Pasden Under Attack!

I got my dad his own domain for his birthday this year. Pasden.com, all his, to do whatever he pleased with. It could be a beautiful shining beacon to Pasdens everywhere. It still might be, but he hasn’t actually launched it. Until then, the world waits….

I check up on it every now and then to see if there are any changes, but there’s nothing up yet. You can imagine my surprise, then, when I checked again recently to discover that the page wouldn’t load. Immediately I doubted my decision to go with a domain forwarding service. You see, you can pay a much lower yearly fee to just have the domain name forwarded to another URL. Thus, when you type “www.pasden.com” into your browser, you are actually viewing the contents of www.sinosplice.com/~pasden/. I also paid for masking, so even though you’re viewing the contents at www.sinosplice.com/~pasden/, your browser tells you you are at pasden.com. Cool, eh?

But it wasn’t working anymore! I was pissed. It had just been working fine a few weeks before. I fired off an e-mail to the company demanding the reason why the service I had paid good money for was no longer being provided. They responded in a timely manner politely informing me that according to their systems the forwarding is still working perfectly.

Huh? Oh no… could it be???

I went to @nonymouse and put in pasden.com. It loaded up fine.

The inescapable conclusion? China is blocking PASDEN.COM!

I am mystified. I had thought the government was getting laxer and laxer about internet censorship, but evidently this was one dissident site they could not allow to slip by unnoticed.

Yes, that was sarcasm. I suppose it’s a part of some IP grouping that was blanket-banned or something. Annoying. But as long as Sinosplice is OK I suppose I won’t have to hurt anyone…