Gmail, Google's popular free e-mail service, was inaccessible to many of its 36 million users Tuesday afternoon, causing widespread chatter on Twitter and other social networks. The cause of the outage, which Google said lasted an hour and 45 minutes, was not apparent by early Tuesday evening. "We know many of you are having trouble accessing Gmail right now -- we are too, and we definitely feel your pain," Google Engineering Director David Besbris wrote in a 4:15 p.m. ET ...

A hoax video purporting to show Michael Jackson hopping out of a coroner's van alive was produced by a German television station as an experiment, the broadcaster told CNN Monday. It was made to show how easy it is to spread rumors online, said Heike Schultz, a spokeswoman for RTL, the leading private broadcaster in Germany. "We sent out a press release before we did the video to alert everyone that it was fake, but once posted it spread really ...

His father and uncle fall to the ground, crying uncontrollably. After 11 years of not knowing, relief of finding a child they thought had been lost forever pours out of them. That child is Christian Norris -- he's 17 now and he stood there unmoved as his father and uncle wept; perhaps because to him both men are distant memories. "I don't really remember my dad that much," Christian said quietly "I just remember my uncle, who raised me much ...

The art of portraiture, once reserved for the rich, the royal and the holy, has found a new mass appeal online. Some avid social-network users are commissioning artists to create small digital images to represent themselves in the online world. Other Internet-savvy people use automated computer programs and Web sites to generate posterized likenesses of themselves. Matt Held, a 38-year-old painter in Brooklyn, New York, has gained Internet celebrity for painting peoples' Facebook photos and then giving them to his ...

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 ...

The Pirate Bay -- the BitTorrent tracker revered by file sharers across the globe and reviled by some of the world's biggest entertainment companies -- is under siege like never before. Black Internet, the largest Internet service provider supplying bandwidth to the site, said Monday that a court in Sweden has threatened it with fines unless it discontinued service to Pirate Bay. The site's operators did find an alternative Web connection and got Pirate Bay up and running, though ...

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 ...

Formula One's new Team U.S. F1 will have the financial backing of YouTube co-founder Chad Hurley -- and the video sharing Web site's chief executive expects to make a big impact in motorsport. The American, who along with co-founders Steve Chen and Jawed Karim sold YouTube to internet giant Google for $1.65 billion in 2006, has faith in the team's prospects for the 2010 season. It is fronted by engineer Ken Anderson, formerly involved with NASCAR team Haas CNC Racing, ...

A 14-year-old boy allegedly beaten at a boot camp in China for young Internet addicts was in critical condition Thursday, less than three weeks after a youth at a different camp died, Chinese state media reported. Internet use has skyrocketed in China, especially among teens. And Chinese parents have turned to hundreds of training camps that offer to wean their children -- mostly teenagers -- from excessive Internet use. There are at least 400 private rehabilitation clinics or camps in ...

A man who crashed his plane in the Florida Panhandle in an apparent attempt to fake his death was sentenced Wednesday to more than four years in federal prison, officials said. Marcus Schrenker, 38, of McCordsville, Indiana, pleaded guilty in June to charges of destruction of an aircraft and causing the Coast Guard to respond when no help is needed. He was sentenced to 51 months in prison Wednesday, said a spokeswoman for the U.S. attorney's office in the ...