Chinese Public Internet Access
It’s common knowledge that the Chinese government keeps its population on a relatively tight leash, and this can also be noticed when it comes to use of the Internet. Most of you have probably heard about the Golden Shield (AKA “The Great Firewall”), a nationwide firewall which blocks access to various “malicious” sites outside of China. It seems that there are several more regulations, some of them more annoying than otherse.
One of these regulation is that all public internet access places (such as the one I am writing from right now) ask for an identification (ID card / passport) which is recorded down in their logs. Thus, it is possible to track, in hindsight, who performed a certain malicious action. Another regulation, one very frustrating for me, is that they cannot allow you to transfer any files to the public access computer. In my case this means that although I’ve bought a new digital camera a while back, I still have no way of uploading the pictures I’ve taken. I’m going to upload a few from someone’s house today, but don’t expect to see many pictures in the near future.
p.s. much of the internet filtering is automatic and based on automatically blocking sites with certain keywords in their text. This means that if you respond here with the wrong sort of comments, especially to this post (which practically “invites” them) I might be blocked from my own site. So please don’t.
fiLi
August 28th, 2006 at 12:28 pm
From the little that I know - The keywords are blocked during the session with termination pings to both sides, which is to say that it will only happen on pages with “improper content”. If you have too many of those, you go up on some list that will be reviewed to see whether the whole site should be blocked, and since your content is fairly okay - I don’t think they’ll ever get to that.
So, you haven’t brought your own laptop, that’s a shame. I hear laptops in China are cheap…
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Ori Maoz
August 28th, 2006 at 12:40 pm
We’ve looked a bit at laptops in China. They’re not cheap. Well, there are the local brands which are probably cheaper than out of the country, but their biggest problem is that they don’t provide warranty out of China.
As to imported computers - they seem pretty expensive. I didn’t do an exact price comparison, but I did compare camera prices and they cost about as much in Israel (if you search for the cheapest place in each country).
Lin wanted to buy her computer here, and after we looked at computer prices my advice to her was to wait until she gets back to Israel. There seems to be no advantage for her in buying a computer here except having a computer with her for the next couple of weeks.
Well, I guess that part of that was because I was pissed off from the computer salesman’s claim that a celeron and a dual-core centrino are the same because they are “made by the same company”. I might do some online-window-shopping and get a better idea of the price differences.
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David
August 30th, 2006 at 9:46 am
I wonder if they can block “offensive content” in other languages as well. I won’t try to find out empirically, don’t worry.
P.S.
I drive my 650 Mercedes to work every day. OK, so it’s not exactly a Mercedes, but it’s made in germany, so it’s practically the same thing.
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