it's not blocked by the firewall. i'm in china and i can load openai's website and chatgpt just fine. openai just blocks me from accessing chatgpt or signing up for an account unless i use a VPN and US based phone number for signup

as in, if i open chat.openai.com in my browser without a VPN, from behind the firewall, i get an openai error message that says "Unable to load site" with the openai logo on screen

if the firewall blocks something the page just doesn't load at all and the connection times out