If you're like most computer users, your PC or Mac is loaded with a gazillion family photos and other prized documents. Some of you may be sleeping peacefully believing that the external hard drive you picked up at Costco is backing up your data every night, but have you ever checked to see if it's configured correctly? What's really going on inside that black box? And what would happen if your house caught fire? One high-tech — and ...

You don't have to spend much time with teenagers to know that the average adolescent would rather devote an afternoon to sitting in front of the TV, computer or video-game console than working out in a gym. And in recent years, as physical-education classes have been progressively cut from cash-strapped public-school curriculums, teens have had even more time to lounge, slouch, hang out or do anything but break a sweat. It's no surprise, then, that obesity rates among ...

When Yahoo! switched off the servers for GeoCities, the Web posting service, on Oct. 27, some 7 million of the Internet's first websites went dark forever. The bulk of these were people's personal home pages, which were pulled offline with no backup and no permanent record of those users' frenetic early forays online. Now a ragtag effort by several groups of budding computer historians is feverishly — and angrily — trying to bring as much as they ...

It was 1969 and a busy year for making history: Woodstock, the Miracle Mets, men on the moon -- and something less celebrated but arguably more significant, the birth of the Internet.

If consumers like the new Windows 7 operating system, they'll have the much-maligned Windows Vista to thank. In part, that's because Windows 7 actually builds on the under-the-hood changes that came with Vista. But, it also turns out that the vast headaches created by Vista were just what the PC industry needed to improve their cooperation. With consumers lukewarm to Vista and many businesses shunning it entirely, both Microsoft and the computer makers realized that the standard way of business ...

A Pennsylvania soccer mom was chatting with a friend via webcam when she was shot to death by her husband, who then went upstairs and shot himself, police said Friday. Meleanie Hain, 31, made national headlines last year as the mother who carried a loaded, holstered handgun to her 5-year-old daughter's soccer game. She was found dead in her Lebanon, Pennsylvania, home along with her husband, Scott Hain, 33, on Wednesday evening, Lebanon police said. Hain was ...

Gary McKinnon, the hacker who broke into Pentagon and NASA computers, was at risk of suicide Friday after losing an effort to fight extradition to the United States, his attorney said. "This is the wholesale destruction and bullying of a small individual by the United States and now our own government," attorney Karen Todner said in a statement. McKinnon's mother Janis Sharp described her son as "suicidal." The British government did not respond. McKinnon, a British citizen, has admitted breaking ...

Amazon said it would begin selling an international version of its popular e-reader that will work in more than 100 countries on October 19. The world's largest online retailer also said it was lowering the price of the Kindle 2 in the US from $299 to $259, a move likely to spur sales ahead of the holiday season. The announcements come as the e-reader market is becoming more competitive. Sony has already introduced a line of e-book readers, and various ...

Residents of close-knit American Samoa are pulling together to help Pago Pago recover from Tuesday's devastating earthquake and tsunami, one of them told CNN on Wednesday. "That's how we operate over here in American Samoa -- basically everyone is related," said iReporter Maneafaiga T. Lagafuaina, 29, of the town of Lu'uuli. "And I know, at this time, especially with what American Samoa has experienced, we have pulled together as one. "Families and friends from both ends of the island have ...

Google Wave, a product that promises to revolutionize online communication, will go out to about 100,000 beta testers Wednesday. The Web application from Google Inc. combines elements of e-mail, chat, Wiki documents, blogs and photo-sharing sites to create a form of Internet communication called a "hosted conversation," or a "wave." Google demonstrated Wave at the Google I/O developer conference in San Francisco, California, in May. The closed group of beta testers will help Google fish bugs ...