Articles by John P. Mello Jr.

A group dedicated to preserving civil liberties on the Internet announced this week that it's throwing its weight behind the development of a technology to foster anonymity in cyberspace The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) of San Francisco said in a statement that it is sponsoring the Tor Project, which has created an open-source application t...

Spam and its evil offshoot, phishing, have become growing problems on the Internet. Not only has spam become a nuisance with its frequently offensive subject matter, but it is consuming increasing amounts of bandwidth. According to a report released by the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, an estimated 50 percent of all e-mail in 2003 was spam, which may have chewed up US$20.5 billion in technical resources...

A company that makes a tool for finding bugs in software code disclosed this week that the Linux kernel is far less flawed than many programs people pay money for According to San Francisco-based Coverity, its source-code auditing tool found the Linux 2.6 kernel had 985 bugs in its 5.7 million lines of code. The typical commercial software program ...

Industry analysts say the fastest growing operating system in the world -- Linux -- could be experiencing growing pains as growth outpaces the supply of IT professionals with expertise in this area "Linux is increasing its market share so rapidly that, in consequence, some companies find it difficult to secure the resources to handle Linux developm...

Universities have begun thwarting the operation of software that promises to accelerate Internet performance and protect its users from malware infections because they feel the program is actually spyware A number of schools, including Columbia University, Cornell, Indiana State and Penn State, have advised their students to avoid using, or have bl...

Landing a contract with a major record label can be nirvana for an artist,but it's a heaven out of reach for many musicians. That's because backingan act is risky business. While record companies can make millions from an artist's success, they can also lose millions, if the artist fails tocatch on with the public Now the world's largest music comp...

Recent low-key efforts by Adobe Systems to bolster its presence in the Linux community makes good business sense, according to one analyst who covers the company Adobe, which makes well-known software brands Acrobat, Illustrator and Photoshop, is keeping all its bases covered by expanding its Linux presence, maintained Martin Pyykkonen of Janco Par...

Expectations are high that Sun Microsystems will make some significant announcements this month about an open-source version of its Solaris operating system Reportedly, key pieces to the open-source project could be revealed as early as November 15 when the company has scheduled its quarterly SunNetwork Conference at the Tech Museum of Innovation i...

The world's largest distributor of Linux expects 50 percent of its revenuesto be coming from overseas sales within the next year -- a revelation oneanalyst sees as a bit of a capitulation "It's our goal that within the next 12 months, 50 percent of our revenues befrom sales outside the United States," explained Red Hat spokesperson LeighDay....

Less than a handful of zombie network operators are responsible for all thephishing attacks in the world, according to CipherTrust, an Atlanta-basedmessage security firm In an analysis of its global customers' e-mail traffic patterns during thefirst two weeks of this month, CipherTrust researchers found that less thanone percent of all e-mail conta...

Have you ever felt a burning desire while taking your dog for a walk to knowhow much money your neighbors have contributed to the Democratic andRepublican parties? Well, now you can whip your cell phone out and find out A New Jersey software tinkerer has written a Java-based program he'sdistributing free that can access Federal Election Commission ...

A court decision that civil libertarians argue could have a far-reachingeffect on the privacy of Internet communications in the United States willbe reviewed again by federal judges in Boston The ruling, handed down by a panel of three federal judges in June, foundthat e-mail service providers may divert and read their customers' messageswithout re...

When was the last time you updated your anti-virus software? Even if you update your AV software frequently, there's still a gap between the time a virus is released into the wild on "day zero" and when virus fighters can update their programs to squash the malware....

While consumers have been slow to move to digital TV, that hasn't deterred Congress from trying to goose the transition process That process includes snatching back spectrum currently used to broadcastover-the-air analog TV channels -- a process that, under current law, issupposed to occur by 2007 -- but only if 85 percent of the households inAmer...

Financial services companies might be unwitting contributors to the nation's identity theft problem, according to a report from Forrester Research in Cambridge, Massachusetts The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) estimates that identity theft costs American businesses US$50 billion to $60 billion a year. "Despite this clear threat to their business, f...

For companies burdened with legacy systems they can't seem to get rid of, this could be the jackpot they've been waiting for A Los Gatos, California, startup maintains it has perfected a program that allows software applications compiled for one processor and operating system to run on another processor and operating system without any source code ...

The techniques used to develop open-source software like Linux have proven to be so effective that they've been adopted by malware writers to improve their mischievous ways "There's a community of worm builders creating, almost in an open-source fashion, Trojan source code that can be downloaded, compiled and released into the wild," said Scott Cha...

A federal appeals court in Boston has been asked to take a second look at a decision that some say could have a far-reaching effect on the privacy of Internet communications in the United States The decision handed down by a panel of appeals court judges ruled that monitoring the content of people's incoming e-mail by a service provider does not vi...

Sender authentication might work as a club to beat down phishing attacks on Web denizens, but it does little to fight spam. That's the finding of a study released this week by CipherTrust, a messaging security firm in Atlanta On the basis of analyzing some two million messages received between May and August by more than 1,000 CipherTrust customers...

The words "copy protection" make Adam Gervin wince. Gervin is senior marketing director for the entertainment technologies group at Macrovision, in Santa Clara, California. Macrovision is a company best known for cooking up ways to thwart the copying of movies and music from tapes and discs He's also point man in Macrovision's quest -- through a ne...