There’s a new game in town. The screeching halt, 180 degree Politburo about-face has such a high degree of difficulty that the sport is rarely held – and never rehearsed – except during extremely important, internationally scrutinized public events. Like the run-up to the Beijing Olympics.

Which is why Chinese authorities today abruptly allowed access to previously blocked websites such as those of Amnesty International and Reporters Without Borders. This occured after the eruption of a bruising controversy when foreign media arriving to cover the Games were dismayed to discover they couldn’t reach dozens of sites related to sensitive groups such as the banned Falun Gong religious movement, Free Tibet activists, and other organizations critical of Beijing and its policies. Sites that host thousands of Chinese blogs have also been affected by the Net clampdown. (update: as of Saturday the Falungong and Free Tibet sites remained blocked, though other sensitive sites such as Amnesty's were still accessible in the Olympics media center.)

    Chinese citizens have lived with such Web interference for years, of course. But Chinese authorities and high-level IOC officials continually reassured the world in the run-up to the Olympics that IOC-accredited journalists covering the Games would not encounter Internet censorship. Once foreign journalists began squawking about blocked websites earlier this week, the it's-all-going-to-work-out-just-you-wait facade began to crack. IOC Press Commission head Kevan Gosper apologized for the Net hassles and said the IOC had "negotiated with the Chinese that some sensitive sites would be blocked on the basis that they were not considered Games-related." But early Friday morning Beijing time – VERY early, like around 1:00 AM – the IOC faxed around a press release saying that senior IOC figures were holding discussions with Chinese counterparts about the Web problems – and that “the IOC would like to stress that no deal with the Chinese authorities to censor the internet has ever in any way been entered into.” By Friday afternoon, sensitive sites began to open up.

OK, so now we’ve seen an IOC reversal and then Beijing’s backtracking. What other public-relations gymnastics are in store, with the Games opening ceremonies just a week away? At least China got a break on one unrelated front: the weather.  Suddenly after weeks of rain and cloud and murk, Beijing's skies suddenly cleared -- to the extent that that my colleague Jon Ansfield thinks Beijing should simply start the Olympics now, early, to take advantage of the glorious weather.  Enjoy it while you can – it may not last.

Which brings me back to China's Internet cops. In case you’re wondering if China’s loosening of Net restrictions are the beginning of the end to Web censorship here, my answer is: don’t dump those VPN’s and proxy servers just yet. In case the current relaxation doesn’t expand as hoped, here’s some info on navigating the Internet compiled by the Foreign Correspondent’s Club of China. (Full disclosure: I’m a former FCCC president and helped publish its recently released “Reporters’ Guide” with insider tips on how to deal with reporting challenges here on the ground):

Virtual Private Network (VPN). As the name suggests, these are secure, private networks that run through the public Internet. This gives them the benefit of bypassing China’s Internet monitoring and censorship systems. Many corporations use VPN systems to allow employees to access company e-mail remotely; if you work for one of them, you probably will not need other tools for accessing e-mail and blocked websites. For others, there are a number of off-the-shelf technologies that can easily create VPNs. For explanations of what a VPN is see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VPN or http://www.howstuffworks.com/vpn.htm

VPN software and services:

·Paid

  http://www.witopia.net/personalmore.html

  http://www.hotspotvpn.com/

  http://www.publicvpn.com/

·Free / advertising-supported

  http://anchorfree.com/downloads/hotspot-shield

Other tools for private/secure Internet access

· Gladder (an add-on for the Firefox browser)

      https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/2864

·Tor

  http://www.torproject.org/index.html.en

·Psiphon

  http://psiphon.civisec.org/

· Anonymizer

 http://www.anonymizer.com/

·Proxify

  https://proxify.com/ 

Secure email 

·Web e-mail

   Gmail. Accessing gmail via https:, rather than the usual http: connection creates a secure connection for e-mail, and should be your default option. The added "s" means secure.

* https://mail.google.com/mail/

   Hushmail. A service offering web-based email encrypted with PGP technology (see below).

* https://www.hushmail.com/

·PGP email. The open-source standard Pretty Good Privacy allows for high-level encryption of e-mail sent through standard desktop e-mail software. This prevents anyone intercepting the e-mail from being able to read it.

  Explanations

* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pretty_Good_Privacy

* Phil Zimmerman, inventor of PGP: http://www.philzimmermann.com/EN/background/index.html

  Software

* http://www.pgpi.org/

* http://www.gnupg.org/

* http://www.winpt.org/