Alexander's

Like so many other airports Beijing airport has free WiFi internet access.

I found this a bit surprising, since China has quite restrictive internet rules. Generally the government is not satisfied by simply blocking some sites. They want to make sure that they can track who is doing what.

That’s why they need identification.

Too bad that at the time of our transfer -- way after midnight -- there were very few airport personnel working anymore. But like a gentle mother the Chinese authorities did even think of this. They provide these -- only slightly suspicious looking -- machines that promise the great wonder of instant internet access for a simple scan of one's passport.

After a week of roaming through the emerald green mountains of Taiwan -- in absence of my daily internet-fix[^1] -- there was no question. Without a moments hesitation I pushed my passport deep into the slit for the documents, pushed the onscreen button and listened to the sound of an old scanner doing its work.

A popup dialog, explaining in Chinese that the machine had just saved a 4MB file of my passport, left a slight feeling of identity theft in my mouth. This feeling grew even stronger when I noticed that step 3 -- get the internet access code -- was not working.

The only working steps were:

1. choose language and
2. scan the passport
3. there is no (working) step 3

Not willing to give up that easily I decided to try again -- same result. Also switching to another language didn't help at all.

Maybe, I thought, it’s because I still have an old passport that sometimes makes problems when machine reading it.

Sadly no one in my family was willing to borrow me their passport to repeat this surely harmless experiment.

This blogpost was written on my way home from our honeymoon in Taiwan. So it's a bit dated already.

[^1]: For some strange reason Ting was really against me spending half the time in front of the computer