As I look back over another year in Shanghai I realise I have spent more time in this city than in any other place as an adult. Working for over six years in one school, getting married to a local, buying an appartment in a working class Chinese neighbourhood and raising a ‘joint foreign enterprise’ child are approximate to laying down roots. However, I am still a foreigner and will always be somewhat alien even if I become really really good at giving taxi directions and wielding chopsticks.

School time operates much like a carousel. You get relaxed spells during winter and summer holidays interspersed with unrelenting weeks of busy pressure as if one is running a sprint and a marathon at the same time. However busy it gets during term time, I always know that teaching in an international school is a lot more engaging than teaching disinterested Bristol yoof and eventually the carousel will turn to reveal the next holiday. I’ve survived before and I can do it again.

But, I also take heart from the awareness that I need to thrive in order to survive. I enjoy my job and sometimes I am even quite good at it. It’s easy to get stale and complacent after several years working at the same post, but I am fortunate to get fresh impetus from the energy and passion of colleagues. I was fortunate to be play a small supportive role in the Learning 2.010 Shanghai education technology conference at Concordia in September (http://www.learning2.asia). One major outcome of this conference was to ignite discussions within our department about the way to allow ICT to break out across the curriculum by working more closely with other subjects. The impetus came from my colleague Adriaan and it looks like we have some momentum to move forward.

I am more of a tinkerer than an advocate. Our department has been using Moodle as a tool to share resources and activities for more than three years. I started using Moodle when I was still in the UK and it struck during my first years in China that the crippled state of the Internet required us to build our own walled garden where we could curate, host and share learning resources.  Moodle would have remained a pet project of the ICT department, but two years ago Nick and Adriaan helped to push it forward.

First, we persuaded the school bosses to give us  a server to play with so we could make Moodle available to the wider school community. Then the prospect of a swine flu outbreak made it necessary to provide a digital backup plan for learning to continue in the event of school closure, which fortunately did not materialise. Still, the foundation of the facility took root thanks to Nick’s tireless enthusiasm until it became firmly established in the school’s culture by the beginning of this academic year.

Jake was still a baby this time last year. It has been amazing to see him grow and develop week by week throughout 2010. My online behaviour has been rather reticent during the last year, except for occasional video posts showing off Jake on Facebook. He is a fearless little boy who takes great delight in showing off his physical prowess whenever he can. By the time he was ten months old, he was already walking very well.  We cam back to the UK for a month in July. Our highlights included witnessing him mount John’s stairs without any help whatsoever and laughing with glee while filling his nappy in front of an assembly of geriatric scrabble players. Since our return to China, Jake’s hair has become increasingly wild and curly while his daring exploits at the local KFC slide has followed suit. In short, Jake is a little action man who loves the ELC music DVD and a fickle succession of reading books about animals and monsters ranging from Maurice Sendak to Julia Donaldson. We spent a few days before Christmas in Hainan Island. Jake was ecstatic when encountering the beach, the swimming pool and any escalator. It’s been a delight to watch him grow up this year from a baby into a proper little boy.

Shanghai Expo opened its doors at the beginning of May. Where we lazy or ungracious for choosing not to go. I enjoyed the spactacle of the architecture from the bridge on my way to school every morning. Shanghai was certainly a better place to live during the six months of the exposition, but I did not fancy the idea of queuing up for hours in the sweltering heat to spend fifteen minutes in a pavillion just to say I’d been there.  I am thankful for the six months moratorium on heavy construction that the made the noise and dust less polluting than it was before. It’s business as usual again since the Expo finished at the end of October. The building crews are working 18 hours a day on the site across the road. The outcome will be another tower block to obscure our view of the Nanpu Bridge after months of dirt and noise.

In some ways that pails into insignificance when compared with the individual acts of pollution I have to encounter on a daily basis when wheeling Jake around the back streets of Puxi. Acts of selfish pollution include smoking, even more smoking, spitting, reckless driving and inconsiderate parking in front of entrances for wheelchairs and pushchairs. Two weeks of holiday allow me to be more  philosophical about my prospects of changing an adolescent culture to be more compliant with my wishes about airs, graces and basic safety.

The weeks, months and years have started to blur together rather like the imagery from Maurice Sendak’s ‘Where the Wild Things Are’.

And he sailed off through night and day
And in and out of weeks
And almost over a year
To where the wild things are

The carousel turns and I’m still in Shanghai. My lack of online activity reveals a busy, engaging year (offline) in terms of my professional and personal life. Happy new year. What will 2011 offer?

