ZoltanTheBold - 5:40 pm on Jun 14, 2006 (gmt 0)

rbacal

...before you give this kind of advice, has it occurred to you that the Chinese government may interpret the use of such tools as criminal?

I'm not his mother. If he is being sent to a .cn domain because of autodetect of his geographical location the software will mask this. There's documentation on the site covering what you've talked about. Making someone aware of a potentially useful piece of software (that's easy to uninstall) is perfectly reasonable. If you're asking me to think for him, why would I? I'm sure he's got a better grasp of what constitutes criminal behaviour in China than either of us.

I know you probably will do anything to get in a dig at google, or help people defeat their procedures...

I'm very flattered you think I can help people beat Google's "procedures", but the procedure in question is probably based on autodetect code - and it ain't rocket science. There are many anonymizer type products out there that help with this very problem, many of them open source with plenty of documentation so you know what you're up to.

And the issue in question is probably more to do with the Chinese govs "procedures" than Google's, after all, they're just doing what they're told by their communist masters. If the guy wants to use google.com and something is preventing him then I'm happy to offer advice. He's free to ignore it.