Articles by Katherine Noyes

Gaming fans may find that life in "SimCity" suddenly gets a lot more realistic this fall with the release of "SimCity Societies", which has been designed to incorporate some of the harsh realities of global warming Through a partnership between Electronic Arts (EA) and energy giant BP, the next-generation version of the bestselling game series comb...

Following its acquisition of Stumbleupon earlier this year, eBay is wading deeper into the social networking waters with a collection of its own micro-communities designed to foster interaction and sharing among members, the company announced Wednesday The home-grown social networking feature, dubbed eBay Neighborhoods, currently includes more than...

Australian renewable energy firm Epuron, a division of German Conergy, plans to build what may be the world's largest wind farm in the outback of Australia, the company announced Monday With plans for between 400 and 500 turbines, the A$2 billion (US$1.8 billion) project in Australia's New South Wales (NSW) state could deliver 1,000 megawatts of cl...

Using digitally descrambled images of a suspected pedophile, Interpol issued a global alert Monday, asking for the public's help in identifying the man The man in the images had posted online about 200 images of himself sexually abusing 12 young boys in Vietnam and Cambodia, but every photo of him had been digitally altered to hide his face with a ...

A California state appeals court in San Jose has reinstated an age discrimination case against Google brought by former employee Brian Reid. A California Superior Court judge had dismissed the case in 2005 Reid sued Google in 2004 following almost two years of employment at the search giant, primarily as director of operations and engineering. He w...

BT Group has teamed up with FON to blanket the UK with free WiFi, the companies announced Thursday Under the agreement, UK-based BT's roughly 3 million broadband customers can join the FON WiFi-sharing network, which has 500,000 users and 190,000 hotspots worldwide, for free. The result, the companies say, will be the world's largest WiFi network....

In a move widely considered only a half-step toward openness, Microsoft on Wednesday announced that it will open up its .Net source code for developers to view, but not change The source code will be available later this year when Visual Studio 2008 and the .Net Framework 3.5 are released to manufacturing, Scott Guthrie, a general manager in Micros...

Yahoo, eBay and PayPal are teaming up to improve protections against phishing attacks, the companies announced Thursday The companies have adopted a new e-mail authentication technology, developed by Yahoo and known as "DomainKeys Identified Mail" (DKIM), that uses cryptography to verify the domain of the sender....

A federal district court judge issued two landmark decisions Tuesday in a nationwide class action suit against Target charging that the retail giant has "failed and refused" to make its Web site accessible to the blind Brought by the National Federation of the Blind (NFB), the suit charges that by failing to make its site accessible to blind users ...

Enthusiastic Wii gamers know that it can be hard not to get carried away in play, but one consequence of the fun can be a damaged Wii Remote. With such players in mind, Nintendo on Monday announced the new Wii Remote Jacket, which is designed to add an extra level of protection The Wii Remote Jacket is a durable, silicone cover for the Wii Remote t...

With the current ban on Internet access taxes due to expire on Nov. 1, tensions rose last week when a move to extend the ban stalled in the Senate The Internet tax ban has been in place since 1998, having last been renewed in 2004 for another three years. On Thursday, the Senate Commerce Committee was scheduled to vote on S. 1453, the ITFA (Interne...

Sony will launch its first organic light emitting diode (OLED) TV this December in Japan, the company announced Monday The 11-inch "XEL-1," which Sony calls the world's first such device, sports a screen just 3 millimeters thick and will sell for 200,000 yen (US$1,736). There is no North American release date planned at this time, Sony spokesperson...

Before the space shuttle Columbia's disastrous mission in 2003, NASA did not fully recognize the safety risk posed by the shuttle's protective foam. Following that tragedy, however, NASA buckled down and set to work, trying to come up with solutions Part 1 of this two-part feature looks at the details of the space shuttle's external tank and therma...

Palm staked its claim in the low end of the smartphone market Thursday with a new device priced at US$99.99 with a two-year plan and rebates The new Centro features voice, text, instant messaging, e-mail, Web, contact and calendar capabilities, along with a full-color touch screen and full keyboard. Due in mid-October, the device will be exclusive ...

The Oracle v. SAP intellectual property infringement lawsuit moved a step forward Tuesday, as Judge Martin Jenkins of the U.S. District Court in the Northern District of California assigned a trial date and made other procedural decisions in the first case management conference between the two parties Following a second case management conference i...

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

The failure of a system controller card at an AT&T office in Memphis, Tenn., Tuesday apparently caused a communications outage that grounded airplane flights and resulted in delays throughout the nation The interruption of communications occurred at 11:25 a.m. CDT at one of 20 air traffic centers run by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to ...

Customers who shop online at Walmart.com may soon have no way to speak with a live person over the phone to ask questions Thanks to a new "Customer Contact Reduction" program, the retailer by next week will remove its toll-free customer service support number, according to a Tuesday report in the New York Times. Instead, online customers will have ...

Ask an IT executive to define service-oriented architecture (SOA), and there's a good chance you'll get at least some kind of a reasonable answer. Ask that executive's functional peers the same question, and the answer might not be so clear SOA has become a hot topic in the IT world, and many view it as the next stage in the evolutionary process fo...

Users of Pudding Media's free, new Internet phone service might want to watch what they say, because the system listens for keywords in their phone conversations and displays related ads on their computer screens A consumer talking about movies, for example, may see links to trailers, reviews and show times for nearby theaters. A sports fan talking...