SkypeIn is not available in China, but I will show you how to create a local number for all your contacts using Rebtel's collect call option. This means that my family in the UK can call a local number, which is routed to a Chinese number. This also means that I pay for people to call me from the UK, but it also means that you only get calls from your Rebtel contact list. I'm going to go one step further and route calls from China or the UK to Skype via Google Voice.

There are a few sticking points to getting Google Voice to work in China:

1. You need an invitation to join Google Voice. It is not open to everyone.
2. You need to have an American IP address to setup Google Voice. It is only open to people in the US.
3. You need to use American telephone numbers to link to your Google Voice number.
4. Your contacts need to dial an American telephone to call you on Google Voice.

How do we get beyond these deal breakers? I have summarised the basic workflow rather than providing a granular step by step tutorial. I'm happy to do this at a later stage if there is a need and a wish.

1. Get a Google Voice Inviation
   Google Voice invitations are easier to track down now. Ask for one on Twitter or look around for a site like Inviteshare.com
2. Get a US IP address
   I used a private paid for VPN (StrongVPN.com) to get a US IP address.
3. Get a US phone number, which you link to Google Voice
   I got a free US landline number, which I found by signing up to IPKall.com. I used it to link my SIPPhone account on Gizmo5 to a US landline number. Gizmo5 is an alternative to Skype that lets you make cheap phonecalls from your computer or cellphone using a Java mobile client. Google just bought Gizmo5 so it is no longer available to newcomers, but there maybe SIP alternatives if you get stuck. I used my IPKall US landline number to receive and forward calls via Google Voice.
4. Route locals from a local number to your Google Voice account
   Get a Rebtel account, which allows your contacts to make collect calls to your international phone services using a local number. Each call can be routed to your SIPPhone or IPKall number via Google Voice. It is also possible to forward calls from Gizmo5 to Skype or Google Talk .

This strange hack means I can use a data only China Unicom 3G sim card on a smartphone that runs Skype or a SIPPhone client. A blended voice and data plan is expensive costing 386 RMB for 1.3 GB a month, whereas you pay 200 RMB for 5GB using a data only 3G package over the same period. In effect you are using VOIP via 3G and wifi to replace China Unicom for voice calls. This is great for people like me who like to use their cellphones to access the Internet and run applications rather than making telephone calls. I have not yet got this to work on a Smartphone. I will post an update when I try making data only calls on my new Nexus One, which arrives from the UK next week.

I have got this solution to work quite well using an Ubuntu netbook running Skype through a USB 3G dongle. There is a caveat, however. The convoluted routing of calls caused a slight delay and I had to get Skype to automatically answer when receiving calls via Google Voice. I intend to keep a VPN switched on when using my phone to make VOIP calls. I am sure China Unicom prefers customers to pay for regular and more expensive cellphone minutes given SkypeIn is not permitted in China. I hope China Unicom will not find a way to break my workaround.

Posted via email from catshanghai’s posterous

When the story first broke, I was in a state of excitement and anxiety. Call it dysphoria. On one hand, it was amazing to see my favourite web company stand up for free speech against an arrogant emerging superpower. I was also worried that this Google fanboy would lose access to all the tools that make him feel connected to the world inside and outside China. I feared and still fear losing access to Google search, Gmail, Google Calendar, Picasa and Google Reader. I’ve been telling students to get ready by setting up alternative Email addresses and getting used to the idea of using Bing.com as a second choice search engine.

Since then nothing much has happened except for rash speculation about Google’s real agenda throughout blogs, Twitter, podcasts and news sites about the real reason and impact of Google’s announcement on January 12. Here are a number of theories being tossed about:

