What I learned in the youtube blackout

Happy Halloween.

I haven’t cared much about this holiday since I grew out of candy in high school, but this year is special since it coincides with the return of my beloved youtube. As I mentioned earlier, since the opening of the People’s Congress in Beijing, youtube has been blacked out in China. But today, All Hallow’s Eve, a day when, according to witches and goths and librarians, a portal to the underworld opens up and the spirits of the dead are allowed to return the physical world, China’s omnipotent Net Nanny has allowed Tay Zonday, Bas Rutten , Reh Dogg, and all my friends to return to the Middle Kingdom.

So hooray for that. But, of course, the question is how long will it be until it’s blocked again.

In the time since the start of the black out, I’ve looked for ways around the PRC firewall and received a lot of good advice. Since many of us live in countries where the powers that be may want to either block or monitor our movements online, I’ll pass on the best recommendations, so at least something good can come out of the Party’s shenanigans.

There are several anonymous proxy sites that you can use. These basically re-route your request so that your online ‘footprint’ can’t be followed. That’s attractive everywhere if you’re worried about surveillance, but it also works (usually) to get around gvt firewalls. 51proxy and anonymouse are pretty good ones. This solution is nice in that it doesn’t require the installation of any software, but it tends to slow everything down.

Then there are lots of small programs that allow you to get around/through firewalls. How this works is a little over my head frankly, but I did find this nifty diagram that (sort of) explains the basic process.

Freegate, HTTP Tunnel, and Tor all work. Programs like these are faster than the online proxies, but they’re sometimes loaded with trojan horses, so be careful. Some, like Freegate, only work on Windows. Plus they’ll only work on computers that have it installed, so if you’re at an internet cafe, at work, or on a friend’s computer, you’ll be back to square one.

The solution I ended up using in the end was a simple little add-on for Firefox. That works fine.

But besides this new knowledge, there’s another silver lining in the blackout.

Since the foreign sites are so much slower, I explored a couple of China’s local video-sharing spots. That’s how I came to youku.com - a site that is in form and content as much like youtube as anything I’ve seen.

In the post I made at the beginning of the blackout, I mourned in this way:

youtube was my first love. It opened up a world of concert footage, teen exhibitionism, low budget documentaries, and TV bloopers that I literally can’t image going without now.

Well, it turns out that youku hits everything on the checklist - without even having to leave the Chinese cultural sphere. A few examples:

Concert footage:

Teen exhibitionism:

Bloopers:

Low budget documentaries:

This one doesn’t have the immediate comprehensibility of the others of course, but it does give a glimpse into rural China that’s very difficult to get from the outside. ((By the way, it basically tells the story of a electronics repairman who is paralyzed from the waist-down. For 11 years, his dog dragged him on a flatbed into town so that he could find work. The filmmaker saw a newspaper article about it and decided to make a short movie about the relationship, but during the course of filming the dog took sick and died.))

So, it’s Halloween, I needed a reason not to go to a costume party, and now youtube’s back. Let the time wasting begin.

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