U.S. Embassy

On the eve of student demonstrations planned for Monday, Iran choked off Internet access and warned journalists working for foreign media to stick to their offices for the next three days.

The measures were aimed at depriving the opposition of its key means of mobilizing the masses as Iran's clerical rulers keep a tight lid on dissent. Government opponents are seeking, nonetheless, to get large numbers of demonstrators to turn out Monday and show their movement still has momentum.

Hamid Dabashi at CNN:

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.

China is sticking to its planned launch of a controversial Internet censoring software in about one week, an official newspaper said Tuesday, despite Washington's concerns over the move's possible impact on trade and access to information.

The China Daily said the plan to require the Web-filtering Green Dam Youth Escort software on all personal computers sold in China starting July 1 remains unchanged, citing an unnamed source from the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology. It is to be pre-installed or included on a compact disc with all PCs sold in China.

U.S. diplomats on Thursday "tweeted" down false rumors they feared might lead to a siege on the American Embassy in Madagascar.

State Department officials turned to Twitter feeds after dubious claims appeared on the micoblogging network that Madagascar's newly ousted president, Marc Ravalomanana, had sought refuge inside the U.S. Embassy in Antananarivo, the Indian Ocean island's capital.

The top Republican on the House intelligence committee landed in hot water this week after using his Twitter page to update the public on his precise whereabouts while traveling through Iraq and Afghanistan.

The revelation prompted the Pentagon to review its policy, which regards such information as sensitive, and lit up the liberal blogosphere with accusations of hypocrisy.

Rep. Pete Hoekstra says he did nothing wrong. He pointed to announcements by other high-ranking officials, including House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, which list the countries they plan to visit.

When Egyptian police scooped up University of California, Berkeley, graduate journalism student James Karl Buck, who was photographing a noisy demonstration, and dumped him in a jail cell last week, they didn't count on Twitter.

Buck, 29, a former Oakland Tribune multimedia intern, used the ubiquitous short messaging service to tap out a single word on his cellular phone: ARRESTED.