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The company says it first noticed traffic from China had decreased dramatically a week ago. A day later, it had dropped to nearly zero. "We don’t know the reason for the block," a YouTube spokesman, Scott Rubin, said. "Our government relations people are trying to resolve it." Coincidentally (or not) on the day the blocking started the Chinese government said a video showing police beating a Tibetan protester to death was a fake concocted by supporters of the Dalai Lama. Stopping the internet?

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Hughes is a technology star whose business is people. He has been plowing what he observes about human behavior into online systems that help real people do what they want to do in their real lives. He helped develop the most robust set of Web-based social-networking tools ever used in a political campaign, enabling energized citizens to turn themselves into activists, long before a single human field staffer arrived to show them how.

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The event was the latest example of efforts by the Obama team to replicate its creative use of the internet during the election campaign. "This is an experiment, but its also an exciting opportunity for me to look at a computer and get a snapshot of what Americans across the country care about," the president declares, adding, "So, America, what do you want to know about the economy? Just go to Whitehouse.gov and ask." The trial run of Open for Questions in the White House wrapped up with more t

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But at a time when many news executives are exploring nonprofit business models to keep specialized reporting flowing, GlobalPost, is intended to be a moneymaking venture. With 65 correspondents worldwide — drawn from a surfeit of experienced reporters eager to continue working in their specialties even as potential employers disappear — GlobalPost has begun offering a mix of news and features that only a handful of other news organizations can rival. "Worldfocus" weeknight newscast features re

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As flattering as that notion may sound, it rankles Venky Harinarayan and Anand Rajaraman, the co-founders of Kosmix. And that’s not because other start-ups making similar assertions have fallen laughably short of the mark. It’s because Kosmix is trying to do something that is quite different from traditional web search. Think more organization engine than search engine.

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The Microsoft CEO quickly jumped in to correct that impression, alluding to recent data showing Apple's growth taking a hit (along with pretty much everything in the world thanks to the global slowdown). And then he said something that could singlehandedly refan the flames of Mac vs. PC rivalry. "Apple gained about one point, but now I think the tide has really turned back the other direction," Ballmer said, via webcast. "The economy is helpful. Paying an extra $500 more for a computer to get a

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And today, Microsoft let loose the full edition of the software's latest incarnation - Internet Explorer 8 - after a year of having a beta test version out in the wild. Microsoft's new browser comes at the end of a month where its competitors also revealed a slew of updated test versions: chiefly Apple's Safari 4 public beta and Google Chrome 2.0 beta. IE8 will be free to download for genuine Windows-running users available, and it'll play nicely with both Vista and XP.

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IE8 was launched earlier in the day amidst claims of superior security from Microsoft. The hacker, a 25-year-old German researcher going by the handle "Nils," won $5,000 and the Sony laptop on which he performed the hack in the annual contest PWN2OWN, that invites hackers to worm their way into popular browsers and operating systems for prize money. No piece of software is perfect--but slowness still dogs the new browser. Of the top five browsers, IE 8 came in dead last in a JavaScript speed tes

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