HAIRCUT DAY: A barber shaves a boy's head in a kindergarten in Shandong Province on March 13, the second day of the second month of the lunar calendar. The "dragon raising head" day is auspicious for haircuts (SHEN JIZHONG)

Integrated Mapping

China will build up an integrated mapping system to cover the ground, underground, sea, air and outer space by 2020, said a senior official of the national surveying and mapping authority.

The system, when completed, will facilitate the country's economic development, national defense and government decision-making, Li Pengde, Deputy Director of the National Administration of Surveying, Mapping and Geoinformation, told Xinhua News Agency on March 11.

The system will also provide spatial positioning information conducive to coping with emergencies and providing people with convenience.

For this purpose, Li said, the system will adopt new-generation equipment and technologies, including surveying vehicles and vessels, medium- and low-altitude remote sensing mapping platforms, aerospace mapping satellites and underground measuring robots.

Rating Web Games

Chinese parents are in grave need of an age-rating system for online games to protect their children, according to a study report issued by the government news portal www.youth.cn on March 9.

The country still does not have a unified content-rating system for the online games industry, which relies on individual games developers to classify their own products into suitability-related groups.

Based on its own standard, the report found that 78.5 percent of the games should be restricted to adult players above 18, while only 2 percent were appropriate for children above 6.

However, about 80 percent of China's more than 564 million Internet users are minors, who definitely need more child- and teen-friendly games, according to the report.

China's online gaming industry took in revenue worth 24.84 billion yuan ($4 billion) in the first half of 2012.

Cyber Threat

China's Internet security watchdog said on March 10 that a growing number of Chinese public institutions and companies have been threatened by cyberattacks from other countries or regions.

The news portal China.com.cn, people.com.cn and Tibet.cn have all been victims of attacks from foreign Internet Protocol (IP) addresses in the past two months, according to a report issued by the National Computer Network Emergency Response Technical Team Coordination Center.

A total of 85 websites of public institutions and companies were hacked from September 2012 to February 2013, including government agencies, a provincial examination authority, a property insurance company and a virus research facility in central China, according to the report.

It noted that attacks on 39 of those websites were recorded from IPs within the United States.

From November 2012 to January 2013, the China National Vulnerability Database also recorded 5,792 hacking attempts from U.S. IP addresses, said the report.

Moreover, in the past two months, 6,747 overseas servers were found to use trojans or botnets to control nearly 1.9 million mainframes in China, and 2,194 of these servers were located in the United States, making it the largest point of origin for cyber attacks against China, said the report.