gmail access in china

It's pretty clear china is "blocking" gmail access occasionally for some users (?), whenever china officially denies anything or states that it's ridiculus or unfair and they're appalled of any accusation it's as good as admitting guilt. Mostly it seems that gmail sync works on my mobile phone. It'd seem that my email on my laptop hasn't been working since I did search for f*ceb**ok among my emails not that you can access facebook, but that they'd be able to detect that it's the same laptop being reconnected at different locations as well as see what one searches for when using https would seem somewhat "farfetched". However, isn't https susceptible to middle-man attacks?

In any case, I can read email on my phone so far. At this moment I can't access my machine in hong kong using ssh. It's be reasonable to assume this is a specific blockage on their part. ssh is encrypted so they don't know what I'm doing thus maybe assuming it's a firewall circumvention site, who knows?

It seems silly being paranoid. But having things not work on internet feel somewhat upsetting. I mean, blogger/blogspot by google as well as picasaweb (pictures) is access is blocked from china.

This is the problem with using corporate services that fallen out of "grace" with the chinese, or for that matter, any government. Of course the "law" in china specifies what one can "bring into the country" and states one cannot do antigoverment propaganda. I wonder what this message falls under?

In any case, I'm enjoying Shanghai, today Mitch Altman was holding a talk about hackerspaces (places where people build electronics and program microcontrollers). Then we had a very good vegetarian dinner.

Now, we'll see if this message get's through. Feel free to comment so I know you got it! Haha.

All in all, it makes me pizzed off not being able to read email reliably, feeling that I don't want to study chinese in china since they seemingly do all this stupid stuff.


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.sigh