MetaBlocking

I just had a hilarious discovery. We were watching the Neverending Story this afternoon (after watching the Truman Show last night. As a side note I think it's funny that Sarah and I just sort of randomly picked two social commentary movies that are so so American. It felt just a little awkward wondering what my Chinese colleagues were thinking about the Big Brother and thought manipulation aspects of the Truman Show or the death of imagination theme of the Neverending Story).

Anyway, that's not the hilarious discovery. During the Neverending Story I was thinking "hmmm, I wonder what happened to the kid who played Atreyu?" I always wonder that about really good child actors who had a major role in one big movie and then sort of disappeared. So I went to look him up on IMDB when Sarah said "no, you can't". Seriously?!?! IMDB is blocked in China. Why? I don't see any reputable news stories on the subject, but there are speculations ranging from the listing of movies that paint China in a less than favorable light (documentaries about Tibet) to the fear of user generated content (forums, comments, etc). So I started looking up more and found that the Wikipedia site "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_websites_blocked_in_the_People's_Republic_of_China" is itself blocked in China. How very meta of them to block the page with the list of blocked pages.

Yes, I know I shouldn't be playing with the censors again just in case the last time the internet went down was more than a coincidence (apparently it had something to do with an unpaid bill and the long holiday weekend interfering with the ability to rectify the situation.) But I just can't help it. My curiosity gets the better of me sometimes.

UPDATE: directly through google blogger since I realized I have a very easy way around the firewall. I knew you could get past the chinese firewall through a VPN client. Everyone here does it. The firewall restrictions aren't effective for people who know what they're doing. But I didn't want to trust some shady third party VPN client (many of them you have to pay for), so I figured it was no big deal to live with the restrictions for a couple of months. Until today when I realized that HARVARD has a VPN client. It's intended for access to files when not on campus, but it can also be used for secure remote web browsing. So HA!! Take that, China. I now have unrestricted web access. Although I could still deal with it for a few more weeks, the great benefit now is that I can watch Netflix movies since netflix now thinks that my computer is in Boston! Well, and besides. Anyone who knows me knows that I don't like to be told I can't do something. Even if I don't *really* want to...