Articles by Katherine Noyes

In recognition of Memorial Day,Ancestry.com announced Thursday that it is offering the largest collection of searchable military records online at no charge to users through early June The company's U.S. military collection, featuring more than 90 million names, captures all major wars and conflicts from American history over a span more than four ...

Before orbital travel becomes commonplace, there's another type of suborbital transit that will likely help fuel the orbital market while fulfilling a critical need in its own right -- "point-to-point transportation." Part 1 of this three-part series discusses the latest advances in commercial space travel. Part 1 also includes predictions about th...

NASA has awarded HP a seven-year contract that could be worth as much as US$5.6 billion, HP announced Wednesday Under the IDIQ (indefinite delivery indefinite quantity) contract, HP will deliver desktops, workstations and blade PCs with Linux and Unix capabilities, as well as servers and printers, among other offerings. Government purchasers will i...

List lovers, take note: Google on Monday added a new feature to its Google Trends report that reveals the top 100 fastest-rising Google search queries Much like Google Zeitgeist, a manually compiled list of popular searches that Google has produced for several years, Hot Trends takes the popularity list to a new level, with more up-to-date informat...

After a brief showdown last week with a group of attorneys general, MySpace announced Monday that it will give the group the information it requested about registered sex offenders with profiles on the site. The attorneys general delivered a subpoena to the social networking site on the same day Working with Sentinel SAFE, MySpace identified about ...

When online advertisers use pay-per-click advertising, as much as 15 percent of the clicks they pay for could be fraudulent, according to the results of a new study announced Friday Under a pay-per-click (PPC) agreement, an online advertiser must pay for every time a potential customer clicks on its ad. However, click fraud -- which is what happens...

After three weeks of coordinated cyberattacks on Estonian Web sites, NATO has reportedly sent an official to the country to help investigate About 1 million computers worldwide were reportedly used to conduct the denial-of-service attacks on Estonian government and corporate Web sites, swamping them with so much traffic they were forced to shut dow...

The U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals on Wednesday lifted a preliminary injunction against Google preventing it from displaying thumbnail versions of sexually explicit images owned by adult site Perfect 10 The thumbnail images in question are miniature representations of Perfect 10 photos that are illegally presented on other Web sites. Google inde...

When billionaire Charles Simonyi blasted off into space for a visit to the International Space Station last month, he not only made history as the fifth private citizen to fly into orbit. He also fulfilled what for many is a lifelong dream: To explore the final frontier The prospect of traveling into space is one that has captivated people for ages...

MySpace won't comply with a request by eight state attorneys general for it to supply information about sex offenders registered on the site, the company announced Tuesday. Citing the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA), MySpace said it is prohibited by law from turning over the information without a subpoena....

Attorney General Alberto Gonzales unveiled on Monday a comprehensive legislative proposal entitled the "Intellectual Property Protection Act of 2007" that would toughen copyright protections, including penalties for the attempt to infringe on a copyright Speaking before members of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Coalition Against Counterfeiting and Pi...

Attorneys general in eight states announced Monday that they have sent a letter to MySpace requesting information about sex offenders using the site Last December, MySpace said it had hired Sentinel Tech Holdings to check the site for registered sex offenders. That search uncovered thousands of offenders with MySpace profiles, according to Connecti...

There may still be another 18 months or so before the next presidential election, but it's already become very clear that Web 2.0 technologies have changed the terrain of the political campaign process MySpace, Facebook, YouTube and "Second Life" have all become a standard part of this new campaign world, as candidates reach out to voters in the pl...

Global warming may hit the eastern United States harder than scientists thought, resulting in extremely hot summers. Average summer high temperatures could reach almost 10 degrees higher in 2080 than they do today Eastern U.S. summer daily highs currently average in the low to mid-80s Fahrenheit. They will likely soar into the low to mid-90s during...

Apple, Microsoft, Adobe Systems and Real Networks are the targets of a Santa Cruz, Calif., maker of copyright protection technologies that has sent letters demanding that the tech heavyweights cease and desist "actively avoiding" the use of its products Media Rights Technologies (MRT) and its digital radio subsidiary BlueBeat.com issued a press rel...

IBM will begin investing US$1 billion per year across its businesses to dramatically increase the energy efficiency of information technology, the company announced Thursday As part of its "Project Big Green" plan that includes new products and services, Big Blue aims to sharply reduce data center energy consumption and to transform the world's bus...

In an unprecedented cooperative effort to combat climate change, 31 states have joined forces to create The Climate Registry, a national initiative to track greenhouse gas emissions The newly formed Climate Registry is a tool to measure, track, verify and publicly report greenhouse gas emissions accurately, transparently and consistently across bor...

A team of astronomers working with NASA's Chandra X-Ray Observatory has witnessed the brightest supernova ever seen, leading them to suggest that a similar explosion may be imminent in a star in our own galaxy "This supernova was not only bright, but also rather slow in its development, which means that when you take into account that it stayed bri...

Wal-Mart Stores has launched a 10-year pilot project to use solar power at 22 Wal-Mart sites in California and Hawaii, the company announced Monday Solar energy providers SunEdison, PowerLight and BP Solar will supply an estimated 20 million kilowatt-hours per year across the Wal-Mart locations, making this one of the largest solar power initiative...

More than half of "Second Life" users are from Europe, according to a study announced Friday that analyzed active users of Linden Lab's virtual online world A full 61 percent of the 1.3 million users who ran the official "Second Life" software and logged in in March were based in Europe, compared with 19 percent from North America and 13 percent fr...