Yesterday, while China Web watchers were digesting the latest bit of news on the requirement that PCs sold in China include government-mandated Internet filtering software, the Web as we knew it a week ago quietly returned.

Last Tuesday, at around 5 PM, Internet users across mainland China began reporting problems accessing popular social networking sites, such as Twitter.com, the Yahoo (YHOO)-owned photo-sharing site Flickr.com, and Microsoft’s (MSFT) Live.com, Bing.com and Hotmail. The sudden unavailability of these sites led many Internet users to suspect that they had been blocked due to sensitivities over the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square crackdown on June 4. And on Wednesday, dozens of Chinese Web sites also announced that they would be closed for technical maintenance for several days.

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The first of two parts. The second is here.

February 2005 was a tough month for those of us who worked at the Wall Street Journal Online, where I was in my fourth year as managing editor. A slew of media experts were telling the world that we were making a mistake of historic proportions by keeping WSJ.Com a paid site.

The criticism usually followed the same route. First, the author would invoke the obligatory paean to the Journal’s historic greatness. That would be followed by a tsk-tsking that the Journal had walled itself off from the “conversation” and thus was en route to irrelevance, followed by obsolescence.

Then, the elixir: Take down the subscription wall, make the site entirely free, and rake in those huge mounds of advertising revenue (time frame for that TBD, but trust us, it’ll come) that will more than compensate for the sudden absence of circulation revenue.

So, author Michael Wolff told a software trade group that February that the Journal was once “one of the truly astounding information franchises.” But then, he invoked ominously, “something happened” in the mid-1990s. “The Journal kind of disappeared. The Journal went out of the conversation as a point of influence….It seemed to, if not stop existing, at least stop mattering.”

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How badly does the newspaper industry need new ideas? Here’s the story I often tell when that question comes up.

The year was 2005, and I had recently joined the venerable Dow Jones from Yahoo (YHOO), where I had led the team that helped build the financial portal. My job at Dow Jones was head of all consumer online sites, including WSJ.com, Barrons.com and Marketwatch.com. One day I was invited to a meeting to brainstorm about, of all things, the width of the Wall Street Journal. After I made a suggestion that was somewhere between novel and off the wall, the then-publisher leaned on the table, looked at me and said: “How old are you, young man?” The suggestion was clear: If you’re under 40, you can’t possibly understand the newspaper business. I still wish my response, though impolitic, had been: “How old is your thinking?”

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Yes, this may be the worst recession America has seen since World War II. But the people who are bringing us the Consumer Electronics Show would like to point out that sales of tech products are actually faring pretty well when compared to what happened during previous recessions.

The evidence suggest that people’s views on devices such as televisions, notebook computers and mobile phones are changing, says Shawn DuBravac, economist for the Consumer Electronics Association. Through November of 2008, 17.22 percent of total durable good purchases were tech goods, the highest share in 50 years, he says.

“While these are typically discretionary purchases, consumers are treating them like nondiscretionary purchases,” says Mr. DuBravac.

That doesn’t mean that consumers aren’t making cutbacks. In fact, in many categories, consumers seem to be gravitating toward lower-priced items for varying reasons. For example, coming out of the 2007 holiday season, nearly 50 percent of all flat panel sales were over 40 inches. Today, Mr. DuBravac says, that numbers stands closer to 35 percent.

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You might be familiar with phishing attacks, those messages sent by criminals that look like they’re from a bank or Nigerian prince. But what about Twishing?

The term may enter the tech lexicon this week, thanks to an attack targeting the Web site Twitter, which runs a popular service that lets people share short updates about what they’re doing. (Blame Brian Krebs of the Washington Post if it sticks.) Over the weekend, cyber baddies sent phishing messages via Twitter’s service to other account holders. The message directed people to a Web site that looked like Twitter’s homepage, but was really operated by the bad buys. As people logged in to the fake Twitter site, the bad guys captured their user names and passwords. Twitter warned account holders Saturday about the scam in a post on its blog, and advised those concerned to change their passwords.

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There’s lots of talk in the tech industry these days about capitalizing on growth in “emerging markets,” countries like China, Vietnam and Brazil where people are rapidly buying computers and printers.

A story in Monday’s Boston Globe says Hewlett-Packard Co. is taking that strategy one step further: Its printers, writes Farah Stockman, “have become a top seller” in Iran–a country whose economy the U.S. government wants to prevent from emerging.

Since 1995, the U.S. government has had an on embargo on trade between U.S. companies and Iran due to the Iranian government’s “sponsorship of international terrorism and Iran’s active pursuit of weapons of mass destruction,” according to a U.S. Treasury Department fact sheet.

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Apple’s highly successful retail stores may be lauded for their sleek modern design and smart layout, but the Georgetown district in Washington, D.C., doesn’t seem to care.

Both the Georgetown Advisory Neighborhood Commission and the Old Georgetown Board, a design committee that must approve designs for all buildings in the historic district, rejected a resubmitted proposal from the Cupertino, Calif., company for the third time earlier this month, according to the Georgetown Current.

Apple announced more than a year ago that it was planning to build a store in Georgetown. Though Apple won’t confirm it, the Old Georgetown Board says the company has a site on Wisconsin Ave. in the heart of the historic district. Apple so far has been unable to come up with a plan that passes the review process.

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Microsoft (MSFT) may not need Yahoo (YHOO), but Steve Ballmer’s legacy sure does.

Perhaps that is why Ballmer opened a new chapter in the annals of perpetual torment [Thursday] with this musing at the GartnerITXpo: A Microsoft takeover of Yahoo would “make sense economically for the shareholders of both companies,” he declared. As you might expect, given the irrepressible optimism of Yahoo shareholders, Yahoo’s shares jumped 12 percent on the news.

[EDITOR'S NOTE: Ballmer was not referring to a takeover of Yahoo, but a search deal; Moore was incorrect that he was talking about a merger.]

It wasn’t long before Microsoft officially pulled back the string. A Microsoft spokesman told us, “Our position hasn’t changed. Microsoft has no interest in acquiring Yahoo; there are no discussions between the companies.”

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