Hide & seek

One of the few summer days in the past week it was worth to enjoy the sun, a walk for me, a game with friends for.. them:

This sort of macro picture cannot give the idea of the dimension of those ants! They were huge!! But usually there is so much garbage around that I guess they got enough to eat..

Flickr’s back!

All this green is a good sight! For many weeks now I had 2 red scary bad cross in the Farm4 fields indicating that the traffic from one of Flickr server farms was blocked by my provider, both at work and home.

I raised the problem in the Flickr FAQ pages, and got an extremely good suggestion from another foreigner in Chinese land, Markus,  ie. on the same side of the GFC (Great Firewall of China): change the hosts file in order to force the browser to take “another route” for opening the farm servers.

The only problem was that apparently the “anti-virus” at work was assuming the change as caused by a virus and force the system to not see it! The anti-virus is a famous Chinese one called Qihoo 360 Safe (安全), that has no manual or info in English (it is the most used anti-virus in China and among Chinese people around, but apparently the makers are not interested in trying to get an international market). Quite funny that if one googles “360 antivirus” it appears that there was actually a virus called like this! And there are a few stories about the antivirus itself..

Similarly, at home, I am also not so sure the hosts files worked as they were supposed to do, but the behavior was not constant (I do not use 360 at home but a much better product with documentation in English!). After several days trying and trying more, today the problem seems to have disappeared. Too good to be true!

I have some posts on standby because I could not see the pictures I wanted to include.. old stuff.. old stories.. that I want to finish!

Anyway, Internet has become more unstable lately and at least from work, but not only, google pages and other blog related are often messy to open properly. According to soem friends of mine it’s all due to the soon to come anniversary of 90 years of the Chinese Communist Party. This is probably the reason there are more limitation by internet and not only: in order to buy fast train tickets now you must show the passport at the ticket counter! The timing is just too perfect for not being related to the anniversary!!