Originally Posted by
Chinatrvl
If you care so much about monitoring and possible repercussions, better not just avoid tom.skype, but also generally avoid phone calls in china - that is naive.
Googling (why do you need google at all?) or researching sensitive topics when in the country - that is simply stupid.
If one news site doesn't work another does - that has been the way for the last decade now. Newssites, I have not once had a problem with pressdisplay.
Maybe my internet usage doesn't contain enough porn or pro-tibet progaganda... Seriously, limitations are minuscule in privat and business life, regardless how 'concerning' some anecdotes sound.
I've never gone hunting for sensitive stuff but I've hit the filters several times. It doesn't seem to cause any problem, though--one trip I absolutely pounded the filter and nobody showed up investigating. (On-line forum. For some reason they blocked the domain on which the ads were hosted but not the forum itself. Every page tried to pull three fairly small ads from the blocked domain.)
Also, two months past 9/11 when that plane went down in New York it took me half an hour to find out what happened--blocked site after blocked site.