Over the past 48 hours, and perhaps longer, it appears that TechCrunch is being blocked inside China. We’ve confirmed this with contacts and tipsters inside China who can no longer access our site, as well as through Web tools such as WebsitePulse and Just Ping which pings sites from inside China’s Great Firewall.

Both of those services indicate that, at least in Shanghai, readers cannot connect to TechCrunch. Chinese readers have reported problems accessing the site in the past as well.

If you are located in China and you can read this, please let us know in comments.

We are not really sure why we are being blocked. Recently, we’ve covered Google’s decision to to perhaps stop doing business in China following a cyberattack on its servers in the country, but we don’t think that is it.

Another possibility, which borders on the absurd, is that on Friday Michael put up a humorous post comparing a Google employee who stopped his SUV because he was talking on his cell phone to the Tank Man who famously blocked Chinese tanks at Tiananmen Square. The title of the post: “A Googler Has His Tiananmen Square Moment.” He followed up with another light weekend post, featuring pictures of him and Robert Scoble re-enacting the incident. That post also had the word “Tiananmen” in the title.

They were just goofing off, but perhaps the Chinese government didn’t think it was funny. China still has a policy of wiping out all references on the Web to the Tank Man and the Tiananmen uprising of two decades ago. China blocked Twitter on the 20th anniversary of Tiananmen last summer, and has blocked Facebook, Bing and other sites during times of unrest. Our post hardly compares.

Again, to be clear, this is all speculation on our part. We don’t know exactly why we are being blocked. There are so many ways we could have offended officials in China. If a Chinese censor is reading this (and we know you are) please let us know what we did via comments or an email.

Photo credit: Flickr/ Michael Mooney

The wait until the Mobile World Conference was just too much for poor Samsung to bear. They cracked and announced the Monte just ahead of the big event (via BGR). The S5620 Monte runs off of the TouchWiz 2.0 Plus UI and features a 3” capacitive touchscree...

If Dear Abby and your therapist just aren’t cutting it this Valentine’s Day, you can tweet at the world’s longest-married (living) couple, Herbert and Zelmyra Fisher, for the scoop on how to score and sustain love.

That’s right, while some of the older set just can’t wrap their heads around Twitter (unless it’s connected to a fax machine), the Fishers will be all up on the microblogging site this V-Day, dispensing pearls of wisdom to the younger set (for whom the sanctity of marriage has already been destroyed by Facebook). The whole project was dreamed up by blinkbox, which is an on-demand movie and TV website in the UK.

Herbert and Zelmyra — who were married in 1924 and are 104 and 102 years old respectively — are inviting us romantically bankrupt miscreants to visit their Twitter page, @longestmarried, from today until February 12. Simply tweet your question to the pair, who will select 14 questions that they will then answer on February 14.

The couple, who enjoy hanging on their front porch, watching trains pass by, counting cars and talking to their neighbors, are apparently the model of wedded bliss. They each have their own bedroom — so Herbert can stay up late watching baseball. Well, I guess distance does makes the heart grow fonder.

Tags: dating, online dating, twitter, valetine's day

A shocking revelation from Warner Bros. earnings call this morning: Since they bumped prices on a bunch of iTunes music, growth has slowed down! Digital track growth dropped from 10 percent in the fall quarter to just 5 percent for this past quarter, which means less money—digital revenue grew less than half as much, 8 percent, versus 20 percent a year ago. Warner Music's CEO apparently conceded that raising prices during the recession, maybe not his finest idea.

The prudent point in this for book publishers, as Peter Kafka notes, is that raising prices like they wish to might slow sales down more than they think. The price difference between a $10 book and a $15 book is a gaping maw, so I wouldn't be surprised to see people react that much more vehemently. But we'll see—maybe people will pay more for fancy ebooks. [MediaMemo]

Elisabeth Rosenthal / New York Times:
Skeptics Find Fault With U.N. Climate Panel  —  Just over two years ago, Rajendra K. Pachauri seemed destined for a scientist's version of sainthood: A vegetarian economist-engineer who leads the United Nations' climate change panel, he accepted the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize on behalf of the panel …

Earlier this morning, the Apple Store was down for a protracted amount of time. That almost always means one thing: Something new was added to the store. This time, it was Aperture 3.

Aperture is Apple’s photo management and editing software for professionals or users who just want more power than Apple’s iPhoto can offer. In many ways, you could call Aperture iPhoto Pro — and that looks like it’s an even more apt description in the latest version.

The software — which is $199 for new users and $99 to upgrade from a previous version of Aperture — lets you organize, edit and export or print all of your photographs.

Aperture 3 adds a bunch of new features, including the Faces and Places features first introduced in iPhoto ‘09. This feature will automatically detect people in your photographs, allowing you to add tags and identify people — which makes exports to Facebook and Flickr pretty simple. The Places feature uses GPS data embedded in your photographs to add location-related data to the photo. This is really cool if you’re on a trip and want to create a supplementary map of all the places you visited and took pictures.

The other big new feature with Aperture 3: It supports video. Photos are still the main focus, but as more and more digital cameras start to feature video and HD video, it makes sense to be able to import all the same data alongside your photographs. You can create a JPEG from a frame, create multimedia slideshows and edit clips. I just got my fiance a Panasonic GF1 micro four-thirds camera that shoots AVCHD Lite. Not having to use different programs to import footage from the card will be a great time-saver.

Even my favorite feature of Aperture — Photo Books — got an upgrade. You can now order extra-large 13×10 books, and Apple added some new book themes. I don’t think I’ve ever given my parents a better gift than the Photo Book that I created with Aperture for Mother’s Day 2008. The print quality was astounding and my parents still keep the book on the coffee table.

Are you a photog or photog in training? What is your favorite photo editing software tool? Let us know!

Tags: aperture, aperture 3, apple, mac, photography, software

T3 Motion's Electric Stand-up Vehicle saw use during this year's Super Bowl. Four of them were featured in Audi's “Green Police” ad. T3 Motion brags that the ad was broadcast to an estimated audience of over 100 million people. ...

Legal Blog Watch – “A committee of the Judicial Conference of the United States has endorsed a set of model jury instructions for district judges to help deter jurors from using cell phones, computers or other electronic technologies during their jury service.”

After the rumored iMac 27 global shipment halt, reader Adam Pattee has sent us confirmation that his unit—purchased on January 29—is now shipping. Apple says his iMac will arrive on February 16.

Did you get a notification too? Write to submissions@gizmodo.com.

Most of the gamers I knew stuck with XP during the Vista's time because it drained precious CPU cycles, but that's not the case here: Steam's released their latest stats on Windows usage, Windows 7 has already blown past Vista.

The stats break down this away: 42.78 percent on XP, 28.53 percent on Windows 7, and 27.91 percent on Vista. Consider that Vista's been out 3 years, and Windows 7's been out for 3 months. Also worth pointing out is that Windows 7 installs are 64-bit by a 2-to-1 margin, which as Ars notes, is now the most popular flavor of Windows on Steam short of XP 32-bit.

The gaming population on Steam isn't necessarily representative of Moms and Dads buying computers, but the fact that the deeply suspicious PC gaming community has picked up Windows 7 in droves does say something. [Ars]

WebUser – “An online campaign has been launched to get older people – or ’silver scribblers’ – to join book clubs and write novels.”

Direct to Bookbite