Flashes of Panic

I hadn’t given much thought to it until this weekend, but one of the consequences of taking this assignment—aside from the potential asthmatic effects I’ve been warned about—is that I’ll be behind the “Great Firewall of China”.

Given that I have a pretty narrow focus on what’s happening at the track, I can’t imagine myself sparking any political clashes with the Chinese government. If I can make it eight weeks in post-Soviet Russia without sparking an international incident, I can probably manage ten days in China, despite the doom and gloom in this New Zealand Press article Nicole links. But part of the nature of my job is to get stuff online in a hurry, and bitter experience in that area suggests to me that that can be hard enough in allegedly-less-authoritarian countries, simply due to technological challenges. What kind of logjam might be created by an artificially-imposed internet bottleneck?

Maybe not IAAF stuff, but how about posting photos on Flickr? Trying to get a secure (i.e. encrypted) email connection?

Heck, shelling in to a work server? Running an impromptu wireless network in my room? All relatively unthreatening things on the face of them (though an SSH connection can be used with port forwarding to bypass a firewall, and who knows what an unsecured network could be used for.) I doubt any of these things would be significant problems, but I wish I knew more.

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