Youtube is one of those websites that has never really appealed to me, for the same reason I never found America's Funniest Home Videos to be entertaining.

As with many others, I found myself a bit curious about the new "Google" of China, created by the Xinhua news agency and China Mobile, both arms of the Chinese government. So I decided to break this puppy in, and see just how far I could get with it...

Mozilla and Google, reacting to US government pressure, will add Do Not Track tools to their popular web browsers Firefox and Chrome to make it more difficult for advertisers to collect data on users and to personalize ads.

The feature, developed at Stanford University, would include a "header," a small piece of information transmitted by your computer when you click on a website. It will tell advertisers that you do not want them to gather information about where you have been or what you've done on the web.

Young people may one day have to change their names in order to escape their previous online activity, Google boss Eric Schmidt has warned.

Now isn't that nice? To make up for civil-unioned gay employees' shortfall in tax benefits versus married straight employees, Google is giving them a pay raise to cover the discrepancy.

Pakistan will monitor seven major Web sites, including Google and Yahoo, to block anti-Islamic links and content, an official said Friday. Seventeen lesser-known sites are being blocked outright, said Khurram Mehran, a spokesman for the government's Telecommunication Authority.

The crisis in Darfur (Sudan) is still going on. Along the terrible things happening there are the destruction of villages, mass rape and genocide.

The Digital Due Process coalition is pushing Congress to modernize privacy laws in the United States. The coalition -- comprised of technology companies and special interest groups, including Microsoft, Google, EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation), ACLU (American Civil Liberties Union), eBay, and others -- feels that existing privacy regulations do not adequately protect data in the digital era, and could stop businesses from embracing cloud computing.

It seems like vendors can't develop a new product or offer a new service these days without tacking the word "cloud" onto it. There are major players -- like Microsoft, Amazon, and Google -- backing the move to cloud-based services, and businesses are rushing to capitalize on the operational and financial benefits offered by cloud computing. However, businesses need to consider whether existing privacy law adequately protects data in the cloud.

In my Media Guardian column this Monday, I suggest that we need a bill of rights in cyberspace as a set of amendments to John Perry Barlow's 1996 Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace.