Monday, October 13, 2008

Great Firewall of China part XI

The Chinese Olympic circus has come and gone, leaving vast squeaky-clean swathes of Beijing in its wake, and moved on to London where its too much to hope that it'll achieve the same.
Miraculously, the internet restrictions that came into force just before the games started have been lifted - most people here resignedly thought that they'd be here to stay, now the journalists have left and no-one cares anymore. Wikipedia is available, as are some of the UK news sites that were blocked. No doubt information on Tibet and religious groups is still censored - I haven't searched for them, and the "Chinese Wikipedia" is still blocked. Thankfully the censors still don't know about, or just believe most people don't know about, anonymous proxy servers. Probably the latter, if people understand proxies properly they can most likely find a way around most barriers the government can put up.

Anyway, that's all fine an' all - but the important news is that I can play Final Fantasy XI Online again. Well, kinda. Just in time for the Olympics there came an announcement from Square-Enix that they would begin to block access from 'certain access points'. So now I can't anymore, at least from home. I'm limited to hour-long sessions playing on a laptop from the local Starbucks, which as any MMORPG palyer will tell you, isn't fun.
I don't know how Starbucks, which uses the same ISP as me, has avoided being blocked. I assume its run through a different group of net addresses that escaped the Squeenix block. So the only question is: How do I get me some of that?
I see I'm not the only one - I see a lot of howling from US servicemen stationed in Korea that they've been blocked too. Not that we've ever seen Korean RMTs - it doesn't make much economic sense for them, in the same way it doesn't for people in the US. That doesn't make me feel any better though.

The question is, how long do I keep paying for a service that they're trying to stop me using? The obvious answer is "Not another minute", but I can't bring myself to cancel my 5,000+ hours just yet. Another important question is, since Squeenix has another next-gen MMORPG in the pipeline: Why would I even start playing it, given that they'd possibly cut people off without warning again?

The bottom line is that SE can do what they want, they can cut off any region they want, and in this case they probably solve some of their headaches, without affecting a significant proportion of their playerbase. But its an ugly and blunt solution, as well as a short-term one. Judging by my fellow fishermen on the Selbina Ferry, Fdgajfg and Xiaopigu, the RMTs have already set up their proxies. So the question is, which is the next part of the world to be banned?