• Many employees at Google are unhappy about their decision in 2006 to censor search results when they made and agreement with the Chinese government and setup Google.cn. The free speech Google faction was looking for an excuse to get out of China in order to reconcile their ethical free speech motto of ‘Do No Evil’.
• Sergey Brin was particularly unhappy that the Chinese government or patriotic hackers were trying to use Google’s technology to spy on human rights activists and dissidents given that his family originate from the former Soviet Union.
• Google can not trust the Chinese government as a business partner if they spy on them and try to steal Google’s intellectual property.
• Google were using the hacking attack and free speech issues to leave for business reasons given they only had 30 percent of the search market in China compared with Baidu’s 60 percent.
• The Chinese market accounts for only 2 percent of China’s online revenues, but it is also a source of problems in terms of hackers, click fraud and phishing scams. Leaving the market would help to mitigate these issues.
• Leaving China would give Google a huge PR boost as advocates of Internet freedom.
• Google insiders in their Chinese operation helped Chinese hackers with the attack so they need to close Google.cn to maintain security of their systems and customers’ data.
• The incident revealed an embarrassing security flaw, which could reduce confidence in Google as a secure place for Internet users to keep their online data. Blaming the Chinese would point the blame at others rather than put the spotlight on Google’s security failures.
• China wishes to become a large intranet that excludes access to all international sites that have not been issued with a license to be viewed within the Bamboo firewall. Such a move would fracture the Internet. What is good for the Internet is good for Google. What is bad for the Internet is bad for Google. Leaving China is a hardball negotiating tactic to try and keep the Internet whole and complete.
• Google is using their announcement to initiate a foreign policy response from the US government to protect open standards, free speech and American commercial interests overseas.
• Google is showing that modern corporations can operate as quasi states with more clout than sovereign countries, rather like the Dutch East India Company during the colonial era. Notice how the Chinese government gave a muted response to Google’s announcement. Contrast this with the indignation meted out to the UK government’s criticism of Akmal Shaikh’s recent execution for drug smuggling.

So many theories raise more questions than they answer, but it is useful to bring together a list of sources on this issue even if history finally reveals that some of them have speculated falsely.

Google Defends Against Large Scale Chinese Cyber Attack: May Cease Chinese Operations

Google Official Announcement on January 12

Google’s China Stance: More about Business than Thwarting Evil by Sarah Lacy of Techcrunch (January 12)

What Google Should Do by Jeff Jarvis (author of What Would Google Do) (January 12)

Google Puts Its Foot Down by Rebecca Mackinnon (January 12)

My Response to Jeff Jarvis’ Comments on the Google-China Showdown by Siva Vaidhyanathan (January 12)

The Google News: China Enters The Bush-Cheney Era by James Fallows (January 12)

China Seeks Clarity on China’s Intentions by Miao Xiaojuan, Cheng Zhuo and Wang Cong of Xinhua (January 13)

Google sends a shockwave through Chinese internet by Charles Arthur of The Guardian

How Google censors its results in China by Bobbie Johnson of the Guardian (January 13)

China’s cyberwar goes beyond Google by Tim Stevens of The Guardian (January 13)

Everything (almost) that’s happened with Google + China so far – Elaine Chow of Shanghaiist (January 13)

Google strikes a blow to China’s Great Firewall by Jeremy Goldkorn in The Guardian (January 13)

Google v. Baidu: It’s Not Just about China by Sarah Lacy of Techcrunch (January 13)

Google’s challenge to China: the reaction by Tania Branigan and Dan Chung of the Guardian (January 13)

Google attacks ‘trace back to China’ by Tania Branigan and Kevin Anderson of The Guardian (January 13)

Google counts cost of censorship and draws red line under China by Boobie Johnson of the Guardian (January 13)

Timeline: Chinese internet censorship over the last year by Tania Branigan of The Guardian (January 14)

Google the latest victim of Chinese ‘state-sponsored’ cyberwar by Charles Arthur of The Guardian (January 14)

Google investigates China staff over cyber attack by Tania Branigan of the Guardian (January 18)

Playing the Wall Game in China by Tania Branigan and Charles Arthur of The Guardian (January 18)

Podcast Links

NPR Onpoint Radio Google Versus China – 18th January 2010 with Tom Ashbrook, James Fallows, Kara Swisher, David Barboza and Yong Xue

This Week In Google Podcast Episode 25 ‘The People’s Republic of Google’ with Leo Laporte, Jeff Jarvis, Gina Trapani and Siva Vaidhyanathan (January 19)

BBC Digital Planet – 19th January 2010 with Gareth Mitchell, Bill Murray and Fons Tuinstra

Posted via email from catshanghai’s posterous

Posted via email from catshanghai’s posterous

A VPN is a way of connecting to a computer remotely. Many sites such as BBC Iplayer, Hulu or Pandora have geographical restrictions that block access from computers outside specific countries. You need to have a UK IP address to access the BBC Iplayer. You can only access this service overseas by setting up a VPN that makes it look like you are in the UK by giving you a UK IP address. Given that the Internet is heavily controlled in China I also need to use a VPN to access blocked sites such as Facebook, Twitter and Youtube.

It is possible to setup a VPN yourself, but making an SSH tunnel connection with an overseas webserver, but this requires technical knowledge and a friend in another country willing to share their connection. I have been trying out paid for solutions with mixed results,which I am still trying to figure out.

