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Explore the Web From China
An anonymous reader writes with this excerpt from Download.com:
"It slows down your browsing. It makes some Web sites inaccessible for no discernible reason. It doesn't even offer you any xiao long bao or pu'er tea for your troubles. But if you want to know what life behind the Great Firewall of China is like, then the Firefox plug-in China Channel is the cheapest and fastest way to experience using the Internet in China without actually being there."
Can it recreate the fear that making the wrong post on a blog will get you arrested?
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
Yeah, no intimidation for the locals with an officer walking around. Could you imagine that at a public library or Starbucks in the US? Oh, wait, we do have to show ID before we can use the computer at our local library. But no police walking around.
No doubt you had full access due to your foreign ID/passport that I'm sure you were required to show before you were given access.
If you were in China during or up to the Olympics, you experienced a totally different internet than before and again now with things back to normal. Things were wide open at the internet cafes - but of course they still had all the IDs of whatever citizens were foolish enough to do something or try something they shouldn't. They needn't arrest them in the cafe, they'll just wait for them to go home and arrest them there.
As an Australian this is a look into the near future.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
Are people really going to develop web applications for Chinese users and not host them in China? Do they think Chinese users surf a lot of English language content on budget shared hosts?
Not to trivialize the censorship issues involved, but if someone really wants to know what surfing the Internet is like for Chinese people, they should learn Chinese and read their complaints in person. There are plenty of sites that offer language lessons basically for free these days. My favorite is Popup Chinese because their hosts speak standard mandarin and they have a great popup dictionary plugin.
Once you know the language you can get out into the actual Chinese Internet. Find out the difference between Baidu and Google. Have Tencent screw up your computer. Watch videos on youku and surf chat forums. It takes time to get to the point where this is comfortable for second language speakers, but Chinese is looking a lot more valuable than banking at this point.....