Blog fans in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, saw PittGirl as their masked superhero -- a comedian and local commentator who jibed the mayor without reserve and ranted freely about her hatred of pigeons. But despite her effort to keep her real name secret, people started to figure out who PittGirl was. Feeling pressure to take control of her identity before someone else outed her, PittGirl on Wednesday posted pictures of herself on her blog and introduced readers to her real-world self: Virginia ...

Facebook hates babies. I found this out last night when I logged on as Laszlo Stein, my three-month old son who has been faithfully posting adorable photos and angry commentary since his second-trimester sonogram, back when his listed interests were just kicking and drinking his own urine. In his time on Facebook, he threatened to pee on some, cut others and once posted — next to a photo of him gummily smiling and wearing a kimono — this response ...

An African-American man has pleaded guilty after being accused of impersonating a white supremacist in a fictitious Facebook account to make death threats against an African-American university student. Dyron L. Hart, 20, of Poplarville, Mississippi, pleaded guilty Wednesday before U.S. District Judge Kurt D. Engelhardt to one count of communicating threats in interstate commerce, according to a Department of Justice statement. Hart admitted creating the fictitious account in November, pretending to be a white supremacist outraged by the election of ...

The battle raging over President Obama's health care plan has spread from across the aisles in Congress to across the country. Senators this week joined their colleagues from the House at town hall meetings as they spent their August recess in their home districts. But disruptive protests are turning town hall meetings into shouting matches and drowning out discussion over what is and isn't in health care plans in the House and Senate. Videos of the protests have been circulating ...

A blogger believed to be the target of the attack that brought down Twitter Thursday has told CNN the cyber assault was politically motivated and timed to coincide with the one year anniversary of the Russia-Georgia conflict. "Cyxymu" has identified himself to CNN as "George," and the owner of the Twitter, Facebook and LiveJournal accounts named by Facebook's security officer as being the target of a co-ordinated online attack. George told CNN in an e-mail his username is "the ...

Hackers slowed Twitter to a standstill early on Aug. 6, frustrating millions of users. For the culprits, all it took to snarl the popular social-networking site was one of the oldest tools in the Internet hacker handbook: the Distributed Denial-of-Service attack , a method that has been used in the past to crash some of the Web's largest sites, including Yahoo! to CNN. DDoS attacks are surprisingly low tech. Using a network of computers controlled by a single ...

An attack on the social networking site Twitter shut the site down for about two hours on Thursday morning, causing headaches in the online community and glitches in other Web sites like Facebook.

In his inauguration speech at the Iranian parliament, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad had something to say for almost everyone -- his supporters, his opponents and those he called "enemies" without naming names. He hailed what he called an "epic election" but didn't go into the turmoil of the past two months that ensued. No word on the reformist movement calling the vote rigged or demonstrators who chanted for weeks slogans such as, "Death to Ahmadinejad." No mention of those who demanded ...

Microsoft knows a good thing when it sees it. And what Google has going on with its search advertising business is a good thing -- which, of course, is why Microsoft want a bigger piece of it. To that end, it struck a deal yesterday to power the searches on Yahoo's various properties. The deal will increase the market share of Microsoft's search platform, Bing. The boost will help. In June, according to estimates from comScore, Microsoft's share in the ...

With rumors piling up about a forthcoming Apple tablet, it appears more and more likely that such a device will emerge soon. But what's still unclear is how this gadget will set itself apart from Apple's multimedia-savvy product line, including the iPhone and iPod Touch, as well as the scores of failed tablet PCs that have come and gone. Judging from the company's past moves, we're betting that Apple's tablet will be a media-centric device, focused -- at least ...