newsweek:

Wikipedia goes dark. SOPA!

I haven’t had the time to look into SOPA but I can say that now I’m experiencing it in China, internet censorship is the WORST. I can’t look at anyone’s tumblrs, I can’t use Facebook, I can’t read any Blogspot or Wordpress blogs, I can’t even Google the weather without having to wrestle my way through Chinese-language Baidu or - worse - Bing. Emails to my parents take hours to get through, and half of the emails they send me bounce back. You can use Google Hong Kong, but type ‘facebook’ into a search and suddenly you can’t search for anything at all. I loved that the hostel in Shanghai was cheeky enough to provide a proxy program for travellers missing Facebook, and I did manage to find an excellent VPN app for my iPad, but the two weeks at Shanghai University without wi-fi or proxies was very isolating.

Perhaps China’s censorship is at the extreme end of the scale, but any step in that direction will inconvenience those with innocent intentions, while failing to prevent piracy.

I’m so glad I’ll be in Hong Kong and free of the Great Firewall in less than 4 hours!

(more about my travels at jessinchina.tumblr.com)

(via puremoaning)