Articles by Katherine Noyes

Daily traffic to video-sharing sites such as YouTube has almost doubled in the past year, according to a new study released Wednesday by the Pew Internet & American Life Project Whereas only 8 percent of Internet users surveyed at the end of 2006 said they had used a video-sharing site the day before being surveyed -- an indicator that they visit s...

When the Federal Communications Commission's much-anticipated auction of 700MHz wireless spectrum begins later this month, at least one planned participant will be conspicuously absent: startup Frontline Wireless, which apparently shut its doors this week "Frontline is closed for business at this time," company spokesperson Mary Greczyn told the E-...

A federal judge has sentenced a former systems administrator for Medco Health Solutions to 30 months in prison Tuesday for planting a "logic bomb" in Medco's computer systems that was designed to wipe out critical data on more than 70 servers, U.S. Attorney Christopher J. Christie announced A programming error prevented the bomb from detonating, bu...

The battle between Blu-ray and HD DVD may be settling down at last, but in the mobile TV arena another competition is just getting under way Two different mobile digital television technologies will enter testing this year, each backed by a different set of vendors. In one camp, there's the A-VSB platform developed by Samsung Electronics and Rohde ...

There have been many indications in recent months that the music industry is on the cusp of a sea change, and two announcements on Monday suggested that the change is nigh First, as anticipated in reports last week, Sony BMG Music Entertainment officially announced the launch of its Platinum MusicPass, a series of digital album cards that enable co...

It's 2008, and that means the year of Linux on the desktop is finally here! According to some, that is. As 2007 drew to a close and the new year dawned, the mood has waxed somewhat more philosophical and contemplative than usual on the Linux blogs Discussion was understandably more subdued over the holidays, generally creating less controversy and ...

Media chain Landmark Communications announced Thursday that it is investigating the possible sale of its businesses, including the Weather Channel and Weather.com Landmark has retained investment banks J.P. Morgan and Lehman Brothers to assist in exploring strategic alternatives, the company said. Potential suitors for the Weather Channel and Weath...

There are many reasons why a company might opt to conduct virtual meetings rather than face-to-face ones. Cost is one, particularly with fuel costs soaring; having a widely dispersed base of employees, clients or partners is another common one An increasing number of companies are also meeting up in the virtual world because of concern about the en...

Doomsayers may be fond of predicting the imminent collapse of the Internet under the weight of video and other bandwidth-intensive applications, but at least one infrastructure provider is on track to increase its capacity tenfold by 2010 VeriSign, which manages the critical infrastructure that handles registration and resolution traffic for the .c

One might argue that China and the Internet are both like high-speed trains. Both are growing at an extremely rapid pace, and both are apparently unstoppable global economic forces that are reshaping the economic landscape. Unfortunately, one might also argue that they are on a collision course "While the Chinese government has embraced the Interne...

After almost a decade at the helm of open source software vendor Red Hat, Matthew J. Szulik is stepping down, to be succeeded at the start of the New Year by former Delta Airlines executive James M. Whitehurst as president and CEO Szulik, who replaced Bob Young as CEO in 1999 shortly after Red Hat's initial public offering, will continue to serve a...

Online content creation is an increasingly popular pastime among American teens, but there are sharp differences in the media preferred by boys and girls, according to a new report from the Pew Internet and American Life Project A full 64 percent of online teenagers ages 12 to 17 engage in at least one type of content creation today, up from 57 per...

Intel has released a software initiator package designed to promote the development of Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) solutions for Linux, the company announced Tuesday Now available for download, the software is licensed under the GNU General Public License version 2 and is open to all FCoE developers for source code download, code contributio...

The Federal Communications Commission on Tuesday published the list of companies that have applied to participate in its auction of the 700 MHz (megahertz) band of wireless spectrum next month, and included among the long list of expected players were a few surprises Oil giant Chevron, for one, apparently plans to bid, as does billionaire entrepren...

A security update released by Microsoft last week is wreaking havoc with Internet Explorer for some users Shortly after Microsoft issued its MS07-069 security bulletin last Tuesday, users began posting reports of problems with Internet Explorer on support newsgroups, including the Windows Update group on Microsoft's site....

A Silicon Valley startup with an unlikely name announced Monday a new platform designed to enable telephony in a wide variety of applications Using an open platform to facilitate connections between telephony and the Web, Ribbit is working with a community of more than 600 developers to help voice-enable a raft of new applications. One for Salesfor...

Internet users are increasingly curious about the information about them that's available online, but they're not doing much to monitor that information in a structured way That's one finding of a new study released Sunday by the Pew Internet and American Life Project. Entitled "Digital Footprints: Online Identity Management and Search in the Age o...

Linux fans love to debate the pros and cons of myriad technologies, but none more than operating systems -- and you can bet the usual winner isn't based in Redmond or Cupertino This week the question was raised once again on Slashdot, spurred by a Linux Magazine comparison of Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon and Mac OS X Leopard and drawing well nigh 600 commen...

Google's proposed US$3.1 billion merger with DoubleClick encountered another stumbling block this week when two privacy groups filed a petition with the Federal Trade Commission, asking its chairwoman, Deborah Platt Majoras, to recuse herself from voting on the deal because of what they say is a conflict of interest There is a conflict of interest ...

Sun Microsystems on Monday plans to announce several key enhancements to its StarOffice and OpenOffice.org office productivity software suites StarOffice 8 and the corresponding open version, OpenOffice.org 2.3, have both been updated with a variety of new features, including the ability to edit for blog servers along with enhanced charting capabil...