paranoia - when they really are watching you
July 1st
it's frightening how long i've actually been using this journal and felt no need to post anything, though i've been checking my friends pages regularly. guess it's a question of knowing it's been forever and then thinking, it's been so long anyway, why bother? well, today i find myself needing to use it.
it hit me today that censorship is real, alive and well. i like to consider myself realistic enough to know that such things are true, i've just never had it affect me in a personal way before. so i guess you could say it is somewhat eye-opening.
today there was an annual protest of about 300,000 people in Hong Kong advocating political change. i heard about this through word of mouth and the growing suspicion that has been growing in the back of my mind has firmly taken hold of me.
at first i thought that my internet connection simply went down for all of the various technical reasons i don't even have words for. then it started happening almost every week, sometimes for days at a time, sometimes only a full day. i started blaming the computer company we went through, tried to arrange to fix whatever was wrong. then i heard comments, joking but truthful, about goverment altering weather forecasts to always read below 40, because employees are not required to work at 40 or over. finally it came to my attention that sometimes only certain sites and servers were down - specifically anything that could broadcast news.
tonight, the major sites/servers yahoo, msn, aol, nytimes, worldnews, and many others were all down, blocking any major news source barring asia news.
is it true? have no idea. but it does make you wonder.
living in China is a whole different world.
Edit the timestamp on this is when the internet started working again.
it's frightening how long i've actually been using this journal and felt no need to post anything, though i've been checking my friends pages regularly. guess it's a question of knowing it's been forever and then thinking, it's been so long anyway, why bother? well, today i find myself needing to use it.
it hit me today that censorship is real, alive and well. i like to consider myself realistic enough to know that such things are true, i've just never had it affect me in a personal way before. so i guess you could say it is somewhat eye-opening.
today there was an annual protest of about 300,000 people in Hong Kong advocating political change. i heard about this through word of mouth and the growing suspicion that has been growing in the back of my mind has firmly taken hold of me.
at first i thought that my internet connection simply went down for all of the various technical reasons i don't even have words for. then it started happening almost every week, sometimes for days at a time, sometimes only a full day. i started blaming the computer company we went through, tried to arrange to fix whatever was wrong. then i heard comments, joking but truthful, about goverment altering weather forecasts to always read below 40, because employees are not required to work at 40 or over. finally it came to my attention that sometimes only certain sites and servers were down - specifically anything that could broadcast news.
tonight, the major sites/servers yahoo, msn, aol, nytimes, worldnews, and many others were all down, blocking any major news source barring asia news.
is it true? have no idea. but it does make you wonder.
living in China is a whole different world.
Edit the timestamp on this is when the internet started working again.