Tiananmen Square

When Shanghai blogger Isaac Mao tried to watch a YouTube clip of Chinese police beating Tibetans, all he got was an error message.

Mao thought the error -- just after the one-year anniversary of a crackdown on Tibetan protesters in China -- was too suspicious to be coincidental, so he reported it on a new Harvard-based Web site that tracks online censorship.

Chinese Web surfers are being asked to stay off the Internet on July 1 to protest the Chinese government's demand that blocking software Green Dam Youth Escort be installed on all PCs sold in China.

That is the date the software filter sold by Jinhui Computer System Engineering is due to debut. All PCs sold in China on and after this date must have the software. It's also the anniversary date of the founding of the Communist Party in China.

Joshua Tucker over at The Monkey Cage:As developments proceed in the next few days, I would keep a close eye on the following:1) Will the planned recount go ahead, and or will Mousavi succeed in forcing a revote? While the latter still seems very unlikely, it would be an extremely significant development, demonstrating that the position of Khamenei is much weaker than we thought only a few days ago.

Microsoft's new "decision engine" Bing may help users get through clutter on the Internet to make better decisions, but officials in China have made it clear that the software behemoth has failed at one decision: to make snippets of sexually explicit material available in search results.

Bing includes a small video-preview feature called smart motion preview, which plays videos when a user navigates over it. The feature, while convenient for some, has landed Microsoft in hot water with some child-advocacy groups, including Virginia-based Enough is Enough.