THE Lowly Peon

Education and China's Paranoia 
09 March 2010, 4:58am

I just had a great idea. Why not get some good, high quality NOVA or PBS type specials downloaded to my iPhone periodically, for free, as podcasts? That way, when I'm on the bus, I could learn about something interesting and beautiful.

After a few quick searches, I learned the NOVA podcast only shows snippets of the episode, much like a preview, to encourage you to buy the full episode (which I'm considering).

I did another search for Terra, and read great reviews of their content on iTunes U, the educational portion of the iTunes store. You can see details at www.lifeonterra.com; the show is about nature (even titled "TERRA: The Nature of Our World").

I went to check it out, excited to learn about interesting stuff, and found that every episode couldn't be downloaded. I turned on VPN, a service I use to get around the "great firewall of China", which allows me access to the internet via some server in Michigan, and the videos work fine.

Could it really be true? China blocks educational TV too? TV about the Earth? Politics I can understand. But nature?