China has apparently blocked access to nytimes.com, now that the Olympics are over and the government doesn't even have to pretend to be mildly less restrictive anymore.

What did comedian Michael Ian Black do to get banned from Facebook? I'd like to think it was karmic payback for providing the voice of the Pets.com sock puppet, an enduring icon of dotcom disaster.

Jason Calacanis, the voluble CEO of Web directory Mahalo, is a fan of free speech. As long as the words are his own.

Bettie Page, whose saucy photo spreads helped get men through, and then end, the sexual repression of the 1950s, died of a heart attack in Los Angeles. She was 85.

The same Obamatards who voted up total blowjob questions on the Digg-like question section of Change.gov have, all too predictably, almost completely obliterated any question mentioning ROD BLAGOJEVICH.

Back in the day, bloggers who didn't do any reporting like Mickey Kaus and Jeff Jarvis and probably Glenn Reynolds used to spend a great deal of time talking about how the blogs (specifically their blogs) would soon supplant the "Main Stream Media" forever. Well, some years have passed, and the MSM is in dire straits, but blogs have not really made much of a dent in CNN and the New York Times' market share, eyeballs-wise, and the boundary-blurring has manifested itself mainly as old school publications getting a little more "webby" in tone and content. There is one metric, though, that has bloggers pulling ahead of their MSM counterparts: jail time! The Committee to Protect Journalists just released its 2008 prison census, and as you can see in the attached pie chart, internet people finally make up a greater share of the journo prison population than snooty newspaper jerks. Way to go, internet, and Burma! [CPJ]

If a YouTube video gets yanked, if a Blogger blog gets deleted, if a website disappears from Google's search results, chances are Google lawyer Nicole Wong had something to do with it. Wong has kept a low profile, aside from the occasional post on Google's official blog, but after a profile in Sunday's New York Times Magazine, it's likely she'll be hearing more pleas than ever from frustrated users whose works have vanished from Google's sprawling Web empire.

This would be ironically funny as an Onion article, but in real life it's just awful: Hossein Derakhshan, pictured, is a Toronto-based Iranian blogger who has grown more pro-Iran over the past two years, supporting the country's nuclear program and its three-decade-old Islamic revolution in the press. The dual Iranian-Canadian citizen blogs in both English and Farsi and generally tries to help people understand his home country. PR win for Iran and its blogger-in-chief Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, right? Actually no, because Derakhshan visited Israel last year for a blogging conference, and bogged there to "show the Iranians a more realistic image of this country," so he's been thrown in jail during a visit home, as a spy, reports The Media Line:

The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has granted Microsoft a patent, first applied for in 2004, on technology to censor profanity — or any keywords off a list — from an audio stream in real time. This technology could be applied not just to online video like YouTube but also for cell-phone audio and internet chat. Think China will be the first buyer? @#$% yeah. [Ars Technica]

The highlight of Sarah Palin's career? It's not her guest spot on SNL, or her scary stump speeches in front of screaming crazy racists. It's this cover for the upcoming Tales From the Crypt comic. Sporting a hockey stick—and heaving breasts reminiscent of the comic's golden days—she asks the fleeing ghouls, "Didn't we get rid of you guts in the 50's?" It's a reference to Palin's book-banning ways, as well as to the wave of censorship that forced Crypt's original publisher to shut it down in 1955.

This past weekend's episode of Saturday Night Live continues to make news; first, everyone was talking about the Tina Fey-enhanced vice presidential debate sketch, then, praise trickled down to Andy Samberg's Mark Wahlberg imitation and Kristen Wiig's tiny, tiny hands. Over on the right-wing side of the blogosphere, however, the sketch that ignited conservative appreciation was a takeoff on the government bailout (spoofing Nancy Pelosi, Barney Frank, and Golden West Financial founders Herbert and Marion Sandler) where Jason Sudeikis as President Bush noted, "Wasn't it my administration that warned about the problem six years ago and it was Democrats who refused to listen?" The skit initially appeared on NBC's website but was abruptly yanked yesterday, causing a conservative furor. Now, NBC says a censored version will be reuploaded today. THR has the scoop:

Jimmy Wales, cofounder of the world's most comprehensive history of C-Pop, recently sat for propaganda pictures with China's top censor Cai Mingzhao. The pair also spoke a little bit, but not about "the fact that a few politically sensitive pages are blocked," according to an interview Wales gave to Rebecca MacKinnon, an advisory board member at Wikipedia's nonprofit parent, the Wikimedia Foundation. "Since I wasn't sure of the exact details, and just due to the way the conversation went (more high level than about specific details), I didn't raise this question," Wales said. "But, I am not cool with any censorship of Wikipedia." Maybe he'll tell Mingzhao the next time they meet for pictures.

While controversy isn't something we'd normally associate with Conan O'Brien, apparently NBC's Los Angeles-area station disagrees. After performing last night's monologue on Late Night, O'Brien repaired to his desk to begin what sounded like an innocent joke about "celebrity douchebags" like Spencer Pratt and Dog the Bounty Hunter. That's when Channel 4 News abruptly cut in, with anchorwoman Colleen Williams warning the audience that "right now in New York," O'Brien was about to make a joke about colliding trains, and that KNBC found it inappropriate to air in light of the September 12 train collision that killed 24 people in Chatsworth. Williams then showed excerpts from John McCain's speech yesterday about the economy, which was funny, but not really ha-ha funny. Watch the weirdness happen up above. [NBC]

Click to viewTo spell it out: Senator Joe Lieberman and Google timed a press release to the anniversary of the September 11 attacks: "Google Tightens Standards for YouTube Videos in Response to Lieberman's Pressure."The move seems more politics than pragmatics. Most Al Qaeda videos are posted outside YouTube. LiveLeak has plenty. Lieberman's been after YouTube since May, but the Google-owned site didn't update its community guidelines until the day before 9/11's seventh anniversary, at a time when Al Qaeda's momentum is fading. Look, I'm as jingoistic as the next guy. But if Lieberman wants to fight Islamic militants on YouTube, what he needs isn't a ban, but a countercampaign: More clips that show insurgents missing the target and running from U.S. troops. I'll bet there's a lot more such footage out there.

"BJ McCombs was severely burned in a fire at the age of 18 months," explains the support group set up on MySpace after the site removed photos McCombs's parents had posted of their late son. BJ's photos had been deleted by MySpace staff after another user reported them as offensive. "You may feel singled out," reads a message from a MySpace representative to McCombs's mother in Sullivan, Indiana. "But be assured we delete each and every one of these images as we locate them." Mrs. McCombs says MySpace threatened to delete her profile if she reposted the pics. Coverage from local media in the Terre Haute area seems to have stayed MySpace from re-removing the photos, now uploaded to the group's pages.

The city of Vallejo, California—most famous for spawning robot-talking rapper E-40 and failing to solve the case of the Zodiac Killer—may not be the most nurturing place in the American marketplace of ideas. Surprise! The city filed for bankruptcy in May, and all of its employees must focus their attention, laser-like, on the task of restoring its finances to good working order. Which is why the city manager has banned them from accessing the local "rag of a newspaper's" website, or something!: Specifically, city manager Joseph Tanner added one widely-read local blog as well as the city paper to the list of sites inaccessible from city servers. Both of which like to write about how the stupid city manager has bankrupted the town, coincidentally:

Since 2000, every time BBC news writes a story on China, their online editors slap up this stock photo of a Chinese police officer looking at a computer. Probably censoring something! Or cracking down on freedom! Or, like, updating his MySpace. Though since the picture dates back to 2000 he's probably just buying a cup of coffee from Kozmo.com. Regardless, there are at least 14 separate instances of the BBC using this same photo to illustrate a story, which is evidence of their anti-Chinese bias, obviously, repeatedly reinforcing the old "Chinese people sit too close to the monitor" stereotype. Also it's not clear whether the Beeb is actually revealing that the photos are not related to the stories they illustrate, which seems like a sketchy practice. Examples after the jump!

We never thought it could happen, but the fanboy bloom may officially — and dramatically — be off the Star Wars franchise after 30 loving years of devotion: Ain't it Cool News boss Harry Knowles has written a scathing review of the franchise's new, animated The Clone Wars. And we mean scathing — vicious enough to not only shake our faith in geek compliance to its very foundation, but also rouse George Lucas from his afternoon cash-bath with a cease-and-desist order straight from the top.

Over at Jerry Yang's shareholder snoozefest today, Chinese political protesters showed up outside the hotel lobby. They set up exhibits shaming Yahoo for handing over bloggers' Yahoo Mail accounts to the Chinese government. Although Jerry Yang has already answered to Congress and settled with the bloggers' families, the protesters who showed up are still mad. Or opportunistic, given the expected media attention this year on Yahoo's normally sleepy annual meeting. The bloggers remain in Chinese prisons. As I tried to take more pics — on a public street outside the hotel — guys in suits came out and told me to leave the premises. And here I thought I was in the United States.

The Chinese government may have assured the International Olympic Committee that reporters would enjoy Western freedoms while covering the Olympic games, such as unfettered access to the Internet. Once on the ground, however, journalists have discovered that's not exactly the case. The IOC has been busy backtracking. Olympics reps now have clarified that open Web access is only for sites about "Olympic competitions" — not, say, Amnesty International, one of many sites that has been blocked. The question no one has asked, however, is why China should feel compelled to act in any other way?