Oh, and FB recoded their site again, so the plugin I have that pulls comments on FB Notes into WordPress is broken again. It uses the mobile FB site, so I have no clue what’s up with that.

Check out the new photos. Nothing truly exciting, but interesting, I hope. Before Christmas, I visited two local schools, one in the countryside and one in Jishou.

I have some thoughts about my trip back to the States, and about teaching here. I hope to get those written down soon, before classes resume on the 25th.

Chinageeks.org reports official news sources are keeping mum about the reasons for the protests, if they carry any reports about them at all. Apparently, China is also blocking Al Jazeera’s live video streams and sanitizing discussion forums as quickly as anyone posts.

Maybe the leaders in Beijing are a little worried. One wonders why.

JISHOU, HUNAN — By now, you have probably heard that Liu Xiaobo, a Chinese dissident, has won the Nobel Peace Prize. But if you were in China, you would hardly know it.

Government censors blacked out CNN cable TV reports, like the one below. The China Daily, the nation’s English-language, government-backed newspaper and website, had nothing about the award this evening.

Searching for his name in Chinese characters (刘晓波) using Google or Yahoo just gave me a generic “server not found” message. However, if I used the pinyin version of his name, I had no problem finding and reading news reports about him. I assume that breech will be closed soon, since searching for his name on Wikipedia gave me a similar “server not found” message.

Liu is serving an 11-year prison sentence in Liaoning province, after he was convicted in 2009 of subversion of state power. He was an advisor to student protesters in the 1989 Tian’anmen Square demonstrations, and a co-author of Charter 08, which calls for more democracy in China. (See the link under Pages at left on this blog, if you want to read the Charter.)

Needless to say, giving the prize to Liu did not please the Chinese government one iota, since it calls attention to Liu’s imprisonment and China’s less-than-stellar track record on human rights. Despite its “opening up” in the 1970s to the outside, the Communist Party of China (CPC) prefers to keep the population in the dark about dissidents like Liu. The CPC is all about a “harmonious society” here. As Chinese media observers have noted, news reports in China rarely mention anything suggesting the CPC makes any errors, or that anyone might object to official CPC actions.

Everything’s just peachy here, you know.

English speakers have an advantage over most Chinese. So far, access to major international news sites like BBC and CNN is not blocked. Since most Chinese still don’t know English very well, however, they are unlikely to go poking around The New York Times for news of China.

And those that seek information on Chinese websites will either find nothing, or the site blocked.

China is not alone in this regard, of course. Iran has a tight grip on its media and Internet pipelines, as well. And the United Arab Emirates threatened to ban Research in Motion’s Blackberry services entirely if RiM didn’t allow UAE internal security agencies access to customer’s communications.

And, lest you think the USA is above all this snooping, the Obama administration wants telecommunications and Internet providers to provide government security agencies “backdoor” access to check on what customers are talking, texting or typing about.

I am not suggesting that the US government will lock people like China has Liu, but at the same time, there is no compelling reason to let government agents have easier access to our private communications than what they already have. And there is no compelling reason to control how and why Internet users access the ‘Net. (I am speaking out Net Neutrality here, folks.)

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.

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!