JISHOU, HUNAN — I am one happy camper tonight, because I discovered how to circumvent China’s blocking of Picasaweb. The solution was right there in front of me, if I had bothered to look.

In their ineffable wisdom, the wonks at Google allow you to upload photos to Picasaweb via email. All you need to do is go to Picasaweb’s settings and set up a secret email addy. Then you can emails to that address with photos as attachments. The subject line is the name of an existing album.

Sweet!

Because China is blocking Picasaweb and Blogger, both Google services, I have had a hell of time uploading to my Picasaweb albums. For a while, I could upload using Picasa 3, the desktop application, then mysteriously uploads would constantly fail. Either the uploads would stall, or I would get the message, “This account is not enabled for web albums.” First, I suspected a bug in Picasaweb (like THAT would ever happen!), but it appears some service or port is being blocked by the Great Firewall of China.

I can use the latest version of Ultrasurf (v.9.98) to climb the Great Firewall, and access Picasaweb to edit photos and such, but uploads would still fail, either from Picasa 3 or on the website itself. Timeout problems, or connection problems because of the proxy service.

So, as they say, RTFM. I went to the help pages, and lo! You can email your pix to Picasaweb. Duh. I should guesed that.

September 1st, 2010 | Tags: censorship, China, google, Great Firewall, picasa, Teaching, travel | Category: China, Teaching English | Leave a comment

JISHOU, HUNAN — I am happy to report that I can once again post to my Picasaweb photo site, as long as I use the Ultrasurf proxy client I downloaded a couple of months ago.

It’s slow, but at least I can use the 80 GB of Picasaweb storage space that I paid for. It also means my photos will automatically get posted to Facebook through the Picasa Facebook app.

So, as I wait for my photos to trickle slowly into my Picasaweb space, I can write some posts. Here’s the first one.

August 15th, 2010 | Tags: censorship, China, Great Firewall of China, Internet, picasa, proxy, Ultrasurf | Category: China, Civil liberties, General stuff | Leave a comment

UPDATE 28/7/2010 11:25 am: And now everything is back to “normal.” But Firefox went south on me, Winamp got trapped in a loop somehow, and even taskmgr couldn’t kill it. After I shut down the computer, and restarted, the “blocked” sites listed below were accessible again. So I laid blame on the Great Firewall, but maybe it was my laptop or Vista Home edition.

JISHOU, HUNAN — Yesterday, I could access a whole slew of my favorite websites. Today, I can’t. I blame the Great Firewall of China.

In fact, my own website (this one) is now blocked. I am using the Ultrasurf proxy to climb the Great Firewall just to post this.

And to aggravate me even more, Wikipedia seems also to be blocked, just as I was beginning the last phase of a long term project to edit Wiki entries about locations in Hunan, using my students’ research papers as the sources. I managed to edit the Jishou entry two days ago. Now, I’ll have to use the proxy to continue.

Here’s a partial list of what I could access yesterday, but cannot today.

• www.nytimes.com
• my.yahoo.com
• www.liitlegreenfootballs.com
• wheatdogg.computernewbie.info — MINE! and thereby cpanel access
• en.wikipedia.org
• www.sadlyno.com
• questionablecontent.net — a webcomic I kinda enjoy
• www.rightwingwatch.org

And here’s what seems so far to be unaffected.

• www.cnn.com
• scienceblogs.com
• www.washingtonpost.com
• www.bbc.co.uk – but some media blocked
• www.gmail.com
• dailykos.com

July 27th, 2010 | Tags: censorship, China, Great Firewall, Internet, proxy | Category: China, Civil liberties, General stuff, Media | Leave a comment

JISHOU, HUNAN — Google and China have had a bit of a falling-out, as you may have heard. Google has relocated its China-based search services to autonomous Hong Kong and the mainland has responded by apparently blocking access to www.google.com — the US-based site.

All I know is, I cannot browse to www.gmail.com now to check my email. On one hand, it’s not a big deal; I can still use IMAP access and Mozilla Thunderbird to handle my email. On the other hand, I’ve now lost easy access to all the contact lists I had created for my classes. To get to them, I will either have to use the Tor proxy network to climb over the Great Firewall of China, or replicate the lists using Thunderbird or another unblocked webmail account.

Here’s a recap of the Google mess, if you haven’t been following it closely.

China requires foreign companies to abide by national laws, so Google had to agree to filter its search engine and search results to eliminate, among other things, risqué photos, porn and politically sensitive sites. Google took some heat stateside for its acquiescence to the restrictions, but Google’s leadership said it was a business decision.

In China, Google’s reps were also trying to persuade China’s net nannies to ease the restrictions, and to unblock some of Google’s other services, including Youtube, Blogspot, Blogger and Picasaweb. They had no success.

March 24th, 2010 | Tags: censorship, China, google, Great Firewall, Internet, net nannies | Category: China, Civil liberties, Commentary | Comments (1)

JISHOU, HUNAN — With the National Holiday fast upon us, China’s net nannies have blocked yet another Internet service, the Tor proxy network, which had been pretty reliable until quite recently.

China typically blocks access to the World Wide Web around important national holidays, such the 60th anniversary of the founding the People’s Republic of China next Thursday. With so many sites blocked already (YouTube, Facebook, Blogspot, to name but a few), I guess the censors decided the surest way to cut off potentially inflammatory websites was to choke the Tor network off.

Of course, there are ways around the newest layer of bricks in the Great Firewall of China.

I noticed something was fishy when I tried to connect to Facebook using Tor. My Tor client couldn’t complete the connection to the network. My little onion stayed yellow, and never went to green.

Tor uses a decentralized network of proxies scattered around the world. The Tor client checks a list of active proxies (computers acting as go-betweens), then logs into the network using one or more of the proxies. An add-on to Firefox then switches Firefox over to use the proxy to access the WWW.

An active Tor connection displays a green onion icon in the Windows taskbar. A pending one shows a yellow onion. The icon refers to Tor’s “onion routing” of connections to make tracing difficult.

September 27th, 2009 | Tags: blockage, censor, censorship, China, Great Firewall, proxy, Tor, torproject | Category: China, Civil liberties | Comments (2)

JISHOU, HUNAN — Sometime in the last week, China’s Internet gatekeepers decided to block Facebook, thereby cutting off my students (and thousands of other Chinese users) from communicating with their Facebook pals.

I can still use FB, but now I have to go through the Tor proxy network. Whatta pain.

China’s net nannies have been on a campaign recently to lock down the Internet, obstensibly to shut off access to pornography, but coincidentally to limit access to sites critical of the government. Given the recent riots in Xinjiang between Muslim Uighurs and local Han (the ethnic majority in China), one can only guess why Facebook has been banned here.

The media site, www.danwei.com, is now also blocked, too. Danwei’s writers are openly critical of Internet censorship in China, and provide links to news sites that are less biased than the official government sources.

For example, if you believe CCTV-9, the international arm of the state TV media, everything is just peachy keen in Xinjiang, where more than 150 people were killed earlier this month and where the army is patrolling the streets to prevent more outbreaks of ethnic violence. CCTV-9 interviewed a Westerner who teaches at a university in Urumqi, the provincial capital, and who said categorically that there were no problems on campus and everything is back to normal. We also got to see a queue of Chinese residents stuffing 100-yuan notes into a donation box — the whole scene was patently contrived for the telecast.

July 15th, 2009 | Tags: blogs, censorship, Facebook, Great Firewall, net nanny, Xinjiang, youtube | Category: China, Civil liberties, Commentary, Media | Leave a comment