Fang is the architect of China’s pervasive net-nanny system that controls what Chinese can see on the Internet, and what content is allowed on Chinese websites. It’s popularly called the Great Firewall of China. Needless to say, Fang is none too popular among Chinese Internet users.

Predictably, tweets about the shoe attack were promptly blocked, as were web searches for the person documenting the prank.

The BBC has a more complete report.

In the interests of global understanding, perhaps George W. Bush can give Fang lessons on shoe-ducking.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VFX-dKpcDz8

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.

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

It’s not the end of the world, since I can still access them. But it’s a nuisance, and there seems to be no pattern to the blocking. Why block the NY Times and not the WaPo? Why block a non-political webcomic? Or Yahoo’s mail service? Or my own site?

On the other hand, maybe the university’s DNS servers have taken a short summer vacation, but that would still not explain the randomness of inaccessibility. (Hmm, good book title. Remember everyone: I have copyright! It just became the title of this post.)

Chinese netizens were all a-twitter about the sudden accessibility of porn sites several weeks. The ostensible reason for China’s tight control of the Internet has been to clamp down on online pornography. When porn came online again, it just revealed what everyone already knows — China’s net nannies want to restrict website access for political reasons.

The Associated Press (always quick on the uptake) only ran a piece about it four days ago. Now the sites mentioned in the AP article are blocked again. Apparently, someone in China reads the AP wire.

WordPress, the platform I use for this blog, allows me to email plaintext posts to a secret email address. I may resort to using that feature if Ultrasurf stops working, as the Tor proxy network did earlier this year.

Plus ça change, plus la meme chose.

China started blocking Facebook (and other sites) about a year after I arrived. Until recently, I had been able to use the Tor proxy network to “climb the firewall” and access Facebook. China’s net nannies had been blocking the IP addresses of public Tor connections, but I was able to get private bridge IPs by email.

Now even the private bridge connections don’t work. My Tor’s log reports “problem bootstrapping. Stuck at 5%” and there it stays. Apparently, China’s censors have found a way to render the Tor proxy network ineffective, thereby shutting us netizens in China out of the wider WorldWide Web.

Internet restrictions here typically get more severe as we approach significant anniversaries, such the Tiananmen Square protests by university students on June 5, 1989. In fact, I just discovered that just trying to visit sites (wikipedia, bbc.co.uk, etc.) that discuss the events is useless. It seems those are being blocked, too.

Sigh.

Perhaps the blocks will be removed after the anniversary passes. Or maybe not. Meanwhile, instant messaging and emails (and comments on this blog) are the only Internet ways to communicate with me.

By the way, Janice, the books arrived this week. Many thanks!

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.”

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.

Checking the Tor client’s message log, I discovered the client was only finding a few of the thousands of proxies on the network, and stalling in its search for more. A quick survey on Google confirmed my suspicions; China was blocking the Tor proxy network by choking off access to the public Tor proxy directory, for the first time since I’ve been here.

But, Tor designers prepared for such an eventuality. You can add “bridges” — unpublished proxies — manually to the Tor client’s network configuration. Once I discovered how to get the bridges, I was back in business checking out Facebook. (YouTube still remains off limits, because the Firefox add-on’s treatment of Flash. I can get to YouTube, but I can’t view the vids. I’ve been too lazy to try to fix it.)

To get three unpublished bridges, you have to send an email to “bridges [AT] torproject [DOT] org” using a Gmail account. Only Gmail messages are accepted, for security reasons. The subject line should be blank, and the message body should just say, “get bridges” (without the quotes). In less than a minute, the reply gives you three bridge IPs and brief instructions on what to do with them.

There is another Firewall hopper called “Freegate,” which I have not tried yet. Predictably, it is nearly impossible to download from within China right now, even by going to the CNET download site. Another web-based proxy, sneakme.net is likewise being blocked. It was accessible only a couple of weeks ago.

So far, Google, Wikipedia, and all Western news sites are still open without resorting to sneaky IP legerdemain. I am hoping the net nannies don’t get that paranoid.

Flickr allows 100 MB a month for free, so I have uploaded my pix from the July 22 solar eclipse. I’ve included a sample here to pique your curiosity.