The Great Firewall Status

We heard a lot about the "Great Firewall" before we got here. That's the lingo for the Chinese government's strict filters that control what their citizens can reach and not reach on the internet. Search for things like "Tibet" and "Tianamen" over here and you'll likely get a "page cannot be displayed" message.

We're assuming that since our office's private network is riding across state-owned lines, there's lots of snooping and sniffing being done. And that was pretty obvious when we got here to discover that our 10 megabit per second internet connection was actually operating at anywhere between 1.5 and 3 megabits per second. Pretty quickly, word started circulating that websites were not accessible and some groups (one of the Australian media companies, for example) started testing the data packets between China and their home office to find out if they'd been "opened" and they had. Nice! News outlets picked up on the story pretty quickly, the gist of which was that they were continuing to block things they considered "objectionable, but not related to the business of reporting the news of the sports happening at the Olympics".

For our own needs, we got the local folks on the job and eventually they made some changes (we don't know exactly what) to restore our bandwidth. We're still going on the theory that everything we do is being watched, though.

Today (Friday in Beijing) we heard that the bad press had motivated the Chinese government to open things back up. I'm sure it'll be quickly apparent if that's indeed the case, as the media masses have begun to arrive.