In the wake of China's campaign to limit the availability of pornographic content online, Google (NSDQ: GOOG)'s search market share in the country appears to be declining. In June, Baidu overtook Google as the number one search engine in China, according to NetApplications. More Internet Insights White Papers * Delivering Enterprise Advantages: Intranets & Extranets * Web-Based Course Management and Web Services Webcasts * Should Global CIOs Help Drive The Business, Or Align With The Business? * Connected Decisions: How a Holistic Approach to Decision Making Can Help Insurers Build a Profitable Book of Business Reports * XP's Day Of Reckoning Is At Hand. Prepare. * Sun's Future Under Oracle Videos In this ReviewCam, we get an inside look at Magnify's video publishing system, including some of its fun bells and whistles, like its ability to auto-tweet, and the very cool capability to pull in videos from many sources around the web. Get more from your new iPhone; InformationWeek's Mitch Wagner showsyou how to master the keyboard, clipboard, Spotlight search, and morefeatures of the new iPhone 3.0 software. EMC acquired Data Domain in early July. Director of InformationWeek Analytics discusses the implications of the acquisition and data deduplication, including some of the industries that the technology is most appropriate for. In this ReviewCam, we get an inside look at Magnify's video publishing system, including some of its fun bells and whistles, like its ability to auto-tweet, and the very cool capability to pull in videos from many sources around the web. A NetApplications graph shows that Baidu began gaining search market share late last year and that Google China started slipping in March. Chinese authorities met with Google executives in June "to discuss problems with the Google.cn service and its serving of pornographic images and content based on foreign language searches," as a Google spokesperson described it at the time.

A teenager sent by his parents to a boot camp to cure his Internet addiction died after he was beaten by camp supervisors, police in the Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region claimed yesterday. The three teachers who allegedly beat Deng Senshan, 16, were detained by local police Sunday, Deng Fei, the boy’s father, a businessman from Ziyuan county, told the Global Times yesterday. “We are investigating a case where a high school student was beaten to death by his camp supervisors. The case is still under investigation,” a police officer at the Jiangnan branch of Nanning Public Security Bureau said.

Here’s a wake-up call for those just digesting Pakistan’s ban on the “slander” of its leaders via SMS or e-mail. It might just pay to be careful while exchanging a joke about national leaders in India too. Anything you send or receive through the Net will soon come under the scanner—if it even remotely resembles anything “offensive or against national security”, you could well land up in jail. If the rules being drafted under the Information Technology (IT) Act come into force, the government will have sweeping new powers to monitor, intercept or even block any content—and also prosecute people. Pretty soon, millions of Indian users will find that it’s no longer easy to put up just about anything on the internet without bothering about it. A photograph, a joke or an innocent, honest comment on a contentious issue could prove to be troublesome depending on how a government agency interprets it.

In line with my irrepressible contrarian streak, I've always viewed Internet censorship as a problem that is ultimately solvable and, thus, less important than other problems facing the Web. For example, we have no tools to fight the proliferation of spin or the growth of "enclave extremism" and homophily; both of these problems do not lend themselves to easy quantitative solutions and may turn out to be much more important in the long run. Internet censorship, on the other hand, usually presents a rather boring set of challenges - e.g. "I can't get from A to B". As most such problems, it could be solved by clever tinkering with the system ("well, if you can't get from A to B, then go to C first and then use C to get to B" - this is the kind of anti-censorship solution that proxy-based technologies like TOR have eventually embraced). As the GreenDam saga shows, the methods favored by censors evolve and get more sophisticated as well (today, Internet censors may not even let you think about etting to point B - you may never have the time to even consider the C option, as your browser will be shut down). There is, of course, nothing surprising about it: why wouldn't governments be doing this? After all, there are many smart techies working for the governments as well - and sometimes they even believe in and like what they are doing.