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Precisely one day after I arrived in China, 0708.fueledbyrice.org and the site of our server provider both became impossible to access. It seems more likely at this point that it is not our site specifically that has been blocked, but all sites hosted by our server, Hostmonster.com. In any case, it is difficult to access our website in China, and nearly impossible to modify it. Hence the lack of updates or new photos or anything at all happening.

For those with technical knowledge, it is actually quite easy to defeat Chinese internet censorship. You can use one of many free systems that “anonymize” your IP address. This means most importantly that your physical location cannot be traced by someone electronically eavesdropping on your surfing. It also gets you past the f*rew*lls and censors that normally decide who can look at what sites in China. The only problem is that most secure logins (like the ones needed to login to this blog and our website) do not allow anonymous IPs for security reasons.

The only way I’m able to post this is that I have a trial version of an anonymizer that is specially set up to allow users to login to secure accounts. We now have to decide to do one of two things. We can buy the services of this anonymizer, which for a small fee allows us to modify our site with anonymous IPs, but still leaves the site blocked for most folks in China. On the other hand, because the problem is with our server and not with our site (we think) we can simply transfer our site to another company, one who’s servers aren’t blocked in China. This is easy to do, only slightly more expensive than buying the secure anonymizer, and would allow everyone in China to look at our site. We’ll see. The good news for anyone checking this site and hoping for more frequent updates is that either of these options will hopefully be in place by later today, and all of us will be able to once again be able to post blogs and pics.

This entry was posted on Monday, September 10th, 2007 at 10:27 pm and is filed under Jim's Posts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.