I’m finally unbanned in China!

In case you were curious why there have been almost no updates since August, 80 percent of Chinese ISPs chose to ban cinnamonpirate.com.

I think this deserves more explanation.

They did not ban the domain or the IP; you can tell if a page is banned at the national or the ISP level based on whether you can access other IPs on the network. Moreover, you could still access byuu.cinnamonpirate.com and vstech.net, the Web site of my web space provider. However, if you opened cinnamonpirate.com, all of these domains would be banned for the next 20 minutes, and only on port 80 connections.

Meanwhile, Internet café users across the street seem to have no difficulty accessing all-night transsexual erotica web-cams. “What you say?”

After trial and error, my host and I learned the ban was auto-generated on page load. The first test was to remove index.php and have the domain kick out its default RedHat Linux Server test page. This viewed fine with no ban. Bringing back index.php restored the ban. Next I tested /wp-admin/. Again, no ban. Using the back end, I changed to the default WordPress template.

… No ban.

This means Chinese ISPs banned my Web site because of the design, not because of the content. The whole ordeal has reaffirmed my belief computers will never replace human thinking, because if they do, the world will explode.