Today, to my great delight the the debian mirror server resurrected. Not only does it have debian mirrors, but also stores other popular distributions such as Ubuntu, Fedora, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, gentto and Archlinux.

The header.txt file in the root directory of Debian CN99 indicates the mirror server is now taken care of by one of the biggest Internet portal site in China: netease.com, which is also known as 163.com. The header.txt says:

Welcome to Open source projects Archive on 163(aka netease.com)
Mirror access is available at

http://mirrors.163.com/

Please email to mirror@service.netease.com for suggestions and/or questions.

This means debianers now can use http://mirrors.163.com/ as an alternative address to do apt-get.

With a giant Internet cooperation — 163.com — sponsoring the mirror server, I am reasonably expecting it to serve the community in a long period of time to come.

Right now I am using a AMD Tbird 1300 MHz CPU and 512MB memory, a configuration which makes the responsiveness of the system my main concern. I noticed an older version of AVG Free used more system resources than it should, so I decided to give ESS (ESET Smart Security) a try yesterday. But it blocked my Internet connection even after I completely disabled its firewall. It was kicked out of my system within an hour.

Reminiscing of the good old Nod32 version 2.7, I am thinking giving Nod32 antivirus 3.0 a try again. But the question is: is the already famous Nod32 uses less resource than AVG Free? If the answer is yes, it is certainly a big plus for me to make the switch. If not, I will stay with the latest version of AVG Free, which I have the obnoxious link scanner disabled. Both are good antivirus software, and both are well-know for its very small system footprint (AVG uses less than 30MB of memory). The question is, which one is even more efficient?

Can’t tell you the result now, but if you know the answer, please give your informed opinion. When I get the time to test and compare both programs, I will post the result here. So far, it seems AVG Free will stay. I am lazy and I don’t want to employ the tricks to make Nod32 free.

Update: Nod32 3.0 does use less resources compared to AVG Free 8.0 in my recent user experience. But AVG is free and powerful, so it is up to you to decide which one to use.

It took me a while to figure out why this pure technical, IT related site is blocked by the Great Fire Wall (GFW):

1. Sourceforge offers a free web space and a free sub-domain service (your-domain.sourceforge.net), and its vhost function can help redirect other domains to the web space in sourceforge. This makes sourceforge a possible host of the information the Department of Truth does not like.
2. It is said the Freenet is the main target of the blockage because it claims “to allow the free exchange of information over the Internet without fear of censorship, or reprisal”.
3. The most recent “offender” of Thought Crime is believed to be the text editor Notepad++. Many netizens believe the reason for the blocking is due to the negative stance taken by the Notepad++’s programmer towards the Olympic Games in Beijing. As a result, the whole Sourceforge became inaccessible from the Mainland China.

Then how to visit the blocked sourceforget.net? Here are a few options:

• Use Tor. It has an overall low bandwidth and the speed is very slow. Only viable for small traffic browsing.
• Use proxy servers such as Ibypass. But this bypass site and its affiliated sites are sometimes blocked as well.
• The perfect solution seems to be VPN (Virtual Private Network). The ideal situation would be someone setting up a VPN server in a different country and tunnel all your traffic through it.

There is a free VPN service called which is based on OpenVPN. It is very easy to install and use, and the speed is fast. It will automatically insert a top frame advertisement banner in web pages opened, but the ads do not bother me at all, and I can close the ad frame by a click.

If you know more tricks and tips on how to bypass the blocking, leave a comment.

Side Notes:

• After all, doesn’t the action to block say enough about the nature of the blocker?
  
• Today I had this thought that I was running out of topics to write about China, but now I realize that there are so many things to write about. I will post my experience at ticket lobby of the train station very soon.
  
• I didn’t provide a link to the GFW for obvious reasons. The omniscient Wikipedia.org will give you a clue.
  
• Unfortunately, I don’t have any luck with Freenet, because it seems too complicated to use.

This is the official web portal of the Chinese Central Government. It provides comprehensive information about Chinese government, including the state structure, its leadership, and links to the ministries. Non-residents can also find useful information about visa and travel on it.

2. China.org.cn

This site is hosted by the State Council Information Office of China. Although it is a news portal of the government, you may find its online Chinese learning programs useful. I recommend the interactive flash files of the Chinese idioms and ancient poems on this site.

3. Xinhua News Agency

You can consider this site as the “Voice of China”. It is the online news service of Xinhua News Agency, the official news agency of China. It has a worldwide information-gathering network and releases important news about China around the clock.

4. China Daily

This is the website of the official Chinadaily newspaper. It is the the largest English portal in China, consisting of three major sections: English Portal, World Online, and English Study. Its Citylife section deserves special attention.