I have tried Witopia, which offers remote VPN access to servers in the USA and more recently the UK. It requires a little technical confidence to setup on Windows or Mac and used to work quite well for me until three months ago when the connection slowed to being almost unuseable. I also had a problem when connecting to the UK servers to access BBC Iplayer. The connection would start quickly enough before being throttled into a crawl or even cutting out. The basic service costs $40 a year and the full SSH costs $70.I have read reports from people who love it and others whowith the same complaint as me. They have a very responsive support team who have suggested that I change the DNS settings or the server gateway, but nothing has worked. I am on the verge of ditching Witopia when my subscription comes up for renewal at the end of August.

I was quite excited when I read an interview with a newcomer called Freedur on Shanghaiist. Freedur promises to be easy to install on Mac or Windows to allow unfiltered web access to American servers without worrying what is happening under the hood. The website was a little difficult to follow, because it did not have clear instructions. The service starts at $5.99 a month using Paypal, which I paid after failing to figure out the trial service, but I got Freedur to work on Leopard after playing Email tag with Freedur’s support team. I have been very pleased with Freedur. It has been very quick for streaming music services and Youtube videos in China. I did become very alarmed at the beginning of the week after AVG flagged up the Freedur client as a trojan horse. I changed all my passwords and reinstalled Windows 7 on my new netbook. Freedur told me the AV notification was a case of mistaken identity, which appears to be the case after I scanned the file again today. I have reinstalled Freedur cautiously and have started to use it again.

I have also tried another VPN servce at VPNUK, which offers basic access to a UK Ip address for 6.50 GBP a month. It was quick enough when I first started using it, but it keeps disconnecting at home. The connection is more stable from my local Starbucks, but it is still slow.

I also tried out consult-here.com to access Iplayer earlier in the year, but their website looks so under the radar that I don’t quite trust them.

Freedur is my favourite VPN at the moment, because it offers the most stable and quickest connection. I am aware that it is possible to spend $15 a month or more for a dedicated IP address in another country with no bandwidth limits so the connection should be very reliable if you are willing to spend a little more. I am cautious about spending a lot of money on a VPN solution given that there is no guarantee that something working today will be reliable tomorrow or next week. I may also need to look at replacing my ADSL terminal or wireless router. It is really irritating when my Internet connection stops working altogether after I disconnect from a VPN. Perhaps there is mischievous censor kicking me off the network as punishment for finding ways to access Twitter and Facebook.

A final word of caution is that all traffic goes through the VPN provider. This is a mixed blessing. Using a VPN should make you safer from hackers and eavesdroppers in a coffeeshop, but the VPN can see all your data. You need to trust the VPN provider or be cautious. I never log on to a VPN while accessing my online bank account or entering sensitive passwords.

Related Posts
http://www.catshanghai.com/blog/2009/07/09/no-face-book-2/
http://www.catshanghai.com/blog/2008/12/16/watching-bbc-iplayer-from-china/

Posted via email from catshanghai’s posterous

I’m a big fan of Leo Laporte who single handedly created the Twit technology podcast network. His shows keeps me informed and stop me going insane during long commutes home through Shanghai rush hours.

Leo is coming to China at the end of this week to participate in a Geek Cruise where he’ll be giving talks about Iphone apps, social media and setting up a Mac Mini home theatre system. During this week’s episode of MacBreak Weekly Leo and his fellow geek cruisers alluded to the expense of setting up roaming cellphone data plans so they could tweet and blog on the road in China. Apparently, AT&T charge $199 a month for an international plan whereas UK’s O2 want travellers to pay 50 GBP for 50 mb of data.

I have good news for the geek cruising MacBreak Weekly panel whose twitter handles are respectively @leolaporte , @donmcallister and @ihnatko. Cancel your expensive data plans and do the following:

• Unlock your cellphone, which may not be possible yet if you are bringing the latest Iphone 3GS to China with you
• Fly to China
• Buy a China Mobile simcard (100 RMB) and another 100 RMB prepay voucher
• Change the sim card
• Call 10086 to setup a data plan and get instructions on configuring your phone, but the basic gprs settings are ap:cmnet, username:cmnet, password: cmnet.
  Use opendns (208.67.222.222, 208.67.220.220) as your name server, because the Chinese DNS servers are awful.

