July 2011 – You'll notice a lot of links that aren't working here on the site. It seems that in recent weeks, The Great Firewall has had some serious updates, and many of the VPNs featured/reviewed are blocked (at least the sites are). This may not be for the entire country, but at least here in Fujian, many have been blocked.
Securitales is a Web Based Service that is not blocked. A web based service is different from a VPN, but can also unblock sites in China. The advantage of a Web based service over a VPN is that you don't have to download anything onto your computer. It works on iPhone, iPad and other smart phones as well as laptop and desktop operating systems like Mac, Windows, and Linux.
The most important thing right now is that it's NOT BLOCKED.
Check out Securitales at www.securitales.com.
I do a lot of talking about Facebook here at Unblock Facebook, but today I though I'd make a featured post for Youtube. Yes, you can access Youtube from China with a VPN, just like any other site. Lots of people forget about Youtube, because we have Youku here in China, but there's lots to be had you Youtube that can't be found on Youku. Ok, mostly the anti-china stuff, but I think in general, Youtube has more stuff than Youku, and it's in English, so it's easier to find. Youku is good for watching free movies, but that's about it. I just don't get Chinese meme – I saw a video of some guy washing his laundry the other day that was supposed to be funny.
This is why we need to access Youtube from China.
I find that video from Youtube is a bit slow with a VPN, but there's nothing you can do about it. It's slow video, or no video.
Actually, when I tried StrongVPN a while back, I was able to access Youtube from China and stream video at a pretty good speed. That's why I always talk about StrongVPN being the fastest VPN I've used. At that time I was using the lite service from 12VPN, back when it was available, and there was a clear difference in speed.
Problem is however, that StrongVPN has been blocked recently. Well, at least I've been unable to access my account for the past week here in Fujian. Try the link and see what happens. If not, I'd suggest Astrill or 12VPN.
Access Youtube From China (top 2)
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I've kept up on lots of the VPN services that unblock sites in China, and even those are a bit shaky – it seems that what works in Guangdong doesn't necessarily work in Xinjiang. But that's another story.
At my job it's a totally different story. When I check my Gmail (or attempt to, per say) on the computer at the office, I get about a 5 percent success rate, if that counts for anything at all. All of the time I've got to use HTML mode, and most of the time I can't even get Google to search properly. They are using a Chinese version of Internet Explorer – may IE 6 or 7 I'm not sure. It's miserable. The good news is that I've got to check out Bing and Yahoo sometimes – an I've found out that my site is pretty much invisible on those search engines – bummer. It must be because they censor their search results, because a lot of the articles I've written over the years are also unavailable.
I know that a lot of people in China travel around quite a bit, and with all the cool stuff apple has come out with lately, everyone is using wifi. The airport, the internet cafe, work, the dorm, school. There are tons of places where you can get connected to a public wifi zone.
I've just complete quite a few site updates. After that crazy period when vpn companies were dropping like flies I did a lot of quick-fix site changes including putting big signs in bold and crossing out prices and stuff like that. Ugly.