The Great Firewall of China

Thanks to the near invincible firewall of China, I see these 2 images almost every other time I try to view a foreign website.

Sites that I have never succeeded in opening up:

- All Wordpress, Xanga, and Livejournal sites.

After reading about the confiscation of 300+ Bibles from American Christians at the Beijing airport and a comment at Topix that said that people should just read them online, I decided to see if that was possible:

- You definitely cannot access Bible Gateway. However, I managed to open up Bible.org after about 10 tries.

- A lot of other foreign sites just take a long time to open up. You just have to try again and again. Major sites such as MSN, Yahoo, and other big newspapers are ok though.

- It takes forever to get onto Facebook, though it's accessible.

By the way, for news, I highly recommend BBC and the International Herald Tribune, which is affiliated with the NY Times, but with a more international focus. These two have yet to disappoint me, in terms of objectivity and journalism/writing standards. Topix congregates all published news around the world in one place. The main thing I like about it is that readers get to discuss and debate on articles. I've read and participated in a few highly charged debates.