Daily News Channel
China’s last-minute decision to postpone a controversial content-filtering application on computers sold there is the latest example of the trouble that Western technology companies face doing business in the world’s fastest growing economy.
China on Tuesday announced it would indefinitely postpone a mandate requiring all personal computers sold in the country to be accompanied by a controversial content-filtering application, state media reported. The announcement came one day before a government-set deadline that would have required the software, called Green Dam-Youth Escort, to come with all PCs, according to the official Xinhua news agency. The Chinese government has said the software is chiefly a way for parents to protect children from pornography.
How do you sell a feminine hygiene product nobody wants to talk about?
Two cable powerhouses have announced an ambitious pilot program that aims to convince their customers that, actually, TV on the web should not be free. With a service called TV Everywhere, Comcast and Time Warner will give cable subscribers access to “premium” television content via broadband, and later cellphone connections. To begin with, 5,000 Comcast subscribers will begin testing the system next month, giving them access to Time Warner’s TBS and TNT channels on their computers, and the same channels’ video-on-demand catalogs on their cable boxes.
Michael Jackson, the show-stopping singer whose best-selling albums — including "Off the Wall," "Thriller" and "Bad" — and electrifying stage presence made him one of the most popular artists of all time, died Wednesday, according to multiple sources, including the Los Angeles Times and The Associated Press. CNN has not confirmed this information. He was 50.
Simon Cowell, the acid-tongued producer of "American Idol" and "Britain’s Got Talent," is in talks with billionaire Philip Green about a new business venture, his representative said Thursday.
A blogger and Internet radio talk-show host in New Jersey was arrested Wednesday for allegedly threatening to kill three federal appeals court judges in Chicago, Illinois. Those strikes followed a major blast that killed 64 people and injured about 150 others at a Baghdad market early Wednesday and a deadly blast in the northern Iraqi city of Kirkuk on Saturday that killed 80 people. The Interior Ministry said seven deadly attacks hit Baghdad from Wednesday night into Thursday afternoon.
As a tense Tehran awoke Wednesday bracing for more protests, residents in the capital city and elsewhere said they were too afraid to talk about the political crisis over the phone. Residents, worried the government was monitoring phone conversations, said the Internet was the best way to transmit information about the unrest.
The Richard Nixon Presidential Library will allow access Tuesday to about 154 hours of Nixon White House tape recordings and 30,000 pages of documents that were formerly classified. Among the tapes and documents are conversations about the Vietnam War, Nixon’s second inauguration, the U.S.
Beijing’s Internet censors are on the rampage again. But this time the victims are not the country’s nearly 200 million surfers but one of the most-recognized names on the Web: Google. The search giant’s China operation, already struggling to compete with its domestic rivals, is the subject of a blistering and unprecedented wave of criticism by China’s official media, who have singled it out as having far more links to pornographic websites than its competitors.