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What makes one online shopping experience better than another?

With 88 percent of customers giving their approval, Amazon easily remained the best in online consumer satisfaction this year. A new survey from analysts at ForeSee points to the site’s huge inventory and easily navigable stores as keys to its success.

Losers this year included Apple, whose 80 percent score was its worst showing in four years. JCPenny.com had the sharpest fall, from 83 percent approval to 78.

The lowest ratings registered were for flash-sale site Gilt.com and Fingerhut.com, which each earned just 72 percent approval from customers.

ForeSee's report is based on 24,000 surveys of customers from the top 100 online retailers completed between Thanksgiving and Christmas.

Despite long-gestating Hollywood efforts to curb online piracy, demand for illegal content remained strong in 2012. And some familiar targets topped the most-downloaded list.

In single episodes of TV shows, HBO’s Game of Thrones led the pack, with more than 4 million downloads of the second-season finale alone. Showtime’s Dexter and CBS’s The Big Bang Theory each cleared 3 million downloads for single episodes.

Among movies, sleeper teen comedy Project X was the surprise No. 1, followed closely by the latest Mission: Impossible installment and The Dark Knight Rises. Each film was pirated more than 8 million times.

Piracy has remained more or less steady in recent years, but it was the subject of especially strong scrutiny this year due to the failed Stop Online Piracy Act. Studios have since instituted the "Copyright Alert System,” which targets illegal downloaders through their Internet providers.

Ten months after her death stunned fans around the world, a tabloid report raises the outlandish prospect that Whitney Houston may have been murdered.

According to the National Enquirer, a private investigator named Paul Huebel claims the pop singer was killed by drug dealers after she racked up $1.5 million in debt. Huebel says he has surveillance video from the Beverly Hilton where Houston was staying when she died in February that supports his story.

Contrary to the coroner’s conclusion that her death was accidental, Huebel claims that Houston’s body shows classic “defense wounds” consistent with someone fighting for her life.

Huebel won’t say who hired him to look into Houston’s death. The coroner determined that the 48-year-old singer drowned in a bathtub as a result of chronic cocaine use and heart disease.  

Should the Westboro Baptist Church be deemed a hate group?

More than 260,000 people who signed a petition to the White House say yes. The biggest ever on the White House's We the People site, the petition calls for the funeral-crashing independent church to be hit with some sort of "imposed regulation."

The Kansas-based anti-gay group is notorious for picketing the funerals of soldiers and gay Americans, and most recently for threatening to protest outside funerals for the Newtown school-shooting victims.

Even if some official action is taken against Westboro, that doesn't guarantee it'll disappear anytime soon. President Obama signed a law earlier this year to prohibit protests two hours before or after military funerals and to keep demonstrators 300 feet away.

A huge whale that beached itself on the New York shoreline has died.
      
The 60-foot finback whale came ashore Wednesday in the Breezy Point neighborhood in Queens. Finbacks are one of the largest animals on Earth, second only in size to the blue whale, and they have a lifespan of up to 100 years. Whales and other sea mammals beach themselves for a number of reasons such as old age, disease or human causes, like a boat strike.
      
Every year, New York beaches see a few large whale strandings and occasionally, as with this incident, the animal is still alive when it appears. But the finback stopped breathing Thursday when it washed back to shore after drifting away during the high tide. A necropsy will determine a cause of death later this week.

People blink as many as 15 to 20 times a minute, far more than needed to keep our eyes lubricated. So why do we do it?

A new paper posits that our constant fluttering is actually a form of wakeful rest, or a mental break between thoughts. Researchers discovered that when people blink, brain activity spikes in areas associated with such brief reprieves, improving our ability to tune in to our current activities.

The study was born from the observation that human blinking is not random but actually predictable from person to person. People watching the same movie, for example, tend to blink at the same time.

The research sets a blueprint for future studies on just where our mind goes each time we close our eyes.

Correction, Dec. 26: An earlier version of this video said people blink 15 to 20 times a second.

Before long, recharging your devices could be as simple as holding them up to the sun.

Stanford researchers have unveiled new peel-off solar cells—flexible energy devices that can be attached to paper, plastic, and glass surfaces alike.

The cells are placed in a bath to affix them to something, and they are removable and reusable. Researchers suggest placing them on cellphones and business cards, or using them to mimic decals on windows. They can even be used for emerging “smart clothing,” textiles with built-in technological features.

If the hackers don’t get your email, the government might.

The Senate has sent legislation to President Obama that strips out an amendment that would have forced law enforcement to obtain warrants before reading the emails of U.S. citizens stored in the cloud. 

The new measure is a tweak to the Video Privacy Protection Act, which outlaws the disclosure of video-rental information unless given consent by customers. The act was adopted in 1988 after failed Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork's rental history was leaked to the Washington City Paper.

With President Obama's signature, the law would continue current rules that let the government collect emails and other cloud data that has been stored on a third-party server for six months or more.

So for now, think twice before you send emails—because Big Brother could easily be watching.

She may have presided over many Christmases past, but Queen Elizabeth proved she's still hip enough for Christmas present.

The queen took her annual Christmas address one step further this year, recording the speech at Buckingham Palace using 3-D technology. The technical innovation comes 80 years after George V began the Christmastime tradition in a speech broadcast over the radio.

Despite having just celebrated her Diamond Jubilee this past June, the queen still shows an interest in modern technology that will hopefully continue with her heirs—we await Prince William's future royal Christmas hologram.