Digital Great Wall

On arrival in Beijing we were happy to find our room featured both wired and wireless internet. One of our first thoughts was to post a few quick comments to the blog. Unfortunately, it turns out blogger and blogspot are both eaten up by the Great Firewall of China. Kind of a nuisance. Tor also doesn`t seem to work for some reason.

There are many anonymizing and proxying services, but most of the obvious ones also seem to be blocked. In retrospect, installing a few before leaving might have been wise. Ultimately we were able to get out by way of VPN to a work PC. This itself was more annoying than one might have hoped as our new laptop runs Vista 64 bit and the Cisco VPN client for Rod's work doesn't seem to like this. Pav's work VPN worked OK, except that her PC was initially off so we had to get someone to go turn it back on!

Anyway, with only a few moments between roamings to argue with the darn thing it has taken us several days to get connected to a suitable PC and reach blogger. Luckily gmail does work so by enabling mail2blogger (send an email to blogger and it`s contents post) we have hopefully seen the last of this and will be able to post some stuff. Beijing is amazing so far and we`re having a fantastic time waking up each morning and walking into the courtyard of our hutong courtyard house.