Saturday, June 27, 2009

Getting caught between China vs Google

Traveling to China for a business trip this week, I found myself caught up between the tug-o-war between China and Google, with China being displeased with the little effort Google makes to filter out porn via certain search words on their site. It also made me realized my dependency for Google services... time for a re-think.

Anyway, I was happily reading my feeds via iGoogle, checking my emails on Gmail and doing lots of searches on Google on Wednesday afternoon (24th June 2009). Things weren't so rosy after dinner as I found that my browser keeps getting connection resent errors to anything related to Google (google.com, blogspot.com and youtube.com).

This went on till Friday morning (26th June 2009) when Google.com services were resumed. However, I still could not get onto Blogspot or YouTube. Even now, as I'm sitting in my hotel lobby waiting for my transportation to the international airport, I still do not have access to Blogspot or YouTube. Not that it matters too much since I'm heading home to Singapore in another few hours.

Astute readers will wonder how did I manage to post this entry on my blog while still behind the Great Firewall of China? Its not the most efficient way (from networking and data perspective) but I managed to gain remote-desktop access to my SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 11 running on my home PC in Singapore. Here's a link to my previous posts (2008) on the various options for remote desktop access to SLED [Part1 and Part2].

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