Articles by Katherine Noyes

With the rumor mill still in overdrive following reports of a new, Google-branded Android phone going on sale directly to consumers as early as Jan. 5, it's not yet clear what effect it may have on the broader cellphone market Widely referred to as the "Nexus One," the HTC-manufactured phone will likely be sold in two configurations, according to a...

Early Monday morning, NASA launched a spacecraft that will map the entire sky in infrared light with more sensitivity and resolution than has ever been possible before A Delta II rocket carrying NASA's new Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE, launched from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California at 6:09 a.m. PST Monday and deposited the in...

Facebook users are now being required to review and update their privacy settings in light of changes the company has made to its privacy controls The latest round of changes -- announced last week by CEO Mark Zuckerberg -- include the elimination of Facebook's regional networks, the implementation of granular settings for individual pieces of cont...

Everyone makes mistakes now and then; the hard part is admitting it. Yet that seems to be just what Google did on Saturday following its acquisition of AppJet, maker of the EtherPad collaborative word processor The news first broke last Friday, when it was announced on the EtherPad blog that Google had acquired San Francisco-based AppJet....

Just days after news that it had helped identify and disable the accounts of more than 2,700 registered New York sex offenders, Facebook on Sunday announced that it has created an external advisory board on the topic of online safety The Facebook Safety Advisory Board comprises five leading Internet safety organizations from North America and Europ...

Some five months after Facebook began testing a series of changes to its privacy controls, CEO Mark Zuckerberg on Tuesday announced that the popular social network has now decided to make them official for its 350 million users worldwide The company will soon eliminate regional networks as a way of connecting users, and it will also add settings th...

What do Michael Jackson, Twitter and Swine Flu have in common? Answer: They were all among the most common search terms this year, according to reports released by the big search engines Google, for example, published its year-end Zeitgeist report on Tuesday, including a list of the fastest-rising Google searches, or those that reflected the greate...

Less than a week after Google released the code for its Chrome OS, Dell announced that it has succeeded in getting the operating system up and running on its Mini 10v netbook "Without a network connection, ChromiumOS is not very interesting," company blogger and technology strategist Doug Anson wrote on the Direct2Dell blog last week. "With a netwo...

Online shoppers took to their computers in droves on Black Friday, spending 11 percent more than they did a year ago and buoying e-tailers' hopes for a bountiful holiday season That's according to a report released Sunday by market research firm comScore, which counted US$595 million in online sales on Friday, making it the second-heaviest e-commer...

With the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen just a few weeks away, leading scientists on the topic probably had a lot of work they would have liked to accomplish this week That hasn't been possible, however, thanks to the recent anonymous theft of thousands of emails and documents from the University of East Anglia's Climatic Re...

It's not every brand new operating system that gets open sourced a year before it hits the retail shelves. Then again, Chrome OS isn't just any OS, and Google isn't just any company Indeed, that's just what Google did last week, making its brand new Chrome OS freely available for download by developers far and wide. Devices running the new operatin...

Thousands of emails and documents were stolen from a prominent climate research center in the UK recently and posted online, firing up a fresh controversy over global warming More than 1,000 emails and several thousand documents were apparently included in the hack attack on the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit (CRU), which is ded...

This fall has not been kind to T-Mobile First, the mobile operator had to account for mountains of lost data that had been stored by Sidekick customers on the infrastructure of Danger, the Microsoft-owned company that developed the Sidekick device....

Microsoft will soon release the source code and binaries for a Windows 7 tool that was recently found to contain code licensed under the GNU General Public License The tool in question is the company's free Windows 7 USB/DVD Download Tool, which enables consumers to create bootable USB drives or DVD backup media from the electronic software edition...

The Android army gained yet another recruit Monday with the release of Samsung's Galaxy Spica phone in Europe and the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), or former Soviet republics Equipped with an 800 MHz application processor and DivX support, the new device -- also known as the "I5700" -- reportedly runs Android 1.5, or "Cupcake."

Users of Google's location-aware mobile software can now track their whereabouts over time and receive alerts when contacts are nearby, thanks to two features added to the software on Tuesday The free application, Google Latitude, introduced earlier this year for a variety of cellphones, was originally designed to let friends see each other's locat...

It was exactly five years ago Monday that Mozilla released version 1.0 of its open source Firefox Web browser, and fans around the globe marked the occasion with a multitude of special events held as part of the "Light the World with Firefox" campaign Celebration ideas were plentiful at the Spread Firefox Web site, while photos of the results were ...

After a flaw was uncovered in some of its handset chargers that could expose consumers to a shock hazard, Finnish mobile giant Nokia on Monday announced a recall program through which it is offering a free exchange The problem affects a limited number of chargers of certain model types manufactured by Chinese third-party supplier BYD Electronic, No...

PayPal on Tuesday opened up a set of APIs that will allow developers to integrate its payment capabilities within applications Typically, online shoppers have to visit PayPal's site to complete purchases. The new functionality will let them complete their transaction without leaving a shopping site or game -- even allowing those who don't already h...

Promising faster performance and a bevy of new features, Mozilla on Friday released the first beta version of its Firefox 3.6 browser Built on the Gecko 1.9.2 Web rendering engine, the new version contains numerous improvements for developers and users, Mozilla said, including support for what it calls "personas," improved responsiveness and faster...