Say you're buying a dog. You know the breed you want; you can picture it in your head. But what was the name? A bull terrier? A pit bull? A bull mastiff? Or what if you're in the market for a new camera You saw a friend with a credit-card-thin model at a party last weekend. But was that a Canon A Nikon A brand you've never heard of If you're like many people, you'd turn to the Internet for ...

The French National Assembly gave preliminary approval Tuesday to a measure that seeks to crack down on Internet piracy. The measure would impose fines of up to 300,000 euros -- the equivalent of about $440,000 -- as well as possible prison terms for the illegal download of films or music. The Assembly adopted the bill by a vote of 285-225, replacing a tougher version of the bill that was rejected as being unconstitutional. A committee made up of members of ...

Rep. Joe Wilson said Sunday he will not apologize again for yelling out that President Obama lied during the president's speech to Congress last week. "I am not going to apologize again," the South Carolina Republican said on "FOX News Sunday" when asked about pending disciplinary steps against him by the Democratic-controlled House of Representatives. Wilson said he already apologized to Obama and that the president accepted it. However, he insisted that Obama "was misstating the facts," and that Democratic ...

Fighting raged Tuesday between security forces and militants in northwestern Pakistan, leaving 43 militants dead and two commanders captured, authorities said. 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 post on the Gmail blog. ...

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 ...