ReadWriteWeb

In our yearly wrap-ups of the best products of 2009, we cannot but notice the shadow that falls over the editorial desk.

We are chilled and saddened by the ghosts of the past year - the apps that should have been, the startups that failed to launch, the brilliant ideas that were throttled, the great minds that were fired, the tech heroes that committed tragic gaffes. But some failures were so monumental that they require specific enumeration and commentary. Here are the 10 worst tech failures of 2009.

At a UN-sponsored event today in Egypt, UN officials demanded the removal of a poster that alluded to the issue of Internet restrictions in China.

The poster was an advertisement for Access Controlled, an MIT publication about the so-called Great Firewall of China, one of the first national Internet filtering systems and a policy that has come under harsh international criticism. The poster was being displays at the fourth annual meeting of the Internet Governance Forum in Sharm El Sheikh, Egypt. The purpose of the forum is to support UN mandates regarding the sustainability, robustness, security, stability, and development of the Internet.

In preparation for the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square Massacre on June 4th, China has started to block a number of web sites, including Twitter, Flickr, Blogger, Hotmail, and Microsoft's new search engine Bing. Tech-savvy Internet users in China, of course, know how to circumvent the Great Firewall, but for the large majority of Chinese Internet users, these sites will remain blocked for the foreseeable future. In addition to these high-profile sites, the Guardian also reports that the Great Firewall now also blocks access to more than 6,000 online forums affiliated with colleges and universities.