Browsing the Broken Web: a Software Developer Behind the Great Firewall of China

troyhunt writes "While we've long known that China takes a fairly aggressive stance on internet censorship, I thought a visit to Shanghai this week would pose a good opportunity to look at just how impactful this was to software developers behind the Great Firewall of China. It turns out that the access control policies make life very difficult at all sorts of levels when accessing simple technology resources we use every day from other countries. But I also found an amazing level of inconsistency with sites and services intended to be off limits being accessible via other means. It's an interesting insight into how our developer peers can and can't work in the country with the world's largest internet population."

Comments

impactful?

[Hubert_Shrump]

The English, she weeps.

Re:impactful?

[SplashMyBandit]

We (people in my country) don't use Webster's (we use the Oxford Dictionary instead as our standard - mostly). Just because a word is in Websters doesn't mean the word is accepted by the international English community. While we my countrymen will usually tolerate abominations like 'impactful', they come across as quite dissonant and are avoided by better writers and speakers. For example, the the writer could have substituted the word 'significant' for 'impactful'.

My other favourite poor-word-choice peeve is 'architected' when 'designed' is the better word to use. All these faux-formal words being made up by corporate drones when there are perfectly suitable and well accepted alternatives instead. If you have a good vocabulary you choose the simplest word to fit, not make up words to try sound enlightened or technically adept. Use of such words are jarring for those of us who have moved past the stage of complicating our prose (as you learn to do as an undergraduate in university) to the stage of ruthlessly simplifying it where we can.

Just like DRM

[deciduousness]

Seems to work just like DRM. Gives the company a sense of power and usually just inconveniences the average user. The power user probably has very few issues.

Re:One acronym solution:

[LynnwoodRooster]

Having tried many free ones before I decided to pay, I can say that nearly all of them are slow, do not always work - and are not reliable at all (drop connection regularly). If you're actually developing and making money, spend a few bucks (32 RMB) and get a REAL VPN connection.