Then again, my access to Google+ seems to come and go, so I probably just shot myself in the foot publishing this tidbit of news.

Since all three of these fine services are blocked in China, I need some feedback to see if the buttons look OK and their functions are working. My proxy connection comes and goes randomly.

One of the plugins also allows sharing with services like digg, del.icio.us and reddit. Pardon the dumb question, but in this Facebook-Twitter-Google+ age, does anybody really use those services anymore? I don’t want to clutter things up with lots of superfluous buttons.

Details are here.

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 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 guessed that.

It’s pretty slow, since I can only send 20 MB at a time (about 10 pix), but at least I can do it. I paid for 80 GB of storage space at Picasaweb, and I’ve barely scratched it.

I’m in the last few days of my summer break. We returned from Beijing on the 23rd. Vanilla and the Americans went to Jishou, while Sally and I stayed in Changde to see the sights. As it turns out, since Sally is from a neighboring town, Hanshou, she is not very familiar with Changde at all. Normally, she travels from the bus station to the train station when traveling between JiDa and home. So, she asked a classmate of hers (whom she hadn’t seen in five years) to be our tour guide.

I wanted to the see Poetry Wall, which people say is quite a marvel, but it was undergoing renovation at the time. We visited Binhu Park and Liuye Lake, though. Both were quite nice, even in the light rain.


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Since returning to JiDa, I’ve helped the American family get settled — their daughter started school today as the only foreign student in the entire school — and prepared for classes, which start Monday. Another task is to proofread a friend’s master’s thesis by Saturday. It’s 14,000 words and I’m about halfway through. She’s a 2009 graduate from our college, now at the University of Durham in the UK.

So, my last week of vacation is pretty filled up with work. Nothing new there.

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.

A few weeks ago, Google in the USA reported that someone overseas had made a concerted effort to crack Google’s mail servers, apparently to obtain the email accounts (and other information) of several Chinese dissidents. Google then reported it had traced the intrusions to a few locations within mainland China.

China predictably denied any such wrong-doing. Talks between Google and the Chinese government ensued, but in the end neither side backed down.

Then this week, Google announced it was shutting down its mainland-based website, and that all requests to www.google.cn would automatically be redirected to www.google.com.hk — the Hong Kong-based website. Although Hong Kong is now part of China once again, as an autonomous region, it enjoys some freedoms that the mainland does not; one such freedom is a relatively freely accessible Internet.

So, I can use Google-Hong Kong to search for things (though the Great Firewall may block the actual sites themselves), but I cannot access Gmail, which is located in the USA.

Thunderbird, my email client, can still access Gmail, so I can still read and reply to my Gmail messages. The IMAP protocol is not as yet blocked by the GFW. Neither is Picasa’s upload service to Picasaweb. (I can upload my photos, but I can’t edit them once they’re online. Grr.)

Torproject.org‘s proxy network enables China’s netizens to climb the GFW, but, at least for me, the connection speeds are excruciatingly slow. I need a lot of free time and patience to edit my photo albums at Picasaweb. Facebook, which is already not very zippy, sometimes loads like I am using a dial-up modem. (OK, I’m exaggerating, but I can still watch the page load from top to bottom.) And for security and privacy reasons, Tor blocks Flash, so I can access Youtube, but I can’t view any videos there. So I don’t even bother with Youtube anymore.

Lack of easy access to the entire Internet is a downside of living in China. The Obama administration has been lobbying China to loosen its grip on the intertubes, but Beijing turns a deaf ear. For the Chinese government, controlling the Internet is another way of controlling China’s huge population. Too much cyberfreedom might disrupt the “harmonious society.”

JISHOU, HUNAN — Sometime this evening, the Chinese net nannies blocked access to Google.com, part of the government’s ever continuing struggle to combat (officially) pornography and (unofficially) access to sites critical of the government.

True to form, the state’s censors are using Google as a poster child to warn those who might want to buck the censors.

CCTV, the state-run television, had a report earlier this week blaming Google for “providing ‘vulgar and unhealthy’ content.” The report featured an interview with a young man – later discovered to be a CCTV intern — who said his roommate had become addicted to porn thanks to Google’s help.

State censors then blocked the intern’s name (Gao Ye 高也) from permissible searches at Google China, the Chinese (net nannied) version of Google.com. Google.cn apparently agreed last week to restrict access to porn, so we can still use it. But, the Great Firewall of China is now blocking the international site,Google.com, which joins youtube.com, blogger.com and blogspot.com on the no-no list.

