or as they prefer to call it themselves, “The Golden Shield”.. You know, “Shield” as in “Protection-Shield”.
No matter if you feel the need to be protected or not, if you are going to China you can expect to encounter a lot of difficulties when browsing the web..
Facebook wont work, Youtube wont work, WordPress, Blogspot, Twitter, Amnesty International.. icanhascheezburger.com.. (eh?)
Having the luxury of carrying my own laptop when in China I could install Tor. For all of you others going there or already hanging around, there’s hidemyass.com, haven’t tried it, but it should work at least for the standard user. Any other advice?
I know this simple trick, many people do, but some don’t at all. & that’s the sad part about restraining people’s rights. There are always ways to get around obstacles that are in your way if you have the time and motivation to do it. Still, in many cases, big corporations and sometimes even governments will want to restrain your rights mostly because of the simple fact that too much freedom and knowledge might be in conflict with them being in power.
And they know that no matter how simple the restriction is to get around, there will always be a big part of the society that wont have the time or interest to climb any mountains in their way and just let go, continuing their daily lives following the absurd rules presented to them, because who needs Facebook anyway? Let them protect us from those bad western values and all that porn and violence with their golden shield that everybody talk so nicely about.
“There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment. How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork. It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the time. But at any rate they could plug in your wire whenever they wanted to. You had to live—did live, from habit that became instinct—in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized.”
George Orwell – 1984
And the evil governments and the big corporations rub their hands, and Steve Jobs points at my phone hysterically laughing and screaming: “either you move to the States and get yourself an AT&T card, or you will be stuck with that giant ugly iPod touch!” And me, lacking the time and knowledge to invent my own unlocking tool will kindly have to google around, waiting for a hacker to release an unlock for the new baseband that iTunes updated my iPhone to without even asking, it just did what it wanted to and locked the hell out of it. I f* paid for this thing. It’s my property, let me use it the way I want to!!
“You don’t understand, you’re supposed to thank us! It’s all just for your protection.”
Goodnight :)