What?! Another firewall?!

Everyone knows about the Great Firewall in China. After a few months here in PRC, people just learn to live with it or find ways around it. In recent days, we have found our internet mobility further limited by yet another layer of unwanted security, one that is perhaps more local in nature.

Let us explain: Since about a week ago, sites such as Fidelity.com, Engadget.com and Seekingalpha.com are no longer accessible to us at home through our ADSL (we tried IE and Firefox). While we are no fans of seditious and anti-revolutionary fear mongering news outlets such as BBC and Voice of America, we are not quite sure what exactly Fidelity and Engadget have done to incur the wrath of the Public Safety Bureau.

But, then we learned that the issue may have more to do with Shanghai Telecom than the PSB. While throwing back a few glasses of ice latte at Boonna Cafe two days ago (yeah, we were very thirsty), the aforementioned “blocked” sites worked like a charm on the same laptop we had used at home. So, it seems to be an ADSL thing, or is it? Shanghaiist freely admits, when it comes to IT issues, we can’t tell our URLs from DHL. It might very well have been a patch we forgot to update or a box under Win XP we didn’t check (then again, those sites used to run fine). All you tech savvy Shanghaiists out there, we ask for your help, because we don't want to be on the record calling out Shanghai Telecom and then find out we just never installed critical update 241603480.