What happened?

I have to admit that I haven't updated this blog for such a long time, not because I'm too lazy, but because of something called "Great Firewall" on the border between mainland China and the outside world.

Shortly after Vox.com launched publicly and I interviewed the head of Six Apart, this social network was blocked in mainland. Why? Maybe it was just the day when blogspot.com cannot be connected to, so lots of "sensitive" users moved to Vox, one of the best web services in 2006. So, unfortunately, the Chinese users can no longer use this service since then.

Of course, the world is flat. Netizens in mainland China can use tor, which is being developed with support from the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and was previously funded by the US Navy, to access some blocked websites located in the US or some other western countries. But, it's way too slow to completely finish loading the What-You-See-Is-What-You-Get editing tool used by Vox.com.

And the worst thing came on Dec. 27, 2006. The earthquake in the Taiwan straight cut down the international fibers buried in the depth of the ocean. Until today, the impotent China Netcom, who's the biggest government-run ISP and the only option for the internet users in Beijing, cannot fix the terrible problem. And doubtless, there's no announcement, no press conference, and absolutely, no apology.

Today, I found out a good way to log on Vox.com. Because of the Unix core of Mac OS X, I typed the ssh command in the console and create a secure channel to an external host. The speed is really good, and finally, I can update this blog, which has been linked by Danwei.org and the Time‘s China Blog.

Really cool!