Reuters reports that China is cracking down big time on morality-threatening Web sites that spread pornography and vulgarity, including search engines like Google and Baidu. The Ministry of Public Security and six other government agencies announced the new campaign on Monday, as state television reported officials hauling away digital equipment from one unidentified office. According to the report, the group "decided to launch a nationwide campaign to clean up a vulgar current on the Internet and named and exposed a large number of sites violating public morality and harming the physical and mental health of youth and young people." …

Thousands of Microsoft's Zune digital music player froze on Wednesday due to a problem with the device's internal clock driver, which was tripped up by leap year, a Microsoft spokeswoman told The Wall Street Journal. The problem, in which the player got stuck with an unresponsive Zune logo screen, only affected the 30-gigabye model and resolved itself once the device moved to Jan. 1. Microsoft advised its customers to let the battery run out before recharging and restarting their devices. Zune, of course, pales in comparison to Apple's iPod in the market for digital music players. According to NPD Group, …

Social gaming may be a growth sector, but GigaOm's Wagner James Au warns the coming year will bring challenges as well as opportunities for social gaming startups. One of the biggest challenges, he says, is that the majority of startups are still at the mercy of top social networks like Facebook, which have a habit of suddenly changing their policies. Such changes can have an adverse affect on third party application makers. There's also unpredictability in competition. Most social networking games are easy to reproduce, so developers often find themselves competing with knockoff versions of their own app. Also, the …

Fudzilla, a tech blog, reports that Microsoft may lay off 17% of its work force, or 15,000 people, on Jan. 15, but Silicon Alley Insider contends that a cut of this magnitude is unlikely. "Unless Microsoft's business has been absolutely crushed in the past two months, there is no reason for the company to suddenly cut this much cost," writes Henry Blodget. He points out that Microsoft's margins are actually fine, as much of the company's revenue is generated from multi-year contracts that aren't expiring anytime soon. Blodget says the only way Microsoft would lay off this many …