Internet in China

While in Germany, I could only have dial-up access. But for some reason the modem did not work anymore: I got a pop-up message, telling me that another application would use the modem. I tried to find out what that application is - without success. I was not able to get to my ISP - quite annoying. Will have to do a very detailed analysis sometime in the future.

So I was very glad that the hotel here in Beijing has a connection to the internet with a simple LAN cable. I read a lot about censorship of the internet here in China, but initially I did not notice anything: Google seemed to work as usual, and I could log on to all my email accounts (work and prersonal) without any problems. Only after a while I noticed a few strange things:

When accessing my Flickr account, no pictures showed up. Actually, no Flickr pictures at all are shown, not even icons etc.!


Also, a few websites just did not load: my own blog was not accessible, so I could not verify if all these entries were showing up correctly. I was also wondering what China has against the Media Markt, but when checking later again, the page did load. Was maybe a proxy issue...

One thing that is annoying to me that the Blogger website here is "too smart" and sets its language to Chinese, since I am blogging now from China. This makes editing and uploading a bit of a guesswork for me... fortunately I know from the location of the buttons, what to do (and fortunately the URLs underneath are in English).