Then I saw it

Now I don't.

For quite some time now, I've been able to get onto blogspot via a very effective proxy. It seems, however, that that may have come to an end or a strong block (whatever one of those might be) has been placed on blogspot since the events in Τιβέτ. It's quite possible that the latter is responsible, because sites that might've been available via proxy before were also blocked. But it's also possible that a recent update to Firefox has messed things up.

As usual, Nanny has been incapable of being consistent during recent events in the imperium sericum. The main page of the Guardian Unlimited got blocked (though it's now available once again), but everything else was still accessible via RSS feeds. The BBC is now back in a way that it hasn't been in my 5½ years in China. As I type this in the early evening of a grey day in Chengdu, I'm listening to R4. The Beeb seems to have become fully functional mere days after the protests in Тибэт were effectively over.

I was able to read various stories about Τιβέτ on The Independent, but I assumed that on The Guardian, which obviously has a much high profile in Cyberia than The Indie, such stories were being instantly blocked. Instead of banging my head against a wall of blocks on English news sources, I switched to reading the stories in two Italian newspapers, La Repubblica and Corriere della Sera, which forced me to make some effort with Italian rather than the usual mucking around.

But the odd thing is that stories about Тибэт were available from both sites even although the name of the place and its towns are mostly identical with their English counterparts, and could be found as part of the URL of the story. It seems that apart from obvious languages (Chinese, English, Japanese, Korean), the rest of the linguistic world is less likely to be subject to Nanny's contrary tantrums.

I assume that like before, I can still compose and post blogspot entries, but for one reason or another, it appears that on this occasion I won't be able to check the entry afterwards.

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