Net Nanny Report: Olympic Edition

Net Nanny report: With the Olympics in town, Internet use is a little easier than it has been in the past. I have not had any trouble accessing English Wikipedia, for example. But by and large, roadblocks are still significant. Here are things that cannot be done without proxy: access RSS feeds, read most URLs with "blog" in the title (e.g., the L.A. Times sports blog... sensitive information, I know), type new postings into Blogspot, or get into Facebook (access rate without a proxy is running at about 35 percent; with proxy, access is 100 percent, hmmmm... what could be the problem here?). The Internet works better here than Zhejiang province. I was there two weeks ago and efforts to access Yahoo! Mail or Facebook were constantly redirected to Baidu, a Chinese search engine and Google competitor, popular here for its hands-off policy toward online exchanges of copyrighted material.

Google Images is consistently filtered throughout China; generally, if you do an image search you can pull up a page of results but if you look any further to page two or beyond you begin to pull up "page not found" messages. Google's cache folders are also always blocked. In recent years, newspapers are almost never blocked. An exception can be found at sensitive times, such as the day last spring when protests broke out in the Chinese province that begins with a T (in English). The BBC is usually blocked and CNN is sometimes blocked. Web pages with a .org in the URL are at high risk of being blocked, regardless of the content within them.

That's my firsthand experience report. Over and out.