5. CCTV

This is the site of CCTV (China Central Television), the predominant television network of China. Needless to say, this is the place to check out its TV schedules and watch the online video streaming. It will extensively cover 2008 Beijing Olympic Games.

And in China, a different sort of backlash has been taking shape — against the companies from countries that seem to be putting pressure on China. French companies like Carrefour are a particular target because of the mayhem during the Paris leg of the torch relay and because the French president has said he may skip the opening ceremony in Beijing over China’s human rights record.

Backlash: a strong and adverse reaction by a large number of people. Mayhem: disorder, chaos

“I think boycotting Carrefour is a peaceful and polite way to express our anger, our Chinese feelings got deeply hurt by France,” said Li Meng, a 25-year-old mechanic who is selling T-shirts in support of the boycott movement in the city of Yantai, in eastern China. “France humiliated China during the torch relay and keeps making trouble for the Olympics.”

Nay. Don’t mix the country with the people. It is better put in this way: “Some French” humiliated China. CCTV reported that Chinese journalists hadn’t received the treatment they expected in Paris. A journalist in a television interview said that the French Authority didn’t give the the Chinese journalists sufficient leeway and good camera positions to cover the torch relay. I am not sure what happened. Maybe those journalists were used to the preferential treatments at home, and they didn’t adjust their mentality well in abroad? Some photos available on the Internet showed that the French police force had no mercy towards the trouble-makers on the scene and arrested lots of them.

American brands like McDonald’s and KFC have also been named as targets of a boycott because some American politicians seem to be supporting the Dalai Lama, whom Beijing blames for instigating violence in Tibet to disrupt plans for the Olympics.

It is a false alarm. I haven’t heard anything about boycotting these two fast food companies at the moment. What happened in Tibet was violent riots. There is no doubt about. Many western media, while reports the number of deaths in the violence, failed to admit the rioters were guilty of killing innocent people. This made me realize how prejudiced the western media was in the matter.

No one knows whether there is widespread support for the boycotts, but the opposition comes at a time when many of the world’s biggest brands — including Coke — are expanding aggressively in China and planning huge sales and marketing campaigns to coincide with the Olympics.

No boycott at all for American companies as far as I know of this time. When the Chinese embassy was bombed in Yugoslavia, many Chinese boycotted these two companies, but I don’t think those people never went to McDonald’s afterwards.

Coca-Cola’s most recent quarterly results suggest the extent of its reliance on the Chinese market. During the first quarter, Coke’s unit case volume sales in China were up 20 percent in the quarter, one of the highest figures from any country. Over all, the company’s net income rose 19 percent in the quarter, to $1.5 billion, from $1.26 billion a year ago.

This sentence and the one above really explains it all. Coke is profiting handsomely in the Chinese market and will continue to do so, and only a fool will ruin this good business. Unit case volume sales: what is it? Anyone knows?

Neither Coca-Cola nor any of the other Olympic sponsors has flinched in its public support for the games, but the groups that are protesting China’s policies in Tibet and Darfur are vowing to step up their pressure. This could lead to showdowns, or even to a possible whipsaw for the companies if Chinese youths start protesting en masse in the other direction.

Flinch (its support): make a quick, nervous movement as an instinctive reaction to fear or pain. Whipsaw: a saw with a narrow blade and a handle at both ends, used typically by two people.

Ms. Tethong added, “You have influence, and you know you have influence. Please don’t hide behind a spin.”

Spin: when an idea or situation is expressed or described in a clever way that makes it seem better than it really is, especially in politics, e.g “They have tried to put a positive spin on the situation.” Source URL

QQ was known earlier as OICQ. It changed the name into QQ in 2001 because of its copyright infringement on AOL’s ICQ.

The discussion group and the resumable file transfer are the two distinctive features of QQ. The users can create and join discussion groups if they have a high user rank or pay some fee. QQ is also capable of transferring large files at a very high speed. If the file transfer is interrupted, it can be resumed upon reconnection.

Many critics of QQ, including myself, think it has grown cumbersome and resource hogging over the years. Even the most loyal QQ users are annoyed by its incessant flashy advertisements.

Some people began to modify QQ and released many so-called “optimized QQ”. Among the hacked versions of QQ, CoralQQ is the best known and the most popular. It is ad free, less resource hungry, and capable of showing the IP address and the location of the chat buddy.

In August 2007, the author of CorealQQ by the name of “Soff” was arrested on charge of violating the copyright of Tencent, the owner of QQ. A poll held by a Chinese portal site, however, shows that the predominant netizens are supportive of Soff rather than Tencent (96.3% vs 3.7%).