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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."
I spent 4 months in Shanghai and was considering moving there. Shanghai is an amazing city. However, by the end of the 4 months I could not get out of there fast enough. Their Internet censoring/monitoring slows down your Internet connection so much it is sometimes not useable. Skype and many other programs/websites we use regularly in the west are not legal in China. Some are blocked for political reasons and other are blocked so people are forced to use local versions of the products. The local versions all have built in monitoring for the government. Almost all expats in China use VPN connections for their daily work. Hong Kong is the complete opposite. Nothing is censored there and their Internet connections are extremely fast! I can live in HK.