The great firewall of China

So, I spent the weekend at my parents' place in Shenzhen, China. For those who don't know, Shenzhen is one of the largest cities in China and is right across the border seperating Hong Kong with mainland China.

However, being in Shenzhen means that I have to bear with Internet access behind what's commonly referred to as the "Great Firewall of China".

What is the "Great Firewall of China", you ask?

To put it simply, the "Great Firewall" is a giant blacklist of sites (well, IP addresses) that can't be accessed from inside Chinese borders. Packets to banned IPs are simply dropped by internal routers and never make it outside the country.

Anyway, the interesting thing about that was... that the published page of this blog was on the blacklist, but blogger itself wasn't. So, while I was able to post entries to my blog, I was unable to view them once they were posted. The last entry made in here was posted in that manner.

So, yeah, browsing the Internet from inside China kind of sucks, since you always run into sites that the government have deemed not suitable for public consumption, or something. Although I guess I can't complain, since I don't have any Internet access at all in my ghetto apartment here in HK.

Anyway, interstingly, yesterday I was back in HK and at work. About half an hour before the end of office hours, my boss waved me over and asked me to respond to an e-mail from a vendor. Apparently, they were confused as to why their website was not accessible from Beijing, and wanted an explanation.

"Type up an explanation," he said. "Make it as technical as possible."

Of course, I didn't want to overload the poor sap with technical terms, so I ended up spending the last half-hour at work typing up a 3-page e-mail explaining how the entire thing works. I... might have BS'd a little to fill in small gaps in my definite knowledge, but I don't think he noticed. I could have looked them up, but I really wanted to go home on time. Heh.