It's a good question. I use skype international version, downloaded while outside of China and which I keep resident on my hard drive so I avoid the skype website (which in China will redirect to the Tom. version). So far, so good. But I would not be surprised if a full clampdown is a-coming. When I return to Beijing shortly, I'm going to try running it over VPN to gauge viability of connection.

Seriously, if you live or visit China enough and need reliable, unfettered access to the internet, things have gotten to the point where you simply must have access to a secure VPN and have any necessary software loaded onto your computer or portable memory device. If signing up for a private VPN service, try to pick one that is obscure enough to be "under the radar" of the Chinese Net Nannies and that has reasonable speed.

And I have also heard a lot of gmail problems lately from various people, so clearly something is afoot.

What's the problem with tom.skype? Same thing, works fine, has cheaper rate plans. I don't see any advantage of using "international skype". You can download int'l skype from thrid party sites.

Except gmail -which i am not using- I know exactly two sites that can't be accessed in China, facebook and youtube. I can live without both of them. Why would you not be able to live without VPN then? Sometimes some sites are slow in responding; I doubt this is pure censorship: On weekends, internet is very slow in my compound, and the reason is most likely the heavy user load the infrastructure cannot cope with. In my experience, however, this has not happen on 3G connections, maybe this can be a backup for those that apparently experience unbearable slow-downs.

In regards to gmail, maybe it is a good idea to switch to something less controversial?

I don't have a VPN either - but I go to HK a lot (and am not a Facebook addict) so it's not such a big deal to me. I've gotten the used to the Chinese video sites, and managed to watch most of the new Entourage season for free on my last flight thanks to baidu video search. They have all the same stuff as youtube but obviously aren't as user friendly. Whatever.

I do have a gmail, and I've linked it to my work email, which works fine. I get the emails - not sure how long they take - but a lot of my FF things are linked to it and I get them regularly. I can load it kind of well if I've got a fast connection, but hotels take a minute or so (or more)to load it. Sometimes I have better luck if I variate between gmail.com or mail.google.com. Yes, I know, they link to the same site, but honestly it works for me. On the phone it's almost impossible for me to connect unless I keep hitting refresh and wait for the 20th time (sometimes 100).

I'm curious about the skype thing too, because I'm in the process of signing up for it. The Chinese one looks the same to me - but I'm wondering if it will have any problems especially running from Europe.

My understanding is, the concession that Skype made to be allowed to work in China initially was to force all to use Chinese version of skype. This allows government the ABILITY, not necessarily that they do, to monitor what is spoken / typed on the Chinese version of skype. Outwardly there is no difference I was told.

How true this is, I don't know. Just creeps me out a bit, that's all.

Who do you think has the ability to listen to you "int'l" skype conversations and all int'l phone conversations? No need to point at China.
Not much creepier than calling from Austria to Nevada.

Today, my primary backup strategy was destroyed because Google took over my university alumni account (it was only a matter of time). While I appreciate the 25G quota, I am now forced to use yahoo and hotmail as my new backups.

VPNs still work, including the free one that I plugged several months back, but they tend to cramp the limited amount of bandwidth that we have on offer.

Twitter as well.

To think that facebook, twitter, and youtube are the only Great Firewall issues is naive. The first two I don't use and the latter only occasionally, and I could live without if necessary. If it were that simple, it wouldn't be too much of an issue to grown adults.

Actually, there are plenty of sites I can't access in China, and also plenty of sites whose home page can be accessed, but not pages that have "naughty" things on them. See what happens when cnn.com or bbc.co.uk run a story on the Dalai Lama, or major riots in China. It might take a few hours or a day or so, but the block will come up. Quite a number of sites run by expats (or ex-expats) about China having to do with media, economics, social observations, domestic political speculations, etc and which can pass on quite useful information (often critical of the Chinese govt) are banned. This is of more importance if you live in China full-time. Without the VPN, I run into multiple sites on a daily basis that are blocked or have certain pages/functions blocked by the GFW. Google something controversial like "Tiananmen 1989 massacre" and you'll not only get a block of the search, but also may get locked out of the Google site for a period of time.

My previous company in China (based in the USA) had its website blocked simply because its IP number was nearly identical to a couple of IP's for pornography sites. The Chinese simply blocked a range of IP numbers, one of which happened to be ours. (We ended up creating a new site hosted in China for China-based clients to access--the point being it was an unnecessary exercise caused by Chinese gov't.)

Excluding the big well-known social media sites, you also have to remember that different ISP's around China don't all filter identically for a given site. This is why people in some areas/cities can sometimes access sites that people elsewhere cannot. ISP's serving Beijing residents tend to be more conservatively set.

On the opposite tack, I have been shut out of websites I need to access and interact with in the USA--such as banking, and certain professional forums--because they (the US sites) have blanket-blocked incomings from Chinese ISP's due to hacking and attacks. I've communicated with the IT departments of some of these sites and it is confirmed. I will not list which because it reveals personal information about myself I don't think is anybody's business. On VPN set to a server in the USA, no problems accessing.

Monitoring of conversations on Skype Tom can and does take place. This includes the ability to pick up "forbidden" words and terminate the connection if the Nannies wish. Or, more commonly, flag the person/traceback on the Chinese end for additional scrutiny. If that doesn't bother you, feel free to use the Tom version while in China.

I happen to be very cautious about these things in China. A few years ago, I got careless with some searching and some talking, and my entire access to Internet from my home was blocked for a couple of weeks. No joke. Phone/internet company could only tell me they were not the source of the problem, and nobody else in the building had issues. Building management went strangely silent and unhelpful. It was targeted, make no mistake about it. Lesson learned.

Wow, a very salutary tale jiejie.

tb

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.

gmail
gchat
reader
docs
calendar
youtube
far more relevant search results than yahoo, bing, baidu, etc

Same for me...I'll always be able to get onto a news site - whether it is cnn, ny times, or the french press. Again, not sure if it's the same, but I think it is...

You can get porn too - I won't elaborate much further, other than to mention that a French friend I have in SH is quite a fan - to the point of having autographs of pornstars.

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.

True that one foreign news source or another is always available. And I certainly am not a regular user of facebook or YouTube. I use a VPN here though as I simply no longer have the patience to deal with time-outs on Google searches just because something on the results page links to a site with the same (or similar) IP address as something the govt doesn't want the masses reading. I could just walk away from the computer and go and get a coffee each time this happens - but if I did that I think my fingers would be shaking (along with the rest of me) from all the caffeine....

Other search engines are of course available but Google search is by far the best (though I still mourn the good old days when Alta Vista was on top of things) for anything technical. And if you want to search for some images for making a presentation or a lecture using Google images, then if you manage to bring up even half a page of results before the page freezes you are doing well.

To balance that I'll say that Gmail has worked fine for me so far without a VPN, though somedays it loads slowly from either work or from home (but never both).

Interesting about your friend in Shanghai. I always wondered what real life situation would require the use of the phrase "you look different with your clothes on", but now at least I have one example!

gmail/chat/talk are the biggest challenges in China.

I thought Google just got their license back?