions and anything at all critical of the Chinese Government. There is talk that Skype may be barred in the near future - some even suggest it already is in certain places.

Some call it the ‘Great Firewall of China’ but like the real wall there are of course ways around it. I am able to post entries on my blog because the editing page is in a different domain (Blogger) to which access is not barred. I discovered that I was able to continue reading my favourite blogs by subscribing to rss feeds (I use Bloglines) and recently I have even found a simple way to actually access the barred sites.

Doing a Google search I found that there are various sites which offer online proxy cover. To put it simply (ie. the way I understand it) these sites redirect users through an external server or use code to disguise the origin, allowing a round-about way to access any website. There are a number of these websites around but I’ve been using Stupid Censorship and Hide My Ass which are very reliable and don’t insert adlinks into the text of the site you’re visiting. Stupid Censorship disappeared for a few days at one point but it's back again now and from what I gather it's a contant, on-going process trying to stay a step ahead of the censors.

I have broadband access in my apartment and having it connected was incredibly easy. The building I’m in is brand new and all apartments are broadband-ready. All it took was a phone call and a tech was out here, fiddled with a few switches in a panel outside my front door, handed me a cable and away we went. It has been incredibly reliable and the service has been great. On one occasion I couldn’t connect and within an hour a tech arrived at my apartment (it was a Saturday mind you!) to fix the problem. Turns out a fuse or something had blown in the operations room and the whole building was down.

The broadband is also incredibly cheap, certainly by Australian standards. It costs 100 rmb a month or 650 rmb for 12 months unlimited access. This equates to less than $20 a month or about $120 for the year. It is 100mbps which I believe is faster than we get in Australia though in real terms it doesn’t seem that much quicker.

The Chinese love their mobile phones and reports suggest that about one third of the population owns one. In fact many people own two, each on a different network. The other night I saw a girl at the gym jogging on the treadmill while chatting on the phone, only having to put her conversation on hold when her other phone rang. It was a fairly bizarre sight to see someone running while conducting simulataneous conversations with a phone in each hand!

Post Script... in a case of good timing Andrew sent me this link just as I was about to publish this post.