Don't freak out guys, but yes, Astrill is temporarily down

I'm flying tonight and I have much to do and really shouldn't be wasting my time with frivolous blogging, but I couldn't resist commenting on the whole Astrill being down debacle which has caused much drama within the internet community.

As heavy internet users ensconced within the Great Firewall of China, we know that VPN proxies are our lifeline and our ticket to surfing important sites like twitter, facebook, blogger(!) and well, google. It means the difference between a frustrating day of work with slow google search results or a frustrating day of work with unusable google. I've personally tried (and paid for) about five different VPN providers, Astrill is thus far the best and the most popular here (being aware of its most desperate and lucrative market, Astrill also has several dedicated proxies for China).

Hence the response when Astrill was down yesterday was, as to be expected, caused no few waves in the community. Several desperate users switched immediately, and within hours, a post hilariously and aptly titled 'Don't freak out guys, but yes, Astrill is temporarily down' post was up on shanghaiist.com. With appropriate tags 'ASTRILL, DOWN, NOOOO'.

Commenters were understanding and serene. Like a comment left by 'Calm&rational':

and others that brought in higher powers:

It was, in fact, the first thing my teammates said to me when I woke up in the morning ('Astrill is down!'). Several demanding emails were sent out to support just from our little group. YH, being a savvy and meticulous Android programmer, dug out about six email addresses from the Astrill team and bombed all of them frustration. Today they had their revenge; she received about twenty emails saying that Astrill is up again. 

I just found the entire episode hilarious but also illuminating; after all I had to admit that the idea of not having this option frightening and would have been the trigger, more so than smog of 500+ PSI to leave this great country (and I do mean that respectfully!). Over the last year I've realised the difference in having free access to information, if only in terms of work quality and productivity. 

In any case I actually think that Astrill still ranks among the best providers of much needed VPN, and may the higher powers ensure continued uptime!

The Beijing Dystopia

PSI has been terrible the last week - I think 'official' figures put it slightly above 400. The lack of food forced me out a couple of nights ago and I was thinking rather gloomily as I waded through the haze that this is like one of those futuristic sci-fi dystopias that I used to read. Life is lived indoors with filtered air, and the dangerous Outside is ventured only rarely and from necessity in some sort of suit. I can still smell the smoke through the mask, there's blackened stuff coming out from my nose and my lungs when I sneeze and I would buy clean air somewhere if I could, but I can't. And I think, we're very very close. We just don't face up to how close. Life just changes, slowly, gradually, and habits along with it - until unknowingly we reach that point, and discover that previous literature had been right. I don't read dystopian sci-fi here - I find it eerily close to the situation, and a little depressing.

The problem is that many developed cities have followed such a trajectory; London and smog post industrial revolution, Japan in the 1960s, Hong Kong, America (whose continental colonisation also led to the systematic extinction of several large flightless birds and mammals, which we could have domesticated today). We don't have a great track record of improving the human civilisation in general. Just that China, with her sheer population size, multiples everything by several factors. The frightening thing is that this is just the beginning. China had the largest absolute CO2 emissions in 2012 with 7.1 tons per capita and is now responsible for a quarter of the world's emissions. America's emissions on a per capita basis was more than twice that, at 16.4 tons. Even environmentally conscious OECD countries generally have > 10, with the exception of shining Sweden, which holds a sterling example at about 7.9.

China has more than 4 times the population size (of the US), and the brain automatically avoid India, Brazil, and other rising stars of tomorrow. Looking up at the sky and multiplying by, say 8 can give one a slightly more urgent view of the situation. Whatever is to be done, some haste would be nice. Being a frog in a pot is not a great feeling, even with reassurances that the fire would be quenched at some point soonish, after a decision is made soonish, when the frog is only lightly steamed.

And this is my frustration with Singapore and how small I feel when I'm back, and how small minded we are as a collective whole on what we choose to care about. But this blog entry has gone on for long enough and this shall be musing for another time.

Meanwhile back to work! Amazon cloudfront + s3 today, amazon cloud has come to China yay. And I shall live another day to make my own little contribution to environmental pollution.


Readable links:
http://www.carbonbrief.org/blog/2013/11/2012s-carbon-emissions-in-five-graphs/
http://thebreakthrough.org/archive/which_nations_have_reduced_car
http://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/interactive/2013/jul/16/carbon-emissions-carbon-tax