Wikipedia Never Looked So Good

Wikipedia never looked so good. I’m in Macau now and after almost a month of not being able to access wikipedia and a couple other sites, I’ve finally got a clear, fast, uncensored connection. I’m not sure if the speed is due to not having to deal with the Great Firewall of China or if the undersea cables are finally being repaired. More likely the former. But even better than the speed is the ability to connect to Wikipedia which has been censored in mainland China since last fall.

It wasn’t just Wikipedia that was missing though. Access to Slashdot and SourceForge was slow or unavailable often, as were a number of other sites. However, these I suspect were more due to the damaged connections than political blocking. In order to access a few sites and files I had to resort to ssh-ing into a server in the US and using Links and wget to grab what I needed. That was actually faster in some cases than waiting for a file to download directly. Oh and let me go on record here and now that Sourceforge’s choice of using an ajax dialog to switch your download mirror is a bad idea. The dialog would never return, so I had to jump into the source, find the URL myself and get the list of mirrors manually. What an unnecessary pain.

But all of that is behind me now. At least for the next month or two as we travel through Macau, Hong Kong and Taiwan. And if we do end up settling back in mainland China (which is likely), I’ll be sure to setup proxy software first this time.