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’ve been using Vimeo recently. It has a basic free service that lets you upload upto 500 mb of videos each week. All video hosting sites display uploaded footage as compressed flash streams, but Vimeo viewers can download the original file. This is very good for my parents who want to see my baby son Jake reach his milestones in high quality video. It has standard embed and sharing to show the video in this blog and in my Facebook feed. I am a little concerned about the new terms of service from next month that disables the download feature after a week. I could pay $60 for a premium account that enables this feature, but what happens if this site suddenly stops working in China?

Jake Crosses The Bridge from Matt Seigal on Vimeo.

Call it paranoia, but I have been trying out alternative solutions. I have just activated the free two month trial of Apple’s MobileMe. This offers upto 20 GB of online storage, which can be shared with others. It is convenient that it integrates so easily into IMovie, but it took some research and Vaper’s Video tag plugin for WordPress to be able to embed the uploaded Quicktime movies into my blog. I need to remember to add a link to the file if I want my family to download high quality videos of Jake. I’m confident that MobileMe will not be blocked in China, because it is not available to subscribers in this country and it is expensive at $99 a year. I may be tempted to shop on Ebay or Amazon for MobileMe at a discount of upto 50 percent.

I also tried the Indian video hosting site Viddler. Each uploaded video can be upto 500 mb and viewers have a download option that is not yet restricted to paying customers. Videos can be crossposted as an embed into blogs, but this feature does not seem to include Facebook. Perhaps Viddler will be blocked if it catches on as a place to host sensitive footage, but it’s not a household name like Youtube so it may slip through the cracks of a social media crackdown.

Another solution was to use ftp to upload a Quicktime video to my Dreamhost server and to embed the video into my blogpost. This works in a very similar way to embedding MobileMe videos. The advantage is I can move my blog and videos together if my site is ever blocked. The disadvantage is that I am paying for a basic shared hosting plan and performance may be slower than other solutions especially if the files are large. It may be OK, because I only serve videos to a few people.

There are other solutions, but these are hampered by practical issues. I could use Witopia as my virtual private network to hop over the Great Firewall of China to upload footage to Youtube and other blocked services, The problem is that Witopia has been painfully slow in recent weeks and Chinese friends will not be able to see my videos. I could upload videos to Chinese hosting sites like Tudou and Youku, but they are slow outside China and do not offer download options as far as I could see.

What is the best way for someone in China to share videos with the outside world? I’m going to use Viddler, MobileMe and my personal webhost. I hope that no more video sharing services get blocked. If they do then I have a way to share my memories of Jake with my family around the world.

I am not a political activist. I am not interested in telling the Chinese government how to run their affairs. Given the widespread availability of non sanctioned reports about the recent race riots in Urumqi what exactly is the point of blocking communication channels used by English speaking civilians trying to keep in touch with family and friends throughout the world?

Let’s think of a workplace parallel. A company boss finds out that an employee has been using Facebook to denigrate the company so the whole service gets blocked even though there was no clear policy telling workers what they could and couldn’t do using the website. We would think this company is mean and and missing an opportunity to make effective use of new social media.

The company could have a transparent policy of what you can and can’t do using various communication tools. They could have made explicit the consequences of individual transgressions. For example, anyone found downloading pornography on the company’s computers or networks could be subject to dismissal.

Why can’t such professionalism be practised by the Chinese Government with respect to the Internet? Shouldn’t Internet users be told when a site is blocked? Shouldn’t a specific transgression be cited and shouldn’t the content providers be given the opportunity to fix an error or appeal when they believe they have been unfairly treated? Better still shouldn’t individuals take responsibility for their own Internet speech rather than the authorities punishing hundreds of millions of users who are quite happy to use the service to exchange news about Michael Jackson? Wouldn’t it be good for China’s reputation at home and abroad to be seen to practising rule of law so companies like Google and their users could operate without wondering if their websites are suddenly going to become inaccessible?

