The Chinese government is retreating from a controversial requirement that every PC sold in the country be equipped with Internet filtering software.

On the eve of a July 1 deadline for compliance, the country's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) today delayed implementation indefinitely to give computer-makers more time to comply, the Xinhua News Agency reports.

Computer makers had protested that installing the software, called Green Dam Youth-Escort, might expose them to liability if the Chinese government uses the software to invade its citizens' privacy. The U.S. government sent a letter to Chinese officials complaining that computer makers were given virtually no notice of the mandate ahead of time, possibly violating World Trade Organization (WTO) rules. Others complained the software could be used by the Chinese government to censor political material—not just pornography.

Resistance is mounting to a controversial move by the Chinese government to require Internet filtering software be installed on every computer sold in the country starting next month. A letter sent by 19 tech and business groups, including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the Semiconductor Industry Association, to China's minister of Industry and Information Technology criticizes the plan and urges the Chinese government to "reconsider implementing the requirements," the Wall Street Journal reports.

Called Green Dam-Youth Escort, the software would be used to censor pornography say officials, but others fear it will also be used to block Web sites with political content, according to the New York Times.

Computer scientists, engineers and journalists converged on the CERN particle physics lab in the suburbs of Geneva, Switzerland, today to pay homage to a piece of paper—several pieces of paper, actually—that together form Tim Berners-Lee's March 1989 proposal that would come to be the blueprint for the World Wide Web.

Berners-Lee, the one-time CERN software consultant who went on to invent the Web and found the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (M.I.T.), began his keynote today commemorating the 20th anniversary of his proposal with a copy of his now-famous document in hand. "I wrote it 20 years ago, 20 years ago nothing happened," he said, referring to the seven months the proposal languished on his supervisor's desk before in September that year he was given money to buy some computers and pursue his idea. (For more coverage of the Web's 20th anniversary, see  Scientific American.com's in-depth report.)

Now that president-elect Barack Obama is officially on his way to the White House, it's time to make good on his numerous campaign pledges. Among them: his plan to appoint the first cabinet-level chief technology officer (CTO) tasked with, for starters, improving cyber security, spreading high-speed broadband Internet connectivity, and coordinating the efforts of the top info officers of the federal agencies, according to Change.gov, a Web site Obama's transition team set up to lay out the president-elect's plans for technology, the economy, education and several other issues.

Who's up to the task? CNET says that Obama's decision to include Julius Genachowski, a fellow Columbia University alum with significant biz and government experience in the tech sector, in his transition team may provide a clue. Genachowski, 45, was co-founder of Rock Creek Ventures, in Washington, D.C., which funds, launches, and advises digital media and commerce companies. He also served in executive positions for eight years at IAC/InterActiveCorp., a New York-based company that owns dozens of popular Web sites, including Ask.com, Citysearch.com and Match.com. Before joining IAC, Genachowski was chief counsel to former Federal Communications Commission chairman Reed Hundt and served as a law clerk to U.S. Supreme Court justices David H. Souter and William J. Brennan, Jr.

Details (as well as plenty of rumor and speculation) continue to emerge about how messages and images from Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin's Yahoo! e-mail account were made public earlier this week. The FBI and U.S. Secret Service are investigating the incident, but several news outlets and blogs report the attack was a multi-step process made possible by weaknesses in the password reset feature (found on many Web sites—not just Yahoo!) as well as proxy servers that allow people to cover their tracks as they navigate the Web.

The  hackers may have exploited the password resetting system of Yahoo's e-mail service using details about Palin's life—her birth date and zip code, for example—pulled from sources freely available on the Web, BBC News reported today.

Imagine taking the social experience of a site like Facebook or MySpace and integrating it into a Web browser so that collaboration and communication with friends and colleagues is completely seamless.

Adaptive Path, a Web design company, in partnership with the people at Mozilla Labs (a virtual lab connected to the Mozilla Foundation, the Firefox browser creators), want to do just that. In this video, they show one possible future scenario of the Web: Aurora.