Internet in China

[gato]

A good series on the internet in China from the Washington Post. Register (free) on the Washington Post site to view the articles.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/02/18/AR2006021801389.html

See attached for the transcript of a chat with Philip Pan, the Post reporter who wrote the series. The original transcript is blocked because Pan referred to some software used to bypass the firewall. Pan consistently writes some of the best reporting on China, in my opinion.

EDIT: I modified the naughty words (i.e. names of proxy software) in the Philip Pan chat. See if the filter is still blocking it.

Chat_with_Philip_Pan_on_the_China_Internet_series.doc

[chenpv]

Gato, hope you dont mind...... A few data on how much time I took to open a website since Mar.: (Crying.....)

Xinhuanet, 0-10s

Zaobao, 20-30s

nytimes, 10-20s,

Guardian, 15- 30s, sometimes inaccessible (I mean, fail to open page); most of the secondary weblink took more than 1min to open

BBC, 30s-1min, always inaccessible;

Spiegel international, 5-15s, (abnormal.....)

Deutsche Welle, more than 1min, need constant refreshing (I mean, stumbled half way or white page showed.)

washingtonpost, more than 20s or inaccessible,

CNN, more than 1 min,

Chinese-forums, 10s- 1min

Ting-shuo, more than 1min, need constant refreshing

hotmail, gmail, always inaccessible.

Msn blog, Livejournal always inaccessible, need constant refreshing.

Other blogs, need constant refreshing

Yahoo China, 0-3s

Baidu, 0s

Google, 10s-15s, or inaccessible

Hi, friends, what do you think, is it satisfactory? Hows your internet?

PS: Gato, cant download your attachment, a window pops up saying, the download couldnt be finished because the address was redirected. :help Can you email it to me? Thank you very much!!!

[gato]

Chenpv, that's actually a good list of data points. Can you also post how long it takes you to load some common Chinese websites, so we can tell if it's a problem with your university's connection? I've heard that some schools do put an extra layer of firewall on their networks, just to protect young minds, you know.

I use adsl at home through China Netcom in Beijing. The only site from your list that I have a problem loading (without using a proxy) is BBC News because it's blocked. WashingtonPost.com and NYtimes.com generally loads in less than 5 seconds for me. I just tried Deutsche Welle (dw-world.de), and it loaded in about 10s. Gmail and Hotmail both load in less than 10s for me.

[roddy]

Chenpv, your internet provider is rubbish, that's the only problem.

Gato, I think that doc is going to be inaccessible for the same reason it would be on a web page. Haven't seen this happen with a file before, but neither chenpv nor I can get it.

[gato]

I uploaded a modified version of the Philip Pan chat. See if the filter still blocks it now.

[roddy]

That's working now.

[yingguoguy]

For the BBC try newsvote.bbc.co.uk, this has identical content to the news.bbc.co.uk site, though the Chinese language section is still blocked.

[stephanhodges]

I wonder if the file download would have been blocked if it was zipped with a password? Of course, that "technically" means encrypted, so perhaps we don't want to start testing that with Roddy's web site:nono

[roddy]

I'm not sure if it actually was filters kicking in, but it seems likely. If anyone wants to do testing they can do it on their own websites, though. The file was never zipped, just in doc format. At a guess zipping might help, but I don't think passworded zip files are encoded.

As a general rule though, Number 6, even if you are editing it so it won't cause problems.

[stephanhodges]

Putting a password on the ZIP file is a form of "encryption". The file is encrypted against that password. Of course ZIP file password protection isn't that secure against sophisticated decryption software/hardware.

[gato]

I actually uploaded a zipped version before deleting it again because it didn't work. I was able to download the zip file, but it was corrupted. I wonder how they do that. Then I realized the same keyword had caused the filter to kick in on a previous occasion. Adding in some spaces between the letters took care of that.