Google has agreed to pay $22.5 million to settle charges with the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) alleging the sultan of search placed tracking cookies on computers running Apple's Safari browser that effectively bypassed the browser's built-in privacy measures. It's the largest fine ever handed out by the FTC, and one the government organization hopes will serve as a deterrent to other companies who might look to profit at the expense of privacy.

Demonoid, one of the Web's largest torrent tracking sites and one of the most popular online destinations overall, has been snuffed out by Ukrainian officials. Demonoid's destruction doesn't come as a complete surprise following a massive Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack that knocked the site to the mat last month. Fans of the site hoped it was just a temporary blip and that it would be back up and running before long, but it doesn't appear that's going to happen.

Giving the Web a sense of scale, a guy named Ruslan Enikeev plotted 350,000 of the most popular websites and 2 million links from 196 countries on a colorful, bubble filled map, forming a giant cluster viewers can zoom in and out of on a whim. As you get closer to any particular bubble, the web address it represents comes into view, or you can punch in an address in the search field and Scotty will beam you there.

In the second Back to the Future flick, Stephen Spielberg envisioned a future with flying cars, one that according to the date on the DeLorean's dashboard is just three years away. That gives GM and company several months to get on the ball, but in the meantime, there are still trains, planes, and land-based automobiles to get from point A to point B. Getting with the times not a moment too soon, Amtrak announced it's now accepting eTickets on all of its trains. Welcome to the Internet era, Amtrak.