Articles by Katherine Noyes

Search online for a particular type of image today, and the results will reflect more or less exclusively the text that's associated with them. A new technology presented by two Google researchers last week, however, promises to use visual cues in the images themselves to rank their relevance In a paper titled "PageRank for Product Image Search," G...

Months of eager anticipation came to an end Thursday with the long-awaited release of Ubuntu Hardy Heron Both desktop and server editions of Ubuntu 8.04 were released as free downloads, and both are Long Term Support (LTS) releases, meaning that they come with commercial support for five years on the server and three years on the desktop....

IBM on Wednesday unveiled a new category of server designed specifically for cloud computing and Web 2.0 applications The iDataPlex system builds upon IBM's blade server background and more than doubles the number of systems that can run in a single IBM rack. It also uses 40 percent less power while quintupling the amount of computing that can be d...

Internet service providers that serve advertising when a user requests a Web page that doesn't exist are exposing their users to a giant security breach, according to security researcher Dan Kaminsky The vulnerability resulting from the practice, which is an increasingly common way for ISPs to make money from users' typos, was identified last week ...

In what surely came as a blow to many Linux aficionados, Red Hat announced Wednesday that it will not develop a desktop implementation of the operating system for the consumer market anytime soon "We have no plans to create a traditional desktop product for the consumer market in the foreseeable future," the company wrote in a post on its blog, cit...

A new fashion shopping site from Florida boutique La Ti Da is banking on personalized service to set it apart Visitors to ShopLaTiDa.com, based in Boca Raton, are invited to complete an online profile including profession, style sense, body measurements, preferred designers and areas of shopping where they might need assistance....

Microsoft is renaming its existing embedded Windows operating systems and supplementing them with additional offerings in key device categories, the company announced Tuesday Windows XP Embedded will become Windows Embedded Standard, while Windows Embedded CE will be renamed Windows Embedded Compact. Windows Embedded for Point of Service, meanwhile...

Adobe may still enjoy a resounding lead with its Flash rich-media runtime and player, but Microsoft appears to be gradually gaining ground with its Silverlight application platform At the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) Show 2008 in Las Vegas, Microsoft on Monday announced a raft of new companies that have adopted Silverlight, including ...

For the eight Florida teens accused of imprisoning, beating and videotaping 16-year-old Victoria Lindsay as they brutalized her for more than half an hour, the events of March 30 have led to kidnapping and battery charges that cast a dark shadow over their future For the rest of the world, the case has shone a bright light on the negative potential...

Until recently, the closest Facebook users could get to playing Scrabble online was Scrabulous, the wildly popular application launched by two Indian brothers back in 2006 That game -- essentially a Scrabble impostor -- now attracts some 600,000 users per day, but in the last few weeks a new, official beta version of the popular board game was quie...

Adding another bump in the road on the way to WiMax, Sprint has delayed the nationwide launch of its Xohm WiMax network The launch had been expected to happen this month, but now "it's not looking like it will be April," company spokesperson John Polivka told TechNewsWorld....

EMI Music has recruited Google CIO Douglas Merrill to head up its growing digital music business, the company announced Wednesday As president of EMI Music's digital business, Merrill will head a new global function that brings together for the first time leadership responsibility for all of the company's digital strategy, innovation, business deve...

The dangers associated with cell phones could far outweigh those tied to asbestos and smoking, an Australian doctor recently warned in a new report In his paper, "Mobile Phones and Brain Tumors -- A Public Health Concern," Vini G. Khurana, a staff specialist neurosurgeon at the Canberra Hospital and associate professor of neurosurgery with Australi...

Intel's low-cost Classmate PC, originally focused on emerging markets, will soon be available to U.S. and European consumers Intel is working with original equipment manufacturers to bring the second-generation Classmate to mature markets in the developed world later this year at prices likely between US$300 and $400, Agnes Kwan, an Intel spokesper...

After years spent battling obstruction of justice charges in an investigation of Credit Suisse First Boston, former investment banker Frank Quattrone is back with an investment firm of his own Qatalyst Group, launched Monday by Quattrone and some former colleagues, is a technology-focused merchant banking boutique based in San Francisco. Qatalyst P...

Japan's four major Internet service provider (ISP) organizations have agreed to cut off Internet access for users who repeatedly copy gaming software and music illegally online The organizations, which include the nation's Telecom Service Association and the Telecommunications Carriers Association, represent about 1,000 large and small domestic pro...

Net neutrality would make it harder for the movie industry to fight piracy, Dan Glickman, chairman and CEO of the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), told attendees at the movie industry's annual ShoWest convention in Las Vegas Net neutrality is "a clever name," Glickman said. "But at the end of the day, there's nothing neutral about this...

The "digital universe" of data was bigger than expected in 2007 and continuing to explode in size, according to a new study from IDC The study, sponsored by EMC and titled "The Diverse and Exploding Digital Universe: An Updated Forecast of Worldwide Information Growth Through 2011," found that there were about 281 billion gigabytes (or 281 exabytes...

A new technology unveiled Wednesday aims to prevent hardware privacy by protecting microchips with the virtual equivalent of an embedded "lock" that can be opened only by the patent owner Called "EPIC" -- short for Ending Piracy of Integrated Circuits -- the technique relies on established cryptography methods and introduces subtle changes into the...

Continuing its departure from a largely hardware-focused history, Siemens Communications on Monday announced a new software-only unified communications server The OpenScape Unified Communications (UC) Server can operate in virtually any existing IT or telephony environment, Siemens said, and is designed to remove the barriers that have traditionall...