My undergrads were supposed to have their mid-term today, online, like I usually do it. The page with the exam opened up at 10 AM but five minutes later it all crashed. My first thought was that the database on the server had been overloaded by too many users — RAM on the server is a bit low — but there was no way for me to restart it. There was in fact no way to reach my web pages at all. Checking with friends outside of the country I realized that the pages worked perfectly in the rest of the world. Oh oh, the Chinese censors had struck again!

It must have been all those questions I had about Taiwan, democracy, nationalism, legitimacy and revolution. I bet the censorship filter picked up these keywords when 25 students in the same place at the same time started asking for the same pages. Access to my site was down for the rest of the day. Poor kids, sitting by their computers not knowing what had happened.

I had to change IP address in the end. It went smoothly and now everything should be OK. Until the next time I ask my students to provide an answer to the question: “What is it that makes a government legitimate?”

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