Professor Michael Wesch should be flattered. A cultural anthropologist at Kansas State University, over the past few years he's received a hundred-plus requests from people around the world eager to enroll in the school's graduate program for "digital ethnography," a subject that he's known for. One problem: no such program exists. Wesch teaches anthropology to undergrads and heads up a working group on digital ethnography. The demand for his non-existent grad program is perhaps indicative, though, ...

After months of talking about Windows Mobile 6.5, Microsoft is announcing on Tuesday that the first crop of phones to carry the Windows Phone brand are ready to hit the market. A host of new phones running the new operating system are expected to debut between now and the holidays, with many being announced later on Tuesday. AT&T has already announced two Windows Mobile 6.5-based phones -- the Pure and the HTC Tilt 2. In all, Microsoft has said ...

Microsoft is hoping that a new crop of phones this fall will help the company in its quest to stay relevant in the cell phone market. The software maker said that the first phones running Windows Mobile 6.5 will launch worldwide on October 6 and will include phones running on AT&T, Sprint, and Verizon Wireless. The new crop of phones will also be the first that Microsoft will sell under the "Windows Phone" brand, an effort to tap into the ...

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 ...

Thumbing through his local Swedish newspaper, Göteborg resident Mattias Akerberg found himself troubled by a full-page advertisement for Ikea. It wasn't that the Grevbäck bookcases looked any less sturdy, or that the Bibbi Snur duvet covers were any less colorful, or even that the names given to each of the company's 9,500 products were any less whimsical. No, what bothered Akerberg was the typeface. "I thought that something had gone terribly wrong, but when I Twittered about it, ...

Software giant Microsoft apologized Wednesday for the apparent bad judgment that led to the head of a black model being swapped for that of a white model in an online advertisement. The ad -- which showed three business people, one Asian, one white and one black -- was altered on Microsoft's Web site for Poland to place the head of a white man on a black man's body. "We apologized, fixed the error and we are looking into how it ...

Landing in stores October, Windows 7 is sparking a surprisingly heated debate (in our forums, at least) on whether or not upgrading from XP is a good idea. If you're in the "nay" camp, we're going to lay out seven reasons why you should consider switching your stance to "yay." When scanning our list, we politely encourage you to ask yourself, "Do I really want to continue using an eight-year-old operating system" Followed by "Don't I deserve better" Because no ...

College students used to complain about dining-hall mystery meat. Their new gripe? Puny e-mail inboxes. Students have been howling that school e-mail accounts are too small to handle their daily deluge of mail and attachments. To address that problem, a growing number of colleges and universities are outsourcing their e-mail. The companies swooping in to manage student accounts for free Google and Microsoft. Like search, software and operating systems, campuses are a burgeoning battleground for the tech titans. Google now manages e-mail for more than ...

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 ...