Technology, Doh! | featured news

The family of Sunil Tripathi endured much emotional pain as speculation swirled that the still-missing Brown University student was a suspect in the Boston Marathon bombing. Users of the Reddit social news site fanned the flames — and now they, along with the site's leadership, are apologizing to Tripathi's family.

In February, Google ran a contest for Glass offering "winners" the opportunity to be "Glass Explorers," i.e. the guinea pigs who will test out Glass in the wild. Downside: Explorers have to pay $1,500 for the product and for the privilege of being called "Glassholes." Upside: They get to test out a brand new product before anyone else. One 26-year-old Explorer came up with an even better upside: he planned to auction off his pair of Glass on eBay to pay down his student loans.

The search giant says it inadvertently removed Digg, in its entirety, from its search engine... Digg, which bears little to no resemblance to the site it once was, is still alive and kicking as a curated collection of top news stories from around the Web -- just not in Google's world. If you queried Google for Digg links earlier this morning, you found that the search giant had no recollection that Digg ever existed. Seriously. As Martin MacDonald, an online marketing specialist, observed in a blog post, Digg disappeared altogether from Google's index.

The Internal Revenue Service says 660,000 taxpayers will have their refunds delayed by up to six weeks because of a problem with the software they used to file their tax returns.

The virtual water cooler, it seems, has nothing on the real thing. Yahoo! CEO Marissa Mayer has decided that the company will no longer abide by its long-standing practice of using employees who telecommute to work each day.

Three weeks after tweeting (and then deleting) a series of strange messages, former senator Scott Brown spoke publicly on the tweets for the first time. "Anyone ever hear of pocket tweet, pocket dial? I mean it was pretty simple," Brown told Boston's Fox 25. "I mean, I have an iPhone 5. If anyone has iPhone 5, the keys are small. It's very, very sensitive."

Tonight's debate between Jon Stewart and Bill O'Reilly infuriated many fans as a server crash left the event's live stream largely inaccessible  The debate took place at George Washington University in Washington, D.C. and was available to those outside of the auditorium only via a $4.95 pay-per-view live stream.

Facebook Inc. received final approval Wednesday for its purchase of photo-sharing application Instagram Inc., clearing the way for a cash-and-stock deal that has lost about a quarter of its value since an agreement in April.

Everyone's made a joke they thought was funny only to see it fall flat, but Park Jung-geun's attempt at humor could see him jailed for up to seven years in South Korea. Park, a photographer by profession, re-tweeted some messages from North Korea's official twitter feed, such as reports on the late leader Kim Jong Il's travels across the country and negative tweets about South Korea.

A former Boston University student who was ordered to pay $675,000 for illegally downloading and sharing 30 songs on the Internet says he will continue fighting the penalty, despite the Supreme Court's refusal Monday to hear his appeal.