Double Sadness Internet Hell in China

I spent a week in China on business. To my dismay, I was all but unable to access my www.netidentity.com e-mail account (Boyd@JonesEmail.com ) and many Web sites in the West were incredibly slow or blocked by the Chinese Internet censors -- or both. Gmail worked well though (for the most part) and I tried to move all e-mail traffic to Gmail during that week.

Truly Internet hell. "Double" in the sense that the sites like Wikipedia.org remain blocked by the China Internet cops -- and in the sense that the Taiwan earthquake in late December 2006 (and the cutting of underseas cables) is still slowing Internet access in China.

Things were a little better in Hong Kong (I assume Hong Kong has some Internet access redundancy of some sort) and back to normal when I returned to Taiwan (although the earthquake cut cables south of Taiwan, Taiwan's access itself to the Internet cloud was not affected).