Here's a link to a very interesting article I read today. It's about the Chinese Internet being disrupted. Ok, I know this is normal. But what I didn't know is that in some universities, there are Internet connections that are not blocked by the great firewall. They made an interesting point, saying that The Chinese government realized the need for an intellectual elite, and therefore allows many university students the ability to surf "the western Internet".
However, just yesterday many universities all over the countries experience problems with their un-firewalled Internet. Google and Gmail wasn't working.
It also mentioned something about hitting "critical mass" for the amount of blocked web sites requested.
Anyway, I won't recite the article, you can read it HERE.
It's pretty long though. If you're not interested, I pretty much summarized it.
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.