Seems that the great firewall has just become even more restrictive. Thought it might have been a temporary glitch, but for the last 3 days or so various sites that I used to have no problem surfing, suddenly became unavailable. Maybe this is only in Changchun, I’ve tried various locations, and all with the same result. 🙁

  I can’t access any google site – gmail, google.com/.co.uk all now blocked. Strangely the BBC weather site (the news site has always been blocked) is now blocked yet most of the rest of the site is still okay. 

 I wonder who decides what to filter and why.  I wonder if the people doing the filtering even understand english, because if they did, they’d realise that searching for many things in english circumnavigates their filters.  And what does a weather site have to do with anything, when the Guardian.co.uk  is still available.

 However the crappy heavily government censored google.cn still works. The firewall is still pretty weak though, didn’t take me more than about 30 seconds to access stuff the CCP would rather not let anyone see.  

 People talk about the firewall being the most sophisticated one in the world, but I have to say it really is pretty damn poor. Rather like the quality of most Chinese buildings, from the outside it looks okay, but when you actually get into it, it’s full of cracks and holes.   It only manages to stop the most basic of user, indeed almost all students know how to find and use a proxy address.  I often find myself asking them for a new IP addresses, as the government  blocks proxies when it finds them.