SHANGHAI (AFP) – China's top search engine Baidu was hacked on Tuesday in what state media said was an attack by a pro-Iranian government group that replaced the usual home page with an Iranian flag. Internet users trying to access the site found a message saying "This site has been hacked by Iranian Cyber Army", the People's Daily reported on its website. Below a sentence in Farsi read, "In reaction to the US authorities' intervention in Iran's internal affairs. This is a warning," the report said, posting an image of the hacked page. Baidu spokesman Victor Tseng said service was interrupted "due to external manipulation of its DNS (Domain Name Server) in the United States". "Baidu has been resolving this issue and the majority of services have been restored," the spokesman said in an email to AFP. The state-run China News Service quoted an unnamed official at Baidu as saying the website's domain name had been hijacked, redirecting traffic to another site, but it is unclear whether those responsible were in fact Iranian.

Chinese authorities have begun blocking Chinese internet users from reading Wired.com, according to a report from the Examiner. Internet users from Beijing to Shanghai found the site inaccessible starting Friday, reports Glenn Loveland, the Examiner’s Beijing correspondent. The block adds Wired.com to a long list of sites that are or have been considered too dangerous for Chinese net users. UPDATE Saturday 19:45 PST: Reports of Wired.com’s demise in China may be a bit premature, as readers in several cities in China report being able to read the site. One says that urls that include the words RSS or blog are often blocked, one said we were blocked on a cell phone, while another said Wired.com was fine now but was blocked for weeks in December. We are glad to learn you all can hear Radio Free Wired.com in Beijing and Shanghai, but we promise to redouble our efforts to anger political censors around the world. /UPDATE

The rules of political speech on the Internet are usually pretty simple. In America, almost anything goes. In places like China, the censors call the shots. But in India -- a boisterous democracy that's riven by religious and ethnic tension -- the game is far trickier, as Google is discovering. In September, lawyers at Google Inc.'s New Delhi office got a tip from an Internet user about alarming content on the company's social networking site, Orkut. People had posted offensive comments about the chief minister of India's southern state of Andhra Pradesh, who had died just a few days earlier in a helicopter crash. Google's response: It removed not just the material but also the entire user group that contained it, a person familiar with the matter says. The Internet giant feared the comments could heighten tensions at a time when thousands of mourners of the popular politician were emptying into the street.

Xinhua News Agency Outlook Weekly reported on a Teleconference on national law enforcement on 4 of Jan, 2010. The Ministry of Public Security reported in the conference that the police will tightening up control over the Internet. According to the report, the Ministry of Public Security will put together resources and extend the power of Internet police to the county level (rather than city and provincial level). Apart from monitoring forums, blogs and websites, they would also actively monitor QQ groups and micro-blogging in order to prevent organized crime.