The First Two Years of Conquering the Tundra

Experiments in Orientation 
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January 24, 2010

China, Google and Illegal Flower Tribute

At this point, everyone knows about Google's decision to channel Rage Against the Machine's "Killing in the Name" and more or less say "Fuck you, I won't do what you tell me" when it comes to complying with China's internet censorship laws.  In its January 12 blog post, Google stated that the company does in fact recognize that leaving search results unfiltered could mean the end of Google.cn and the end of their business in China as whole.

Since the Google announcement last week, Chinese Googlers have traveled to Google China's headquarters in Beijing to pay tribute to the search engine by laying flowers and lighting candles.  As more Googlers come to pay their respect, they've noticed that the previous visitors' flowers have been removed by alleged "security guards".  A local security guard has reportedly said that in order to lay flowers, people would need to apply for a permit from the relevant department.  Without said permit, Googlers would be conducting an "illegal flower tribute".

The phrase "illegal flower tribute" is now a Chinese internet meme.  Though like many things on the internet, it's blocked by numerous Chinese websites, including Baidu, Google's biggest competitor in China.  The California based custom goods website Zazzle.com has already jumped on board with multiple shirts sporting the phrase in Chinese (非法献花) as well as a "no flowers" logo for the steep, steep price of $22.95 (157RMB) not including the international shipping that would be required for anyone around you to understand what your shirt even means.

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Filed under  //   censorship   internet memes   news  

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January 7, 2010

IMDB Rant

A large chunk of my week-long break has been spent watching movies and tv shows.  The average temperature during the day is a frosty -22C so you can't really blame me for being lazy and refusing to go outdoors.  In the past seven days I've watched the entire first season of Bored to Death and John Safran vs God (a fantastically hilarious Australian show about religion).  I've watched all three Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles live action movies, the Star Wars prequels, The Invention of Lying, Taking Woodstock, Home Alone, Purple Rain (twice), and I've kept up with all the new episodes of the Colbert Report and The Daily Show.  

Two things have helped me feel like I'm not completely devolving into some kind of Jabba the Hutt type blob:  A) I regularly watch TV whilst perched atop my exercise bike and 2) I'm almost always on my iPod Touch looking up new and interesting bits of information about the movie or TV show I'm watching with the IMDB app (I feel like this makes me smarter but really I'm just preparing for future games of Trivial Pursuit Pop Culture).

Today, the Great Firewall rocked my world by blocking IMDB for no apparent reason.  I understand why social networks like Twitter and Facebook are blocked by the GFW.  They're vile, disturbing sites where people can share photos of cute kittens.  Disgusting.  But I really don't understand why IMDB would be restricted.  What's so bad about looking up the Avengers movie every single day just to see if Ed Norton has been officially cast or if it still says "(rumored)"?  And how does looking up the release date for Resident Evil: After Life force me to support the Dalai Lama?  Earlier today I had to use Wikipedia to look up whether or not I saw Sam Rockwell in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (dude's totally in that movie).  WIKIPEDIA!  This makes no sense.

Oh yeah, also if I search "IMDB" on Google and then click the link, Google ends up being blocked for the next 2-5 minutes.

Hey, Australia, get ready for this to be your life.

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Filed under  //   censorship   Rants  

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August 15, 2009

Jarrod 1, GFW 0

Before I left for Hawaii, I made a few lists of things I needed to do or buy while I was in America.  

The "Buy This Shit!" list was full of things I either can't find here in China or are too expensive as import products.  For example, Levi's jeans usually run 700rmb and up ($100+) here while they're only about $30-50 in any US department store.  I also wanted to buy some Red Bull (just a 4-pack to give my students a taste of what college students in America live on), some Cap'n Crunch, some migraine medicine, among other things.  The "Go Here" list was (obviously) just a list of places I wanted to check out but not necessarily buy anything from, including Target, Taco Bell, Borders/Barnes and Noble, and a comic book shop.

The oddest list I made was called "Internet Crap".  It included things I wanted to check out or do on the internet that I can't do through a regular proxy site here.  Mostly I just wanted to download some Apple software that is for some reason or another blocked here, download the new Drown Culture album, and add/delete some people on Twitter (Delete: Perez Hilton because he's incredibly annoying and stupid, Add: Mike Kinsella because I like his music and he seems like he'd have some decent tweets), I also un-deleted my Facebook profile (albeit by accident).

After a week of total internet freedom and fast download speeds, it was hard for me to find myself constrained behind the Great Firewall so are started looking  for ways to break free.  I used to just utilize web-based proxies like NetEvader, but sites like that A) don't work well with Java/Cookie heavy sites like Twitter and Facebook (hence traveling thousands of miles to delete Perez as a friend) and 2) you can't download anything with them.  After one intense Google search, I found some open-source software called JonDonym.

I hadn't heard of it before, so I thought I'd check it out.  The software works well and it even has a plugin for Firefox.  It's a little slow, but the best part about it is that it doesn't bog down my browsing by processing everything I try to access.  I just set up a new Firefox user profile and run everything I need to route around the Great Firewall through that.  This way I can use Google Chromium (my new, totally awesome, default browser) for all my regular surfing and internet doings and tab over to Firefox when I feel the need to access some totally evil, perverted shit like Danwei.org or Amnesty International or NPR.

For you dudes in China, I highly recommend JonDonym/JonDo/JonDoFox.  For me, it works better than any other proxies and it's much (MUCH!) simpler to set up and use than Tor/Vidalia (which you can't even download from China anymore anyway).

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Filed under  //   censorship   gfw   software  

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July 18, 2009

Reasons Why NPR is Blocked

I just looked up NPR.org via proxy and found some disturbing content.  Mao be praised.  The horrifyingly graphic, immoral, perverted stuff isn't immediately noticeable, so I've added some notes to help you read between the lines (and see through to the grotesque, bodily-fluid-drenched orifices).

     
Click here to download:
Possibly_reasons_that_NPR_is_b.zip (415 KB)

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Filed under  //   censorship   photoshop   screen shots  

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July 18, 2009

In China, NPR = Pornography

Lately the internet at my university has been total crap.  It's felt like I've time traveled back to 1997 and hooked my computer up to a 14.4 kb/s modem and some free hours of AOL (i.e. it's incredibly slow and I get disconnected every 20 minutes).  At first, the school chalked it up to all the students being online, but when I brought up the fact that at least 80% of the students have gone home for the summer the story changed to maintenance on the server.  Well, now after two+ weeks of bullshit, the internet seems a bit more reliable, albeit with some new quirks.  NPR (National Public Radio) is now blocked as if it's a porn site.

       
Click here to download:
In_China_NPR_Pornography.zip (568 KB)

I first noticed this ridiculous case of censorship in iTunes when my favorite podcast, Fresh Air with Terry Gross, failed to download for two days in a row.  Then I realized that all of my NPR podcasts were coming up with errors when I tried to update them [Photo #1].  I just now tried the NPR website and it's blocked as well.  The weirdest thing is that it's not blocked in the same way as Twitter or Youtube (those just come up with connection errors) [Photo #2].  No, NPR.org comes up with a page that tells me I'm accessing prohibited content, that my behavior is being recorded and that my network administrator will be alerted [Photo #3].  This is the exact same message that one would receive if he or she would to attempt to access a pornography site like Big Boobs Alert [Photo #4].

Now, I haven't checked it through a proxy, so I suppose the block could be justified and the NPR home page could have a huge picture of the Tappet Brothers from Car Talk running a train on Ira Flatow, but I highly doubt that.

Hey Green Dam, you suck.

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