The Internet made shopping without checkout lines a no-brainer. Now, some Web companies are betting that people are ready to forsake another shopping tradition: tangible products.Virtual goods, which exist as digital bits on computers and cellphones, have grown more popular in the past year as important accoutrements for increasingly Web-oriented lives.

China has issued new regulations that expand its Internet controls by tightening procedures for domain name registration. The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology posted the new rules over the weekend, part of a three-phase plan to target what it called pornography accessible through cell phones.The regulations require telecom companies and Internet service providers to carry out "complete and thorough" checks to determine if Web sites are officially registered.

Experts are warning internet users against Koobface computer virus targeting popular social networking sites in the run up to Christmas.It is said that Facebook users are most at risk from a variant of the Koobface virus, which comes in disguise as a Festive greetings video, hosted on a YouTube site.The new virus is "particularly nasty" and encourages victims to participate manually in creating a new Facebook account to help spread the worm.The attacks work by posting malevolent links on Facebook pages.

The internet is really changing the basics. It was a given, for instance, that you needed to be a celebrity of sorts to be able to afford followers. But now, thanks to the internet, a mere 16-year-old kid boasts over 120,000 online followers.The teen goes by the name of Daniel Brusilovsky. And he managed the huge number of followers online because of a spot on Twitter’s ‘Suggested User List’ of account. Brusilovsky has also been officially ‘verified’ by the microblogging service, lest someone impersonate this powerful 16-year-old.