If there's anything the tech community likes more than a special media event from Apple, it's the chance to speculate about one. The blogosphere will have to stop hyperventilating about the possibility of new iPods and an Apple tablet computer when Apple is host of a rock 'n' roll, iPod-themed event in San Francisco, California, on Wednesday at 10 a.m. PT (1 p.m. ET). Many questions will be answered then. But for the fortune-tellers and futurists in all of us, ...

Many Google users probably didn't notice this month that they can now display their search tips in the Hawaiian language. Wedged between Hausa and Hebrew, Hawaiian is one of more than 125 "interface languages" now available on Google. The list also includes some humorous twists on English, including "pirate," "Klingon" and "Elmer Fudd." But for Hawaiian educators, the addition of Hawaiian is a small step toward legitimizing a language that is considered "critically endangered" by the United Nations. "It's the ...

Be cautious if you plan to Bing Jessica Biel or Google Brad Pitt. A new report says you might get a virus. The Hollywood actors are among the top 10 celebrity searches online that can lead to computer problems, according to a report released Tuesday by the computer security company McAfee. The company named Biel the "most dangerous celebrity in cyberspace." One in five Internet searches for terms related to "Jessica Biel" leads to a Web page, photo, video or ...

Janet McBride had to send someone to fetch lunch for her Saturday. The cheerful auto dealer receptionist didn't dare leave her switchboard during the waning hours of the federal government's "Cash for Clunkers" program. "Our phones have been ringing off the hook," said a giddy Pete Richards, general manager of Ed Voyles Honda in Marietta, Georgia. "... It's been great. Phenomenal." McBride was compiling a list of customers for swamped salespeople to call back. "I try to keep it ...

More than half of the Internet's top websites use a little known capability of Adobe's Flash plugin to track users and store information about them, but only four of them mention the so-called Flash Cookies in their privacy policies, UC Berkeley researchers found. Unlike traditional browser cookies, Flash cookies are relatively unknown to web users, and they are not controlled through the cookie privacy controls in a browser. That means even if a user thinks they have cleared their computer ...

The man who shot three women dead in a Pennsylvania gym before killing himself this week posted at least two videos on YouTube last year, apparently referring to a desire for a girlfriend in both. George Sodini, 48, gave a tour of his house in one clip, his camera briefly panning across a book called "Date Young Women" in his living room. "The couch and chairs, they match. The woman will really be impressed," he says just before showing the ...

Sex on TV has come a long way in the past few years. Anyone who saw the first episode of 90210 — a pair of students engage in oral sex in the first episode of the new sequel to Beverly Hills 90210 — can attest to that. The question that has been debated by parents, psychologists and media critics for years is whether such racy content has an adverse effect on young viewers. Now researchers at the Rand ...

Amir Farshad Ebrahimi sits at his computer in a small apartment in Berlin clicking through data bases with thousands of photos. He clicks back and forth between the Web and the photos of demonstrations in Iran for hours. The pictures show plain-clothed men beating up demonstrators in Iranian cities after the disputed presidential elections. Every once in a while he circles a head, a baton or a gun. "This is one of the guys I used to know," he ...

There comes a moment in almost every movie romance when words no longer suffice and the music must rise to the occasion. From the initial meet-cutes to the heated arguments and all those third-act sprints to win back the girl, a movie's soundtrack often does the heavy lifting, providing all the needed passion, heartache and poetry. The romantic comedy Days of Summer, with a soundtrack ranging from Wolfmother to Carla Bruni, hits all the right notes, with a ...

Twenty milligrams; that's the average amount of carbon emissions generated from the time it took you to read the first two words of this article. Now, depending on how quickly you read, around 80, perhaps even 100 milligrams of C02 have been released. And in the several minutes it will take you to get to the end of this story, the number of milligrams of greenhouse gas emitted could be several thousand, if not more. This may not ...