Yes, You Can Log Into Second Life from Mainland China

Since landing in China late last week, I've been wondering if I'd be able to access Second Life through the Great Firewall, especially since concerns have been raised that it might even be impossible, but now I know you can: Above, is my laptop logged into SL from my hotel in Shanghai. (That's the Bund in the background, by the way.) Lag was pretty bad, to be sure, but not drastically more than what I often experience in San Francisco. It's possible that a VPN account is needed to access SL, but I'm not quite sure; will experiment with various log-in methods. And yes, I'm posing next to a woman in a bridal outfit, because she's the first avatar I saw after logging in.

Actually, the first avatar I saw was a buck naked woman hovering in mid-air, and I guess I could have took a screenshot of that, but you know, why push your luck?

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Comments

[Orca Flotta]

Congratz for your successful login to SL, Hamlet.

But why did it take you since "late last week" until today to finally try it out? Real SL residents would have tried it right the first evening. Some SL blogger you are :/

Furthermore what you decribe as lag is probably just long latency caused by physical reasons, namely the long long, ultralong fibercable from China to America and the fact that hotel wifi usually isn't very good anyway and you have no option to plug into a router from your room.

/me giggles a bitchly harr harr

[Hamlet Au]

I actually took this photo last Friday, which was the first chance I had to log in, and am only blogging about it now. That's not made clear in the post, yes, but I don't see much value in defining who and who isn't a "Real SL resident" based on time criterion like that.

[Orca Flotta]

LOL
Hammie, there's no need to explain yourself to a much loathed troll like Orca. Particularly when she has one of her silly days.

[GoSpeed Racer]

I've seen SL users from China listening into KONA Stream for the past few years.

[mousebi]

actually you can log in from china since 2007.
alot of av from china logging in since 2007 hanging out in ' china sim for ages ...
what do you mean you can't access from china?? so strange !

[mk]

people outside china have a very strange view of what china is like, as if no one over there can see websites outside.

whenever i go there i can access all the news sources like CNN, BBC, etc.

the fact is there are so many chinese websites (and so few chinese speak who any language but chinese and their local dialect) that the mainland users tend not to go out of their own sphere.

saying that, viewing outside sites is sometimes slow, prolly because they are filtered.