Travel in China

[malch]

I am currently traveling in China and for the past two weeks have suffered from horrible Internet connectivity. Obviously, a lot of social networking sites are censored in China but I don't much care for Twitter, Facebook et al. However, many other sites have Facebook/Twitter widgets and the blocking takes a serious toll on those page load times. DNS lookups are slow and unreliable -- it seems like port 53 is blocked for many seconds every minute.

Anyway, today, right before I head back home, I solved all of those problems.

The solution is Sonic.Net's VPN service. See:

http://www.sonic.net/features/vpn/

Yikes, it makes everything here work just great.

I am posting this to say two things:

1. Thank you Sonic for a wonderful value added service.

2. If you plan on traveling to China specifically (and maybe some other countries too) keep in mind Sonic VPN and don't wait until right before your return flight as I did!

[virtualmike]

I use Sonic.net VPN all the time. Not only for better security in my connections and dealing with firewalls that block specific sites or ports, but also to give the appearance I'm in the Bay Area for services that really want me to be at home.

For people who are concerned whether their favorite sites will be available while they are traveling, consider using herdict.org. This site crowdsources accessibility reports from people reporting throughout the world.

[malch]

Yes, now that I have the VPN client installed on my laptop and appreciate just how simple this is... I'll be using a great deal more. I see no reason not to use it anytime I'm away from home (e.g. at a Starbucks hotspot or whatever).