Suspicious Internet issues

Since a week and a half ago, my building has been have some "interesting" Internet issues. If you've been in contact with me this past week, it's likely I told you or even experienced firsthand how unstable my connection has been.

At times, the Internet connection would just shut itself down completely. Other times, the Internet connection was fine (it was even fast), but all I could go on were the major Chinese websites, such as Tabao, Baidu and Youku, but no international websites whatsoever. Even more perplexingly, there were even times where it seemed completely normal (for China).

It has been so fickle, that I have come up with my own eight-level system of classifying my Internet connectivity based on what programs can connect and what websites I can log on to. (I won't bore you you with the actual eight levels I came up with though.)

Obviously, the most annoying thing about not having a reliable Internet connection was not being able to get into my e-mail. Though Gmail has been blocked several times before, normally I had other ways to access it. However, last week proved to be a real challenge.

So far this week (knock on wood), the Internet seems a bit better. It's still rather slow and finicky when I try to gone on some international websites and particularly Gmail, but I can deal with it. Hopefully it stays this way. That's all I ask for.

For some more information on the Internet issues currently facing Internet users in China, take a look at the below article form the China Digital Times. Pay special attention to the latter half of the article, since that's what largely seems to be what's happening in my my case.

Unfortunately, I could only give you a screen print of the article, so it maybe a bit blurry. Click on the image to enlarge & read.

Click to enlarge
Article courtesy of the China Digital Times

For more information, there seem to be many other articles on the topic currently on the China Digital Times. I'd normally post the links myself, however my Internet seems to go down for several minutes each time I try to log on to the CDT website.

That's not obviously suspicious at all. Ha.

Sidenote: In attempt to inform students about what is going on with our Internet connections, BNU actually posted notices in the international student dorms. Normally, notices are only posted in Chinese (after all, you are here to study Chinese), but this time it's actually in Chinese, Korea and English. In the notice it informs students that the connectivity issues are beyond the scope of BNU's tech support and that we should always comply with China's Internet laws and not visit illegal websites. Clearly BNU wanted to get the word out to all students regardless of our the level of our Chinese comprehension and discourage us from bypassing the Great Firewall.