China has announced it would indefinitely postpone a mandate requiring all personal computers sold in the country to be accompanied by a controversial content-filtering application, state media reported.

China's central government announced in May that the Green Dam software package must accompany all new computers in China. Citing China's Ministry of Information Technology, China Daily recently reported the government policy came "in response to calls from many schools and parents."

The number of people online in China has swelled in recent years. The nation surpassed the United States in 2008 as the world's top user of the World Wide Web, according to a Chinese government-backed research group.
Critics of the application say it is capable of causing glitches when a PC user types or encounters "forbidden" political content. And some independent researchers have demonstrated that the application has programming errors that expose users to security risks.

Despite such communication, there has been no indication so far from the Chinese government that the rule will be revoked, only delayed.

PC makers, then, may eventually find themselves stuck between a rock and a hard place. On the one hand China's large market is rather difficult to ignore. According to research firm Gartner, last year about 14 percent of the world's PC sales occurred in China, and that number should increase to almost 16 percent by 2012.

Source: CNN