News Portal, latest news from around the world.

(CNN) -- For a "dead" gadget, the HP TouchPad keeps showing remarkable signs of life.

Nearly two weeks after Hewlett-Packard announced that it was discontinuing mobile devices and dramatically slashed the price of the TouchPad, customers are hunting them with renewed zeal.

The tablet has sold out, according to the company. Meanwhile, HP is considering making more of the devices -- and continuing to support them, despite the fact that independent developers are working to hack the tablets to run on Google's Android operating system, instead of the now-killed webOS.

"We have been surprised by the enthusiastic response to the TouchPad price drop, and we understand that many customers were disappointed that HP and our retail partners ran out of supply so fast," HP spokesman Mark Budgell wrote in a blog post Monday.

Like virtually every other device in its class, the HP TouchPad failed to make much of a dent in the iPad-dominated tablet market when it was released early last month.

But after HP announced August 18 that it was discontinuing mobile devices, remaining TouchPad inventory was slashed to fire-sale prices: $99 for a 16-gigabyte model and $149 for a model with 32 gigabytes of storage.

The device, which had originally sold for about $400 more, all of a sudden became one of the most sought-after item in the gadget world.

Via Twitter, Budgell let potential customers know Monday that there's no official word when, or if, HP will be making more TouchPads.

"Don't rush...no availability today," Budgell wrote.

He said there would be more information "in the next few days" on whether more of the tablets will become available.

But in an e-mail Monday, a spokeswoman described TouchPads as "temporarily out of stock."

For gadget lovers, the discounted TouchPad is a tradeoff. The assumption has been that the discontinued device won't get software updates, there will be no new apps created for it, and webOS, the operating system created by Palm and purchased by HP, will essentially become a dead platform.

But for many, a device that got largely positive reviews and was selling for $400 less than the iPad was a powerful temptation to jump into the still-emerging world of tablet computing.

"The bottom line is that the TouchPad, right now, is worth $99. Even if it never sees another ounce of code added to it, a gadget whose software soul is forever frozen in August 2011," wrote Matt Buchanan, a gadget reviewer at tech site Gizmodo. "The TouchPad is the second best tablet you can buy, at any pricepoint. It nailed all the big ideas about what a tablet should feel like".

And things could get even better.

Editor's note: Pete Cashmore is founder and CEO of Mashable, a popular tech-news blog. He writes occasional columns about social networking and tech for CNN.com.

(CNN) -- Google's new social network, Google+, is shaping up to be a hit for the search engine giant.

And yet Google continues to court controversy with its real names policy, which asks users to represent themselves with their real names or risk having their accounts suspended.

Critics say the move is harmful to political activists, victims of harassment and numerous other groups for whom using a real name online might pose a safety risk.

So why is Google being so stubborn about this issue and risking bad PR for the sake of a minor technical change? Why not just allow usernames, as Twitter already does?

'Identity service'

The answer may lie in comments made over the weekend by Google Chairman Eric Schmidt. During an interview in Edinburgh, Scotland, NPR's Andy Carvin asked Schmidt to justify Google's real-names policy.

"He replied by saying that G+ was build (sic) primarily as an identity service, so fundamentally, it depends on people using their real names if they're going to build future products that leverage that information," Carvin explained in a posting to Google+.

"Regarding people who are concerned about their safety, he said G+ is completely optional. No one is forcing you to use it. It's obvious for people at risk if they use their real names, they shouldn't use G+. Regarding countries like Iran and Syria, people there have no expectation of privacy anyway due to their government's own policies, which implies (to me, at least) that Schmidt thinks there's no point of even trying to have a service that allows pseudonyms."

In short: It's all about identity. More to the point: It's all about Facebook.

Researchers from MIT and Princeton have developed a smartphone application called "SignalGuru" that uses the camera from a dashboard-mounted smartphone to capture images of traffic lights. Once the images are captured, they're analyzed to detect whether the lights are green, yellow or red and then that data is passed along to other nearby SignalGuru users.

Using the resulting data, the app can relay to a particular driver how quickly he or she will need to drive in order to make the next light. If the next light is already red, the driver can coast up to it slowly instead.

(MORE: IBM Wants to Improve Your Commute With Traffic Prediction)

The researchers tested the app in Singapore, which uses dynamic traffic lights that change based on traffic levels and in Cambridge, Massachusetts, which uses dumb, old timed traffic lights spawned from the loins of none other than Satan himself (I live near Cambridge, believe it or not).

The results, according to MIT:

"By reducing the need to idle and accelerate from a standstill, the system saves gas: In tests conducted in Cambridge, Mass., it helped drivers cut fuel consumption by 20 percent."

That's pretty incredible, considering it requires no additional modifications to the car itself.

(CNN) -- A meeting on Thursday between the British government and Internet communications firms was friendly, not confrontational, according to people from the organizations that took part in the meeting.

At the meeting, the government "did not seek any additional powers to close down social media networks," the British Home Office, the government's home security department, said in a statement. "The discussions looked at how law enforcement and the networks can build on the existing relationships and cooperation to crack down on the networks being used for criminal behavior."

Spokespeople for the British Home Office declined to provide additional details about whether it broached the issue of imposing limits social media.

The gathering took place about two weeks after British Prime Minister David Cameron suggested that the government should impose limits on the "free flow of information" when it's "used for ill." "When people are using social media for violence, we need to stop them," he said then.

(CNN) -- People keep on flocking to sites like Facebook and Twitter, and young women are leading the way.

The percentage of Internet users who are on social-networking sites continues to climb, according to a survey released Friday by the Pew Internet & American Life Project.

In fact, it has doubled in the past three years, the report says, from about 29% in 2008 to 65% this year.

This year's Pew report also marks the first time that more than 50% of adults surveyed (Web users and nonusers) use social networking.

In February 2005, 5% of adults told Pew they used social media.

The report calls young adult women the "power users" of social-media sites.

About 89% of online women from 18-29 years old are on the sites and 69% of them say they tend to log onto social media every day.

Overall, 69% of women on the Web said they use social networking, compared to 60% of all men.

Pew said women have been "significantly more likely" to be on social sites than men since 2009.

Only search engines and e-mail remained more popular than social media among Web users, according to the survey

In one question, Pew asked people who have used social-networking to give a one-word description of their experiences.

(CNN) -- There's "God of War" and "Devil May Cry." "Kid Icarus" and "Battle for Asgard."

Plenty of video games use mythical gods or other characters and creatures from beyond to drive their stories.

But notably absent, at least among mainstream titles? The Bible. At least until now.

"El Shaddai: Ascension of the Metatron" (Ignition Entertainment) is based on the Old Testament figure Enoch, a man originally written about in the Book of Genesis who, according to the story, is taken to heaven without dying.

In the apocryphal Books of Enoch, which appeared in the Ethiopic Bible, he becomes the chief of the archangels and protector of heaven's treasures.

In "El Shaddai," Enoch is a priest who attempts to stop seven fallen angels from destroying the world. Ignition's director of business development, Shane Bettenhausen, said there have been plenty of games set in other kinds of mythologies, but "El Shaddai" developers wanted to tell a different story.

"The mythologies of the Western world are kind of off-limits in neo-modern popular culture. Everything biblical is off-limits unless you are trying to make something didactical," he said. "We felt most Christians in the Western world don't know this story.

"We felt there was some value in presenting this story modernizing it and basing a game on it, because it does have a good template of hunting down these fallen angels, bringing them back to face justice in Heaven."

Bettenhausen said the company made the story a new retelling of the Books of Enoch while being very careful not to step on the toes of believers.

(CNN) -- With the threat of Irene behind, airlines will resume operations Monday.

The three major airports serving New York -- Kennedy, Newark and LaGuardia -- and others along the U.S. East Coast will also reopen Monday.

Here is an airline-by-airline breakdown of operations that were made available early Monday morning:

Delta Air Lines

Flights will resume around noon Monday. The airline is undecided on adding new flights to make up for the weekend's canceled flights, but spokesman Morgan Durrant said Delta expects every customer to be accommodated in the next few days.

United Airlines and Continental Airlines

United and Continenal flights will resume Monday from the three major New York-area airports where operations were suspended Saturday and Sunday. The carriers also will resume service at airports in White Plains, New York; Boston; Hartford, Connecticut; Providence, Rhode Island; Portland, Maine; Manchester, New Hampshire; and Albany, New York, following Sunday flight suspensions.

Airline employees from other domestic locations will be in New York to assist with resuming operations, the airlines said in a statement.

Would you spend the night in this? The Sleepbox at the Sheremetyevo International Airport in Moscow resembles a vending machine from afar.



We figured tourist lodgings in expensive cities couldn't get more "basic" than capsule hotels.

We figured wrong.

A Moscow company is now marketing "Sleepboxes" -- freestanding, mobile boxes with beds inside -- for travelers stranded overnight, or those in need of a quick snooze. The Sleepboxes are meant to be installed in airports -- even at departure lounges -- and rented for 30 minutes to several hours at a time.

A Sleepbox is currently installed at the Sheremetyevo International Airport in Moscow.

"We travel a lot and many times we faced a problem of rest and privacy in airports," says co-designer Mikhail Krymov of design firm Arch Group, who together with Alexei Goryainov came up with the idea of Sleepbox. "And as we are architects, we like to think of solutions."

Measuring 1.4 meters wide, two meters in length and 2.3 meters in height, Sleepbox’s star feature is a two-meter-long bed made of polymer foam and pulp tissue that changes bed linen automatically.

It also comes with luggage space, a ventilation system, WiFi, electric sockets and an LCD TV.