Experts suggest that the government’s anti-porn crusade is a smokescreen to block access to politically sensitive websites. We lost access to Youtube, for example, after videos of Chinese soldiers beating Tibetan monks showed up there, and blogger and blogspot went dark around the time of the 20th anniversary of the Tian’anmen Square Massacre earlier this month.

Blocking Google.com might serve the same function, or as the articles at Danwei.org suggest, the sudden crackdown may be retaliation for national and international protests about new forms of government censorship.

A few weeks ago, China announced that by July 1 all computers sold in China must have a web-filtering program installed called Green Dam Youth Escort, supposedly to prevent children accessing porn and violent material. Chinese netizens instantly cried foul, and most have mocked the program as a thinly veiled attempt to censor the Internet. (One example of mockery is shown here: Green Dam Girl (绿坝娘) is pulling down Windows XP Girl’s knickers.)

Another group of Chinese netizens proposed a national boycott of using the Internet on July 1, the deadline by which manufacturers must provide Green Dam on new computers.

Computer experts at the University of Michigan then alleged Green Dam was a security risk, allowing external computers access to a user’s files and Internet browsing history. The UMich analysts recommended users uninstall Green Dam ASAP.

Representatives of a US software firm, Solid Oak, accused Green Dam’s developers of stealing code from Solid Oak’s own Cyber Sitter web-filtering application.

Finally, the US government weighed in on Monday, saying it had grave concerns on how Chinese Internet censorship would affect trade and access to information.

China, however, remained resolute yesterday in requiring Green Dam on new computers.

Blocking Google.com, then, may be a way for the Chinese censors to show us all who’s boss, in a virtual pissing contest. (Though, as I have reported earlier, there are ways to circumvent the Great Firewall of China. It’s cumbersome, but it works.)

On a more personal level, losing access to Youtube and Blogger/Blogspot was a nuisance, but a minor one. Losing Google.com, however, means I cannot easily access my photos at Picasaweb or use www.gmail.com to read my email and access my contacts files. [I can still check my gmail using Thunderbird and Yahoo! Mail, though. Only Web traffic is being restricted so far, not POP/IMAP/SMTP traffic.]

It’s impossible to say how long Google.com will be blocked. When I arrived last August, I found that Livejournal.com was blocked, then sometime this spring the ban was lifted. In true authoritarian form, Chinese censors giveth, and they taketh away.

Part of my grand plan was to show my family and friends my life here, so they can feel more a part of it. Picasaweb was the easiest way to do it. Facebook, my favorite social networking site, has painfully slow uploads sometimes, making it a photo-sharing option for masochists. Qzone, since I am in China, is lightning fast, but its menus are in Chinese, which frustrates my peeps in the USA.

So, I downloaded the desktop Picasa application (which has a quirky interface), and started organizing and uploading my photos to Picasaweb.google.com/john.wheaton. One nice feature (which Flickr also provides) is to tag the location of the photos or albums, so visitors have an immediate idea where I was at the time.

Last night, I discovered a new Picasaweb feature, that’s as helpful as it is eerie: automated people tagging. Facebook users know you can tag people in photos, but if you have a lot of photos, the process is tedious. (And for me, frustratingly slow. Sometimes the tagging fails.) Google, on the other hand, has adapted facial recognition software to search through your albums and locate faces it thinks belong to the same individuals. You then do some quality control, eliminate the false positives, enter one tag per person, and bingo! all your photos containing a specific person are tagged at once.

In addition, you can associate each face with an email address, so your Google contact list doubles as a mini-facebook (using the original definition of the word).

Well, I’m impressed. It almost makes up for the desktop application’s annoying tendency to crash my feeble computer as I try to sort and eliminate unwanted images from the Picasa catalog.

Word of advice: don’t let Picasa search your entire drive(s) for images to index. It will mindlessly catalog every png, gif, jpg or what have you, even if they have no real importance. Case in point: I used to set up php-nuke sites for clients, and habitually would back up their sites onto my hard drive before mucking around with code. Picasa indexed all those image files, too. Bleah. So, if you have lots of images you don’t want Picasa to find, either archive them (zip, rar, tar or gz) or tell the app to index only specific folders.