100 RMB will pay for 2gb of data. 200 RMB will get you 5gb. It is Edge speed, which is quick enough to upload text and photos to blogs. GPRS will give you access even in remote areas, but it is very, very slow. Wifi is quicker and pervasive in coffee shops, hotels and restaurants. Wifi is often free, or you may be able to pay to use it from your Skype account if you are at Starbucks. Don’t expect to access Youtube unless you have access to a proxy, and even then it can be very slow. Twitter, Gmail, Flickr have all been blocked recently although they are working at the moment. Even unblocked international sites are slowed by lag and having to pass through the GFW.

Otherwise, Leo and his mates should enjoy their time in China by eating good food, checking out the historical sites and watching people play Mah Jong and walk backwards in parks.

Our first baby is due in May.  Should our baby have British, Chinese or dual nationality?

Ideally we would like our first born child to have dual British and Chinese nationality. This would make it easy to travel and live in Europe or China without any additional visas.

I’ve just telephoned the British Consulate in Shanghai who informed that the Chinese Government does not recognise dual citizenship so we need to make a decision.

Our child will have a very mixed up international identity given the background of his or her parents. Jenny is from Shanghai, but she spent her formative years making friends from around the world and was told by a fortune teller that she would marry a foreigner.

Although I am from the UK, my parent’s family are Jewish and they originate from Germany and Eastern Europe. Our child will be born in Shanghai to a Chinese mother, but he or she will be keeping alive a European Jewish name.

The consulate officer told me that our child will automatically receive hukou or Chinese citizenship as a result of being born in China. We will also be able to apply for our child to get British citizenship and a passport given that I am a UK citizen who was born in Britain. I need to present my passport, birth certificate and my child’s records after the birth.

Our child’s nationality will change once we decide to travel on a British passport. We could choose to travel on a Chinese passport and apply for a visa whenever we go to the UK, but life is so much easier travelling on a British passport. When we arrive in the UK on a British passport our child will lose his or her Chinese citizenship. From this point on, our child will need to travel to China on a British passport and get a visa just like any other foreigner.

I know it is possible to keep two passports and keep this information from the Chinese government, but we were advised not to do this. Our child will in fact be a dual citizen, but only until their first visit overseas.

Given our multiple cross cultural identities, I find the binary logic of choosing a nationality quite strange.

It captures the communication problems, the sense of chaos, the flexible attitudes to copyright in terms of vintage BBC tv shows and web service design. America does Youtube. China does Youku

Enjoy. Tell me if it plays in the UK. There is little chance that a cease and desist letter will remove this video clip.

I’ve just returned from Hainan Island with a group of 56 teenagers.

It was a great trip, but I am happy to be home in Shanghai even though the Shanghai weather is deteriorating day by day. Highlights in Hainan included Houhai Beach and Yanoda Rainforest Park.

I was a teacher supervisor, which meant I spent the week observing from the sidelines as the children got stuck into surfing, swimming and beach games. Houhai is wonderful, because it is so good to find a deserted location free from crowds of tourists. I didn’t surf, but I really enjoyed scrabbling on the granite rocks until we found a cave with natural air conditioning.

It is still very hot and the sun is very strong. Hainan is the only place in China that has all year summer.

We also spent some time at Yanoda. Yanoda manages to do a fine job of taming a rainforest without ruining it. The paths in the forest made it accessible without being like a twee theme park. We saw Banyan trees, vines, ferns, rocks and complex ecosystems. The headsets used a geolocator to trigger each commentary, but they should have recruited a native English speaker without the syrupy and repetitive use of ‘Dear Visitor’. All the staff were also welcoming and ultra polite, but they don’t need to make the Yanoda v-finger symbol to everyone on every occasion.

We spent a night camping at Yanoda. Our students are living in the gilded cage of affluent Shanghai expat life so living in the great outdoors is a much needed antedote to the soft living that these teenagers are so familiar with. We didn’t really rough it, however. The camp site had great eco-friendly toilets and hot showers. The camp staff also prepared an amazing barbecue of fish, meat and vegetables. The local villagers even put on a show of Li music and dancing that I must upload at the earliest available opportunity.

Every group also had the chance to go canyoning on rocks and through streams wearing funny straw shoes that look like a cross between flip flops and mini boats. They managed to keep us on our feet mostly.

Going back to Hainan was an amazing experience. Our school organises activity week trips at the beginning of each November. It is always one of the highlights of the school year, because it opens up our students’ horizons while developing their social skills. The best memories and lessons often happen outside the confines of a formal classroom. The best thing about our school are the students who are some of the nicest young people you could ever hope to meet. The only thing I would like to change about future trips is that it should be a little more difficult for them so they are even more challenged as they develop their social skills and sense of adventure.