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China, November 15, 1999

Mysteries of Chinese ISP's

Something fishy is going on with my ISP

The cage protects birds from cats, right?
The cages protect the birds
For one whole week in November, I emailed back and forth with my website host about problems I was having trying to upload new pages onto my website. I thought they'd changed login parameters on me, or somehow blocked my access. The customer support reps, who were able to upload to my site without problems, thought I was an idiot. I even went so far as to blast Pacbell (the host) in a weekly email I send to people who write into my site. That is until I found out the real deal.

See, what pissed me off the most was that I could ftp to my Russian-hosted, Russia-content website, but not my USA-hosted Chinese-content site. This led me to believe there was a problem with Pacbell, not my computer program. So, just to test my computer before I really flipped out, I tried to upload on a friend's computer. When it work flawlessly, I started to get suspicious and I used a different ISP than my normal one to upload my files.

What does that mean in simple English? Somehow I am not allowed to access my website on China using a Chinese ISP, but I can access it using a non-Chinese ISP. Since I am still in China, I'll let you draw your own conclusions from my little escapade.

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