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 ...

Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, the medical ethicist and oncologist who advises President Obama, does not own a television, and if you catch him in a typically energized moment, when his mind speeds even faster than his mouth, he is likely to blurt out something like, "I hate the Internet." So it took him several days in late July to discover he had been singled out by opponents of health-care reform as a "deadly doctor," who, according to an opinion column ...

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 ...

Christina Cimino was logging onto Twitter on Thursday morning when something happened that she found deeply unsettling. "I got some weird error message, and I'm like, 'What's going on!" the 24-year-old said. That error message was the scourge of online social networkers worldwide on Thursday as cyber-attacks shut down Twitter and caused sustained glitches in other social-media sites like Facebook and the blogging site LiveJournal. Twitter co-founder Biz Stone wrote the sites were the victims of what "appears ...

John Hughes, the producer, writer and director whose 1980s films such as "Sixteen Candles," "The Breakfast Club" and "Some Kind of Wonderful" offered a sharp-eyed look at teenagers and their social habits, has died, according to a statement from his representative. He was 59. Hughes died of a heart attack while taking a morning walk in Manhattan, according to the statement. Hughes, who was also a prolific screenwriter and producer, was at his peak in the 1980s, when his films ...

It's no secret that sedentary behavior contributes to obesity and chronically poor health. But not all sedentary behaviors are created equal, according to a new study that examines the link between blood pressure in children and their choice of inactive pastimes, including watching TV, using the computer and reading. Researchers in the U.S. and Spain collaborated on the study of 111 children ages 3 to 8 and found that of all the forms of inactivity they examined, television-viewing was ...

In a shockingly unsurprising move, Google CEO Eric Schmidt resigned from Apple Inc.'s board of directors today. This was inevitable, since both companies are staking their future growth on the explosion in mobile computing. So why did it take so long? Three years ago, the mobile horizon looked very different from how it has turned out. Google was working on Android, its open-source-ish operating system for cellular phones. Its strategy: Let a million mobile phones blossom! So ...

Two days before leaving Tehran and three weeks after Iranian Intelligence had come around looking for me, I was taking no chances. The notes, essays and photos on the protests I had been regularly sending back for publication would have to be sent to the States separately...with my grandma. She had a flight to the U.S. one month after mine and although the training manuals at Langley likely do not recommend it, I spent the better part of ...

Given the magnitude of Japan's recession, it should perhaps come as little surprise that the fantasy-obsessed animation industry has received a hard dose of reality. Yasuo Yamaguchi, executive director of the Association of Japanese Animators, said the industry has been rocked by the country's deepest recession since World War II. "The spread of free Internet downloading is having a deadly effect," he said. Japanese animation is roughly a $2 billion-a-year industry. Revenues peaked in 2006 but have since fallen ...

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 ...