***CENSORED***

"Page Timeout" is an error all too commonly encountered while browsing the web here in China. Yes, our internet is a little on the slow side, but it's not THAT slow. In fact, this is the most common sign that the site you're trying to access has been censored. The Great Firewall of China as it's (not so) fondly called is set up by their (not so) fearless leaders to try to limit access to objectionable information.

This week was the twentieth anniversary of the Tiananmen Square Massacre and censorship has been particularly egregious. God forbid anyone should find out what the government did to its own people because they dared to speak out. They seem to have been pretty successful at keeping information flow to a minimum. The day after the anniversary one of my Chinese teachers happened to write out a list of dates of historical importance in China. June 4 wasn't on it. When I added June 4 to the list she paused, noticeably puzzled, before finally adding the year, 1989. She told me that, while mentioned in the history books, the day of the Tiananmen Square Massacre gets not more than about two sentences in school text books.

But, back to the censorship...

YouTube's been blocked for several months, we think because someone posted a video in support of Tibet. We've gotten used to that. News sites (New York Times, etc.) are routinely blocked for short periods, but rarely for more than a few days. This week, though, the shit hit the fan. Twitter is down, blogger is down (I'll tell you in a moment how I'm writing this post), YouTube, of course, is still down. Facebook, for some reason has been left in peace. Most peculiar of all, our wedding photographer's print ordering site is blocked. Can't have anyone ordering highly subversive wedding pictures! Censorship isn't limited to the web, either. Chinese newspapers (English language ones included) are, of course, heavily censored. We do, however, get several international channels (CNN, BBC, etc.) via satellite television. This week, though, they've been unreliable, blacking out frequently, generally for periods of 2-4 minutes. Funny that's just about the time it takes to run a story on the anniversary of the week.

Back to the internet, though. I have the folks that run the best VPN service out there to thank for the fact that I'm posting today. VPN is a go-between service that masks your internet address and, incedentally, allows you to access blocked content by (more-or-less) making the HTML requests for you, then passing the results back. So long as you can connect to the VPN and the VPN is outside China you should be able to access blocked content. Of course, when I tried to connect to my trusty VPN this afternoon it was...you guess it...blocked. I get what I pay for, though, and a few minutes after contacting customer service on livechat, I was up and runniung again on a server the Chinese have not yet tracked down and blocked. To avoid ruining a good thing, I'm not going to post the service's name here directly. Instead I'll give you a few clues and you can look them up yourself.

Unbeaten for now...

Clues to find the best-ever VPN service:
2 words...first word starts with a letter in the second half of the alphabet and is, roughly, a synonym for dependable. It is also the adjective form of a four-letter verb starting with the same first three letters. The second word is the gerund (-ing) form of the four-letter verb that describes what you are doing when you throw a party. The verb in question also forms the important part of the word (ending in 'ess') that describes the lady of the house where the party is thrown. The product I use from this company is a VPN. The first word in the name is an adjective that describes a guy (or girl) who can lift very heavy things.