A shift in direction...

For years Jeff has been my little hole in the Great Firewall that allowed me to download pornography access the web unhindered while living in China. Basically the Great Firewall is a joke that only stops lazy people and stupid people (neither of whom you really want on the Internet anyway, so you could view it as a public service). Jeff, very kindly, kept a server in his basement hooked up that allowed me to redirect all requests for web pages that were deemed a danger to the state here through a Canadian server that allowed such things.

About a month ago this server's connection went flaky and died. Jeff, being newly married and kind of in a complex part of life, didn't have the time to check it out. I didn't mind, though, because very few sites I really cared about got blocked. That changed this week as Blogger turned out to be a threat to the Chinese government. It became imperative that the problem get solved and, for some reason, Jeff was incommunicado.

I decided that it was really unfair to have Jeff be responsible for my free (as in freedom, not beer) Internet access and embarked on a project to change this. So as of today I have my own tiny, cheap VPS in the USA that runs my little backdoor to the rest of the Internet; the stuff the Chinese government thinks is too dangerous to be seen. Like my blog here. The one I'm posting. Telling you what a bunch of utter shitheads the Chinese government is for being afraid of my little key-clickings telling you harmless, inoffensive things about China (for the most part). Apparently I am a danger to the state. Funny, I don't feel any different from last week this time....

Mr. Hu Jintao? I want the six hours I spent debugging this setup back. Please mail it to me you frightened little child.