I have recently discovered how to get online via ChinaNet wireless access points, which you can see in coffeeshops throughout Shanghai.

People living in Shanghai with a China Telecom ADSL account can use this account to login to ChinaNet access points. Here are the steps that you need to follow:

1. Select the ChinaNet wireless access point in your wireless dropdown list.
2. Enter your account username and password.
   Your username is your China Telecom ADSL username with “@shtel.tyt” at the end. If your China Telecom ADSL username is “ad999999999 the access point username is “ad999999999@shtel.tyt”
   Your password is the same as your China Telecom ADSL password. You can see this on the card that was given to you when first setup your Internet access with China Telecom.
3. Enter the verify code, which is the captcha number under the VPN checkbox. In this case it is ’1355′.
4. Now you are online.

I have tried ChinaNet at Starbucks in Liyuan Lu and Huai Hai Lu. Liyuan Lu had fewer customers using wifi so the performance was much better than the busier central location. I was able to achieve download speeds of up to 260kbps, which is comparable with my Internet access at home.

Getting online this way is cheap, but not free. It costs 3.6 RMB each hour of online time, which is added to your monthly China Telecom bill. You also tend to see ChinaNet access points at overpriced coffee outlets such as Starbucks that should really know better and throw in free wifi after spending 30 RMB on a cup of coffee. There are plenty of free wifi hotspots throughout Shanghai. My favourite locations for free wifi are Sakura Do in Xinle Lu and Wagas at The Loft.

Hopefully the need to use Shanghai wireless access points will diminish as 3G devices and data plans start to become pervasive and cheap over the next year or so.

I have tried many different services and software tools, but I have stayed with Google Reader. I can keep upto date with all my feeds on a variety of devices including my MacBook, school computer and cellphone. The latter is helpful for reading in the bathroom, but this also leads me open to suggestions that surfing the Internet on the toilet in China is likely to cause constipation.

Google Reader is an example of a web or cloud based reader, which forces you to be online to read your updates. However, the service now uses Google Gears, which offers offline viewing. Google Reader would be perfect for me except it does not have satisfactory support for bookmarking and sharing content to Twitter, Diigo or Delicious. I am also waiting for the day that I have a writeback feature for writing comments from within the browser.

I have tried alternatives to Google Reader such as Flock’s in built RSS reader and Newsgator’s readers for Mac (NetNewsWire) and Windows Mobile. The latest online/offline RSS reader I have discovered is Sharefire, which is a light weight Adobe Air application. I may stick with this reader for a while, because it lets me send links to Twitter and Delicious. The interface is quite plain and I had to parse Lifehacker’s feed through a proxy to get it to work in China.

Still, a new feed reader is a welcome diversion for 10 minutes and it will give me something to read on the bus.

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.

Sometime before Christmas I tried to add a few friends from the mobile Facebook site using my crappy HTC Tytn Windows Mobile cellphone, but Facebook defaults to ‘add all’. Like an idiot, I added hundreds of students and parents as friends. It was never my intention to mix my professional and private lives to this extent so I deleted my Facebook account. I had to Email them for special instructions to delete my profile, but it worked.

A month later, I am taking stock of my life before China and realise that I am getting further and further adrift from my friends back in the UK. We are all older and busy with our families and jobs. They are in different time zones or not connected to the Internet. They don’t use Skype, Twitter or even Email. Keeping in touch with friends from the UK is not always easy. There is a tendency to drift apart.

Even though I spend hours every day on the Internet, I am not always an effective networker. Call it shyness or a passive satisfaction that is very happy to spend much of my social time with Jenny, our child to be and Chog the fat cat. Every now and again, I feel the need to poke my head out of the shell in search of face to face and virtual network friends using tools such as Twitter and Facebook. The birth of our child in May somehow makes me want to get in touch with people again, such as my old university friends and the good folks from Sheffield’s Gyaltsabje Buddhist Centre.

