In its never-ending struggle to completely control what its citizens can and can’t see on the internet, China has now banned all internet phone calls not made over one of two state-owned telecom networks.  According to The Telegraph, China is the world’s largest market for internet phone calls, so the loss of the market for all other internet phone calls is not trivial.  Does this really specifically connect to Skype, though?

Yeah, according to the state owned newspaper The People’s Daily:

[This] is expected to make services like Skype unavailable in the country.

In what’s likely being caused by a holiday-related wave of data-gobbling video calls crashing into a rocky shore of technical issues, Internet phone and video chat service Skype has been having outage issues throughout the afternoon, affecting millions of users. Speaking to the BBC, Skype CEO Tony Bates apologized for a state of affairs in which “clients are coming on and offline and sometimes they are crashing in the middle of calls.”

The Skype blog explains the outages in further detail (supernodes!), and warns that fixing them “may take a few hours”:

>>>Update: Check out our roundup of changes to Facebook that were announced today.

Watch as a hardworking young man’s webcam call from the office to his girlfriend takes an embarrassing turn for the worse in just 23 seconds. Former Geekosystem intern Michael Suen tells us this video/possible ad-for-who-knows-what has been “going viral on various Chinese social networks,” but no knowledge of Chinese is required.

All Rubik’s Cubes solvable in 20 moves (Cube20)

Skype files for IPO (WSJ)

Gorilla plays Nintendo DSi XL (Escapist)

MTV hires $100k/year Twitter jockey (Runnin’ Scared)

Real Life Meeting Between Obama And Saints Startlingly Similar To Video Game Version (SportsGrid)

Vintage Tokyo subway manners posters (Pink Tentacle)

Install Flash on your iPhone the easy way (RWW)

Bonus video: Lando Calrissian Blaxploitation film:

Daddy-O! Sau Paulo-based ad agency Moma designed these vintage ads for YouTube, Facebook, and Skype to promote Maximidia‘s seminars on new media, the theme of which is “Everything Ages Fast.”

Looks like the iPhone may be the way to go in India. The country’s Department of Telecommunications has demanded that Research in Motion (RIM) and Skype format their communication data so they can be read by intelligence and security agencies. A similar notice has been served to Google India, asking that their Gmail content also be made readable. The companies have under two weeks to comply, or else face the possibility of a ban in India.

Let the voice wars begin! The same day Skype releases its SkypeKit Beta Program, Google tries to one-up: This morning, the company announced that Google Voice will now be open to the public, without the previous need for invitation.

Now, anyone can sign up for one number which can be connected to multiple other numbers, voicemail transcription (often inaccurate), free calls and text messages within the U.S. and Canada, and low-priced international calls.

Today, Skype has officially released SkypeKit into limited beta. SkypeKit is a suite of tools and APIs that allow developers to integrate Skype functionality — read: voice and video calling — into any number of internet-connected devices and products. That’s right; Skype is now poising themselves to be a standard among video chat solutions that can make it past your computer and mobile phone and into whatever the developer and/or consumer wants.

From Day One, one of the most persistent complaints about the iPad has been that it lacks a camera: Despite the fact that its frame has a camera-sized gap, currently, the best you can do is connect a digital camera to the iPad with Apple’s expensive, poorly received “iPad Camera Connection kit,” which isn’t really the same as having a camera built into the device.

PhotoFast’s coming Webcam for iPad, first spotted by Pocket Lint, may not be quite the same thing as a built-in camera, but it sounds promising: