It’s sometimes easy to believe that the internet is free and open for everyone. Open your browser, type in a URL and find the content you are looking for. But the whole world does not experience the internet the way we do.
Flow recently supported a client on a Chinese trip. We were tasked with producing a video and getting it to our client in China. At 250MB the large video file could not be emailed, so we used Google Drive to upload the video and then share the link with our client. After four hours of uploading (our ADSL upstream bandwidth is about 50Kbps), we discovered that our client couldn’t download the file because China blocks Google Drive.
No problem, we thought, let’s copy the file to another of our hosted servers that is not blocked by the Great Firewall of China (GFC). Unfortunately, Google does not allow direct share links to download files on Google Drive, and despite repeated attempts we couldn’t use any command line tools to copy the file from Google Drive to our Rackspace server in the USA. (We tried the linux commands wget, curl and lynx, with various cookie methods.)
Eventually, we spun up a full desktop version of Ubuntu Linux 12.04 on Rackspace, used a remote desktop screen-sharing tool to log into the server, downloaded the file from Google and then served it via a website address. Once the file was transferred, we simply deleted the Rackspace server instance – it cost less than $1 in hosting fees to do this.
On reflection, we could have used simpler ways to get around the GFC. One way is to use an encrypted VPN connection, such as http://www.strongvpn.com, and “pretend” that you are using the internet from another location, such as the UK or the USA. A VPN enables you to run your internet connection as if you were living in the UK or USA, for example. (Some people use VPNs to watch the BBC coverage of the 2012 Olympics, which is blocked for anyone outside of the UK – not something SuperSport or the SABC would be happy about!)
A second issue we had was with our websites not functioning correctly behind the firewall. Facebook, Twitter and YouTube widgets are blocked by the GFC. Every time a page loads, it stalls at the point when it tries to make calls to these widgets to load.
If your website has a significant Chinese audience, it’s important to make adjustments to either exclude this functionality for the region or use self-hosted solutions (e.g. serve your own video files rather than using YouTube).
This experience has challenged our assumptions about connectivity and access to information. When developing and testing sites, you rarely consider that the content could be blocked by a third-party firewall, let alone an entire country. In the coming months we will look at methods for our websites to respond appropriately when functionality is blocked.