Chinese government

When China's authoritarian leaders are on top of their game, they can make awesome feats look breathlessly easy, lacing the coasts with bullet trains, throwing up vast airports seemingly overnight, plopping scores of power plants on the landscape like some giant farmer setting out rice shoots.

When they are off their game, it becomes apparent that managing a billion-plus people is not easy at all, even with near-absolute power.

The Chinese manufacturer of Internet-filtering software that must be distributed with all new computers next week has received death threats, state media said Wednesday.

Workers at Jinhui Computer System Engineering Co. received more than 1,000 harassing phone calls this month, according to Zhang Chenmin, the general manager of the company. He said personal information of some of the programmers had been leaked online, and one caller threatened to kill his wife and child.

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.

Facing a barrage of international criticism, the Chinese government is apparently backing down from its earlier announcement that all PCs sold in the country must have censoring software installed.

According to an anonymous official in the government's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT), it's "misleading" to say that China is requiring PC owners to use the software.

In its ongoing effort to regulate citizen access to Internet content, China has announced that all new computers sold in the country will be required to have preinstalled filtering software known as Green Dam-Youth Escort.

Personal computers sold in China will have to include blocking software, beginning July 1. The directive from the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology in Beijing has gone to manufacturers, but hasn't been made public.

The directive aims to block users from specific sites and content, including pornography, according to Jinhui Computer Systems Engineering, the software maker. But foreign industry officials who viewed the software told The Wall Street Journal the move will give the Chinese government even more control over what users are viewing on the Internet.

Personal computers sold in China will have to include blocking software, beginning July 1. The directive from the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology in Beijing has gone to manufacturers, but hasn't been made public.

The directive aims to block users from specific sites and content, including pornography, according to Jinhui Computer Systems Engineering, the software maker. But foreign industry officials who viewed the software told The Wall Street Journal the move will give the Chinese government even more control over what users are viewing on the Internet.

Global mobile handset sales fell 9.4 percent year on year to 269.1 million units in the first quarter, even as smartphone sales rose 12.7 percent to 36.4 million units, according to Gartner.

Overall, the mobile-device market recorded its biggest quarter-to-quarter contraction since the research firm began monitoring the market on a quarterly basis in 2001, said Gartner Research Director Carolina Milanesi. "This was also the first time the market contracted year over year during the first quarter, a period traditionally helped by strong seasonality in the Asia/Pacific market," she said.

For old-fashioned detectives, the problem was always acquiring information. For the modern cybersleuth, hunting evidence in the data tangle of the Internet, the problem is different.

"The holy grail is how can you distinguish between information which is garbage and information which is valuable?" said Rafal Rohozinski, a social scientist trained at the University of Cambridge and involved in computer security issues.

China denied media reports that hackers in the country breached a U.S. jet fighter program two years ago, calling the allegations Thursday "irresponsible" and "made up."

Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Jiang Yu said China was resolutely opposed to and has cracked down on cyber crimes, including hacking.

The Wall Street Journal, which first reported the breach, cited unnamed former U.S. officials as saying the attacks appeared to have originated in China.