Articles by Katherine Noyes

Google soon will begin targeting kids 12 and under with tailored versions of its products, likely including its search functionality, along with offerings such as YouTube and Chrome The company is pushing to change make its products fun and safe for children, Pavni Diwanji, Google vice president of engineering, said last week in a USA Today interv...

NASA's Orion spacecraft on Friday successfully completed its first test flight, splashing down in the Pacific Ocean west of Baja California at 8:29 a.m. PST after orbiting the Earth twice in roughly four and a half hours NASA Administrator Charles Bolden, left, NASA Associate Administrator for the Human Exploration and Operations Directorate Willia...

Artificial intelligence eventually could bring about mankind's demise, renowned physicist Stephen Hawking said in an interview published earlier this week "The primitive forms of artificial intelligence we already have have proved very useful, but I think the development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race," Hawkin...

HP on Tuesday unveiled the EliteBook Folio 1020, a new family of business-oriented notebook PCs it claims are the thinnest and lightest in the industry so far The HP EliteBook 1020 and the ultra-lightweight HP EliteBook 1020 Special Edition both offer an ultrathin form factor measuring just 15.7mm, and they are designed with enterprise mobility in ...

Uber has disciplined the company executive accused of using an internal tool to track a journalist's whereabouts, it confirmed on Monday. The company offered no details about the nature of that reprimand, however, or about the possibility of taking similar action against another executive who publicly suggested the possibility of targeting journalists with a smear campaign...

The new full-disk encryption feature that's enabled by default in Android 5.0 Lollipop comes at a hefty price in terms of performance, according to a recent benchmark report In fact, when full-disk encryption is enabled, random read performance drops by 62.9 percent, while random write performance falls by 50.5 percent, AnandTech reported late last...

Google on Friday unveiled Contributor, an experimental service that lets users make a donation to support the websites they visit instead of viewing ads Currently available only by invitation, Contributor begins by asking users to set a monthly contribution amount between US$1 and $3. Then, when they visit a participating website, part of their con...

A Russian website has been posting live video streams from unprotected webcams in homes and businesses around the globe, Britain's Information Commissioner's Office warned on Thursday The website has gained access to the webcams using the cameras' default login credentials, which are freely available online but often don't get changed by their owne...

BitTorrent on Wednesday announced new plans for its Sync peer-to-peer Dropbox competitor, including a premium subscription option, along with other new paid products Sync, which was released in beta in July, is billed as a cloud-free file-sharing solution. Currently in version 1.4, Sync soon will graduate to version 2.0, with both an improved free ...

WhatsApp has added end-to-end encryption and enabled it by default in the latest version of its Android messaging application, partner Open Whisper Systems announced Tuesday The new feature taps Open Whisper's open source TextSecure encryption protocol to ensure that only a conversation's participants can read the messages they exchange. WhatsApp i...

The Republican Party and at least two outside political-spending groups used anonymous Twitter accounts to share internal polling data in the months leading up to this year's midterm elections, CNN reported on Monday Tweets posted to the accounts -- one of which was named after the fictional West Wing character Bruno Gianelli, who attempted to fund...

Skype on Friday announced Skype for Web, a new version of its VoIP service that can be used in a browser rather than through the dedicated application "Perhaps you're sitting at a computer that doesn't already have Skype downloaded," explained Jonathan Watson, a senior product marketing manager with Skype. "Or maybe you're on the go and using an In...

After close to a year of beta testing, Nvidia on Thursday officially launched its Grid on-demand game-streaming service. Due to become available on Nov. 18 in North America, Grid will be free through June 30, 2015, for users of Nvidia Shield tablets and portable devices. It will arrive in Europe next month and in Asia next year....

The European Space Agency's 1.4 billion-euros Rosetta mission on Wednesday achieved a first for humankind by successfully landing its Philae probe on comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. Now, the lander's fate hangs in the balance following a tense descent and the apparent failure of several key anchoring systems The ROLIS camera on Rosetta's lander, P...

Roughly 10 years to the day after the release of Firefox 1.0, Mozilla on Monday announced an updated version of its open-source browser, complete with a new Forget button aimed at protecting users' privacy "Forget gives you an easy way to tell Firefox to clear out some of your recent activity," explained Firefox Vice President Johnathan Nightingale...

Elon Musk, CEO of both SpaceX and Tesla Motors, soon may be venturing into new territory: the Internet satellite sector Musk is working with ex-Googler Greg Wyler, founder of WorldVu Satellites, on a US$1 billion project to develop relatively small and inexpensive models that can be used to provide Internet access around the globe, according to The...

The most successful phishing attacks manage to dupe their victims a full 45 percent of the time, according to a study released last week by Google On average, phishing's success rate is about 14 percent, but even the most obvious scams still manage to lure 3 percent of the people targeted to a fake website and convince them to turn over personal in...

Natural Machines this week took to the stage at the Web Summit in Dublin to demonstrate Foodini, a 3D printer that can be used to create pizza, pasta, burgers and a wide range of other savory and sweet foods Users begin by choosing the recipe they want to print, either from the Internet-connected device's onboard touchscreen or from their own PC or...

Jawbone on Wednesday announced two new fitness trackers: the high-end Up3 wristband and the entry-level Up Move clip device Using a multisensor platform, the US$179.99 Up3 captures detailed information about the wearer's heart rate, sleep stages and physical activity over the course of the day. It also connects with the Up App to deliver Smart Coac...

Google's Android stole share from all of its major mobile OS rivals over the past year to achieve a whopping smartphone market dominance of roughly 84 percent in the third quarter of 2014, according to a new Strategy Analytics report Apple's iOS, which weighed in with about 12 percent, lost more than a point of share to Android since the same quart...