Chinese Internet: FTW or FAIL?

I tried to google "freedom toast" this morning and was stopped by the Great Firewall.  Apparently they have no tolerance for quasi-politically correct breakfast foods.  I decided that this is a good time to address the limitations of my internet connection in China.

Proxy servers

There are many proxy servers that work here, the main one being HotSpot Shield.  Unfortunately this does not work for Macs and will probably be the only moment that I wish I had a PC.  It's only a fleeting thought though and I immediately go back to being a Mac fanatic.

I use a proxy server and a web-based proxy server to access Blogger and Facebook, although I cannot post anything or interact with Facebook in any way.  It's pretty annoying, but has forced me to email people a lot more often than just doing the random 1-3 sentence post on walls.  This is a big plus, I guess, because email is much more thoughtful and personal than a Facebook message.

Blocked Sites

So how do I know if something is being blocked from me because of the Firewall?  Basically, when I try to load a website, my browser gives me the error message that says "Page has taken too long to load" even though it had only taken one or two seconds to get to that page.  Alternately, the website just never fully loads and the browser stays in the thinking position for a while.

Google images is interesting because sometimes the thumbnails show up, and other times they don't.  Then there's also the possibility of when you click on a thumbnail that you want to see, you'll get the browser error message.  This used to happen to Flickr two years ago, but that issue seems to have been resolved. 

The list of blocked sites

- Facebook
- Youtube
- Blogger (anything .blogspot.com)
- Google's Picasa
- Google image search
- sometimes Gmail goes out for a few hours, but is usually restored within the day.  This has only happened once this time.
- and growing...