It's For Your Safety

After months and months of fabulous luck, the powers that be have decided to block Blogger for my safety and the safety of the Chinese public. While I appreciate the thought, I’d rather be able to post and edit blog posts without the hassle of being forced to use a proxy server and an image hosting site. Blogger is just one more to fall in a long string of recent blocks. YouTube has been dead to me for several months.

I can’t really complain all that much as the internet has been rather “free” this year. Leading up to the Olympics China unblocked a great many sites for “the benefit of the visitors.” Unfortunately, the rolling block-outs began again during the winter, taking out many websites that are disruptive to the public good and many that are not.

I imagine that the current blockage of Blogger will continue until I leave in a few short months, so I’ll just have to learn to live with the change. Though I am able to post text with relative ease using a proxy, it seems that the proxy cuts out all the frills of Blogger that I’ve grown accustom to. Rather than relying on the makers of Blogger to know all the HTML codes to do things I want, I have to figure them out myself. So far I’ve figured out how to post pictures using an image hosting site and how to add links. Take that Net Nanny!

The New York Times has written some informative articles on this topic over the past few months. Here are the links to two:
China Is Said to Restore Blocks on Web Sites
Surveillance of Skype Messages Found in China