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 ...

Oil giant Exxon Mobil Corp. has pleaded guilty and will pay $600,000 in fines for the deaths of 85 protected migratory birds in the company's wastewater ponds in five states. China announced earlier this year that it planned compulsory installation of the Green Dam-Youth Escort software, ostensibly meant to protect young online users from pornography. The installation was postponed on June 30. Minister Li Yizhong said Thursday that his ministry was still working on its plans and that the Green ...

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 ...

Between GPS devices on your car's dashboard and digital maps of almost any locale in the world on your smartphone or laptop, it's hard to get lost these days. We may take these 21st-century services for granted. But someone still needs to do the actual legwork of mapping these places and making sure the information is accurate. Meet the people at Tele Atlas, the company that provides so-called "base maps" to such high-profile clients as Google, MapQuest and RIM, the ...

Some Web designers are staging an online revolt against an old version of Microsoft's Internet Explorer browser, which they say is hampering the ability of the Web to move forward in a cool and interactive way. The designers say Internet Explorer 6, which was released in 2001 and since has been updated twice by Microsoft Corp., is crippling the Internet's potential and slowing down the online experience. They also blame IE 6 for giving webmasters a collective headache, because they ...

Blair MacIntyre imagines a world where tiny clouds of information -- Facebook statuses, business cards, Twitter posts -- float above all of our heads. In some ways, it's not that far from reality. Advancements in mobile phone technology have cleared the way for a coming wave of "augmented reality" applications that merge the physical world with information compiled about people and places on the Internet. "When the technology gets there, this stuff could be amazingly useful and mildly terrifying in ...

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 ...

Personally, I like my pizza deliveryman to do one thing: bring me my dinner. But mention this guy to a group of women, and, while most of us will think of cheesy pies with tomato sauce, a good number of us will conjure up that hilariously bad porn cliché, the randy fellow who's always ready to accept sex in exchange for a medium sausage and mushroom. Notwithstanding how lame the cliché is, or how simply bad most porn is ...

Got a few grand to spare for a $3,000 phone? Yeah, we didn't think so. Nobody does -- and that's a problem for the makers of luxury phones, such as Motorola, Bang & Olufson, LG and Vertu. After years of chasing the ultra-wealthy with exclusive devices that carry designer logos and promise craftsmanship from materials such as sapphire and stainless steel, luxury phone makers are now pulling back. "The culture has shifted away from conspicuous consumption, so if you are ...

In less than a week, Google announced an operating system to compete with Windows, while Microsoft announced that Office 10 will include free, online versions of its four most popular software programs -- a shot at Google's suite of web-based office applications. And not more than a month and a half ago, Microsoft unveiled its new search engine Bing, which it hopes will steal market share from Google and finally make it real money online. From the news of it, ...