Slashdot Mirror
Geeks In Asia Use Clever Hacks To Get Slashdot
Daedius writes "My comrade Hugh Perkins is living in Asia and he has been without reliable internet connectivity for many days. He uses l33t hacks to get his daily dose of Slashdot in desperate times." From the posting: "The Taiwan earthquake has brought telecommunications in the Taiwan/Hong Kong region to a standstill. I am living in Shenzhen and am unable to read Slashdot directly for several days. Gmail and Google have privileged bandwidth and local servers and both continue to work perfectly from the region. Could there be some way to use Google or Gmail to read Slashdot? A solution was to upload an executable to my web hosting in America that would receive zipped executables by email, execute them, then email me the results."
If you'd bothered to read the article, you'd see that the reason he was unable to read slashdot was due to the EARTHQUAKE limiting connectivity over there. Not any chinese censorship.
If this was the old internet, he could have used one of those 'Web to Email' services that *used to operate* till a few years back (remember Agora servers and stuff ??)... Too bad for the new Internet!! ;-)
Are doomed to repeat it.
http://www.expita.com/howto1.html
You are in a twisty maze of processor lines, all alike.
There is a lot of hype here.
I live in Taiwan, but I haven't noticed even the slightest disruption in Internet service (Hinet) whatsoever - either in terms of speed or connectivity to the outside world. Am I just lucky or has Taiwan escaped the "standstill" reported in other places in the region?
I live in Hong Kong, and indeed it was a huge disaster. I run an online flower shop myself, so we see our daily traffic went flat for the last couple of days. And I can't even ssh into our colo in USA.
:)
Recape of the situation: 6 underground fiber lines were cut. "Foreign" sites like Slashdot, Google, EBay and Yahoo! were dead. Hong Kong based sites, Australia sites and a few European sites like BBC does work, so that give us hope. So...
On day 1 ( 12/28 ): we found out Google Hong Kong still works, and Australia sites work... so we search "australia proxy server" and funny that a few ISPs have open proxies open at 3128 (Looks like Squid Cache to me!). Since we must be an early batch, we feel wonderful to be "the only one" in town to go online, beat the odds and get all the pussies...
One day 2 (12/29): news of the proxies must have gotten out. Yahoo! Answers are full of such foreign proxies lists, and some entrepreneur hackers must have wonderful day, building their own proxies and lured people into using it. Of course your average surfers wouldn't know normal http is unencrypted... Meanwhile our "free proxy" running by that friendly Australia ISP finally adds ACL to block us out... We try installing Google Web Accelerator, and it did no good, and accessing local sites are even slower...
On day 3 (12/30): we start looking for Australia colocation / dedicated server plans to run our own proxy server. Their prices are at least 2 times more expensive than US hosting companies, so we start pinging popular hosting in USA.... ev1servers.net? down. Rackspace? up (but too pricey). Godaddy? up, and lo and behold, they have a cheap $29.99 USD virtual linux plan.
So, we setup our own Squid cache and it finally keeps us reading Slashdot until this day
The article specificly says the man lives in Shenzhen(like myself). Shenzhen is most certainly not in Taiwan...