thought police

i've encountered something quite unexpected while using the internet here in china- censorship of a wide variety of websites. i had read something about the blocking of websites here in the past but assumed it'd be something along the lines of what exists in thailand, annoying but not overboard.

so imagine my surprise when i couldn't get a lot of common websites to work and even google was only working sometimes. at first i thought something was wrong with my connection to the internet, as i kept getting an error message instead of a notice like thailand's 'police aleart' (sic) page. here's what the error message looks like:


after reading various websites i realized that this is the china 'great internet firewall' in action. what amazes (and frustrates) me is how arbitrary the censorship is. for example the first google search i did on censorship brought up a bbc article on the china firewall, so i clicked on the link... only to find that the bbc news website is blocked! the irony is that i'm watching bbc world right now on my hotel television, and it's widely available here.

the government even went so far as to ban google a couple of years back, though that didn't last for too long. seems as if the general approach is to ban any domains outright that are too difficult to monitor- i've found that i can't read most of the blog sites out there, including blogspot.com, typepad.com, and blogs.com, though xanga.com seems to be ok.

i just did a search on banned blogger sites in china and i can't read half the results because they're on banned sites. argh!!! found a slashdot entry about the banning, that apparently took place earlier this year putting the blame on some chinese bloggers who tried to slip in banned info onto their blogs.

the most frustrating thing is that so many useful sites, sites that i used every day, are banned here. most google caches are banned. even altavista's babelfish language translation site is banned. argh!!!!!!!!!!!

anyone have any good proxies i can use???