It will take me a little while to retrieve the connections that I deleted when I got rid of the old Facebook account. I hope to find a few more lost souls such as the tall Dutchman from Orange County who has a habit of turning up at the most extraordinary places when you least expect him!

This is still an issue or I would not choose to resurrect such a gloomy old blog post. The difference these days is that I am enjoying my summer holidays. Thirty degrees celsius, a daily bike ride, all the time in the summer and plenty of sleep equip me with forgotten reserves of patience and tolerance towards all sorts of challenges and bad news.

Still, a couple of incidents have reminded me that I still have trouble understanding and being understood whether I am speaking Chinese or English.

People in this city like to speak Shanghainese or Shanghaihua. It is the language of family and back room deals. I live in a working class Chinese neighbourhood near Nanpu Bridge where Shanghainese is spoken almost exclusively. Of course all locals can speak Mandarin, but it is in a slurred accent that is supposed to be the Chinese equivalent of Geordie or Scots.

It seems that Shanghainese people over the age of 50 have great difficulty understanding foreigners mispronounce Mandarin. My spoken Chinese is still proto pidgin, but I know more than a thousand words. I can even string together multi clause sentences such as ‘Yinwei wo meiyou ya, wo bu hui chi tiandian’. (I can’t eat dessert, because I have no teeth). My wife and colleagues have no trouble understanding my laughable attempts at speaking Chinese. Unfortunately, this basic repertoire does not cut it with aging locals who just don’t understand my poor grammar and tone deaf pronunciation.

Today I tried to tell my wife’s aunt that I wanted to get a new key cut. The only way I could get her to understand was to show her a bunch of keys and get her to call my wife to translate my instructions into authentic Chinese.

It’s not just Chinese that is causing me trouble. I have started to use a phone transciption service called Jott . I tried using this service (in English) to create Google Calendar entries, E-mails to self, Remember The Milk tasks and new Evernote reminders. The Lifehacker set have been raving about this service for months, because it is free and makes use of Indian call centres to convert audio into text that is then used to update a plethora of aforementioned web services.

The idea is convenient and fascinating, although I am ethically ambivalent about a poor bugger from Bangalore transcribing my voicemail for $2 an hour. I have read the tutorials and followed the examples, but I can’t get Jott to understand my perfectly clear British English. When I tried to dictate ‘Introduction to Computer Systems’ Jott mistook my entry as ‘In seduction, that can take this.’ Maybe I need to improve my accuracy by dictating my Jott entries in the style of John Wayne.

Try it for yourself to see if you have more success with Jott than me. You need an American telephone number to start using the Jott service, but this is easy enough to setup if you become a Rebtel user, even if you are in China.

The nub of this post is that doesn’t matter if you speak good English or poor Mandarin. People will still struggle to understand so you may as well talk to your cat, which is a lot less trouble.

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Rebtel lets you make calls between China and the UK landlines for 1.9 US cents a minute plus 1 jiao a minute for local calls. Calls to the US are even less. A 15 minute call cost me about 35 US cents, which is about half the cost of SkypeOut.

Rebtel is a little fiddly to setup. You have to buy credit and add phone contacts. Then it gets much easier. International contacts are given local numbers that you can add into your cellphone address book. I have been using Gizmo5 for nearly a year, but Gizmo makes you open a separate application and initiate a callback for every conversation. Rebtel saves you from such a chore. You call the local number in your address book and it gets routed to their overseas number. The only drawback is that you have to use the Rebtel website to set up the contact number before you call them the first time.

Calls to international cellphones are still expensive, although they are cheaper than Skype and Gizmo5.

Phonecall quality has been very good. It is also possible to make free calls to other Rebtel members.

A side benefit is that a local number is assigned to you for each country where you have a contact. I am not sure if this means contacts can use this number to call you back, but I was able to use this to setup an account for Jott.com that is only available to Internet users with a North American telephone number.

I am sure that the tumbling cost of telecommunications will mean that I will soon be writing about a better alternative as identical services come and go.