Well, bully for you. If you are happy with how you and your communications are working, fine. If you have experienced no troubles yourself, fine. But you don't have the right to pooh-pooh others of us who have different experiences and perhaps different needs. For some of us, limitations range from occasionally annoying to regularly problematic. To come out publicly on a forum with the position that the China internet access world is Fine and Dandy, is pretty appalling.

Your crack about "porn or pro-tibet progaganda (sic)" isn't funny.

I don't know when they got it back, but their Wudaokou office is quite impressive.

I asked some colleagues in the office today why this is happening, and they told me that I should already know the answer. Indeed, it seems quite obvious:

1) Big Brother doesn't like us being able to communicate with each other in any means that it can't easily snoop upon
2) He also wants to protect Chinese companies... like youku and tudou at the expense of youtube

So, VPN it is, I guess (I'm kind of hooked on google).

For me, I am well aware that monitoring exists on all formats however if one spends a lot of time in country, you eventually run afoul of some sort of censorship because we don't think of it as bad.

Personally, I do what I can to make things as difficult as possible for the Nannies to monitor me. Doesn't mean it stops it.

I find it encouraging when I hear the folks at gmail complaining about hacks publicly because it means that they are refusing to be sheep and comply with the Nannies.

jiejie's experience is not new, a friend was expelled from the country last year, banned from re-entry. He was tutoring a student who was involved in a revolt at the university. He said, he experienced similar problems as jiejie just before the authorities came.

So one needs to be aware.

The powers that be have really kicked things up a notch this weekend.

They mustn't want to be "occupied".

I have to say, I think this week-end has been better than the last week. But it's very patchy/moody. Unfortunately, I've got trouble accessing my VPN at the mo (boring technical reasons that I don't fully understand but have learnt to live with), so I've just got to go with the flow.


tb

I've rarely seen blocking this bad--it's almost like the annual Party Congress is in town. Google.com is very sporadic as to viability, and often winks out. I've been getting around it (if off VPN) by using google.co.jp and google.co.uk which are somewhat more useable, but not 100% either.

I don't use gmail but a friend of mine visiting from USA for awhile does heavily. She's ended up having all gmail auto-redirected to a completely different for-pay specialty email site that does not get blocked. Which she can manage for a few weeks.

ETA: Whoops, it's October! The Party Congress is coming to town in about a week. So we can assume we are in one of our annual "lockdown" periods and particularly if your ISP is serving the Beijing area. The only question is whether it will be lifted come November.

This seriously blows. I've spent the past 1.5 hours trying to work within gmail, but have received no love.

A possibly relevant data point: My wife just had a miserable connection on Skype talking to her sister in Shanghai.

Skype is being very moody: using it to make international telephone calls: no problems. Skype-calls to UK, few problems. Skype calls to US: major problems, essentially unworkable.

I have to say, my gmail is not mis-behaving (hope I don't jinx it) -- could it be that I'm connecting through a (chinese) university instead of a private network?

tb

CPC

microblogs
yuan
Taiwan

Better look like something is being done.

I have also noticed some extra "latency" in the internet in recent weeks (okay - actually a lot ...), starting towards the end of September. I've not been in Beijing all the time since then, but it doesn't seem to have gotten any worse (for me at least) in the last few days. I suspect that this is related to the October Party Congress meeting, but we know from experience that it doesn't take a lot to spook the authorities here into turning up the internet filtering dial to "11" (someone with artistic talents - that rules me out - could make a great cartoon of this).

Basically these days I run a VPN most of the time. Without it searches on Google sometimes work, sometime don't. More than that, many websites these days have code that makes active calls to Twitter, and Facebook (for tracking purposes), so that even though I don't use these sites page-loading is slowed down (and in some cases hangs completely). Similar for sites that use "Googleapis" to track page-hits.

On the other hand, I have had no problems with basic Gmail services. The internet restrictions though in China are notorious for being locally implemented - so what works (or doesn't) on one ISP, may not (or may) on another.

Moondog: Just a thought. Are you using a Open DNS address for the name server? Sometimes just doing this can open up the e-highway (not all the blocking they use here is so advanced - though some clearly is ....). If not I recommend "DNSjumper" - very easy to use. I normally select one of the openDNS addresses, but the Google ones also work.

China bandwidth to the outside world + more filtering = crapnet.

Opera works a lot faster in China. Mostly because it renders the page without completely download it. Therefore, you don't have to wait for the blocked content to timeout before the page loads.

I've actually got IE, Firefox, and Opera loaded up. With IE mostly for Chinese-based websites that don't work well in the other two. I have definitely found that certain websites/pages load better in Opera 11.51 than in Firefox 7.0.1 however, changing browsers doesn't solve the fundamental problems already identified: bandwidth + filtering.