Articles by John P. Mello Jr.

In what's been called the "Academy Awards for Engineers," four distinguished figures in personal computer history will be awarded the Charles Stark Draper Prize tonight at a dinner in Washington, D.C Sharing the US$500,000 prize will be Robert W. Taylor, Alan C. Kay, Butler W. Lampson and Charles P. Thacker -- all key players at the celebrated comp...

The amount of Internet fraud perpetrated using a practice known as "phishing" increased 52 percent from December to January, according to the Anti-Phishing Working Group (APWG) In January, there were 176 new, unique attack types reported to the group, compared with 116 in December, the organization revealed in its monthly "Phishing Attack Trends Re...

The first vulnerability stemming from the Windows source code apparently leaked last week by one of Microsoft's developers has been posted on the Internet "It appears that it could be used to attack ordinary users, but according to the person posting it, it does not affect newer versions of Internet Explorer," said Stuart Moore, CEO of SecurityTrac...

Sharman Networks has moved to nullify a court order that allowed agents of Australia's music industry to raid the company's offices in Sydney last week in search of evidence for a copyright infringement case against the owner and distributor of Kazaa, a popular Internet file-sharing program The action by the Australian Recording Industry Associatio...

Diebold Systems, a US$2 billion company that makes most of its money by manufacturing ATM machines but most of its headlines by producing electronic voting devices, found itself in court Monday for alleged abuse of copyright protections created by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) The lawsuit filed by two Swarthmore College students and a...

As the entertainment industry attempted this week to overturn a court ruling protecting the operation of file-sharing services on the Internet, two peer-to-peer outfits rolled out new products that could cause more hand-wringing among movie and music execs Los Angeles-based StreamCast Networks released a new version of its Morpheus peer-to-peer sof...

Big Music and Big Movies will square off once again with Internet file-sharing services Grokster and Morpheus today in a California courtroom over what the "bigs" say is rampant copyright infringement taking place on those networks A lower court dismissed contentions that the owners of the services should be held responsible for copyright infringem...

The five-year antitrust probe of Microsoft in Europe appears to be drawing to a close, and there are indications that punitive action will be recommended against the Redmond, Washington-based software colossus Although lots of unnamed sources have been talking freely to the press about a draft of a decision in the case, the European Commission, Eur...

News of Microsoft's move to file XML-related patents in Europe and New Zealand is being seen in some quarters as an attempt by the Redmond, Washington-based software company to erect barriers to competitors seeking greater compatibility with the company's market-dominating office suite "When Microsoft added an XML format to Word, suddenly Word's fo...

Do you hate your cell phone but can't live without it? You're not alone. Nearly one in three adult Americans told researchers in a study released Wednesday that the cell phone was the invention they hated most but couldn't live without Thirty percent of the adults in the researchers' sample put the cell phone at the top of their necessary evils lis...

A hornets' nest of fury over a video game that urges its players to "kill the Haitians" has prompted a South Florida city to approve -- at least initially -- a sweeping ordinance to regulate games sold or rented to minors. The law, proposed by North Miami's Joe Celestin, a Haitian-American, imposes a $250 fine on anyone who sells or rents to minors without their parents' consent games in which players kill or cause harm "to a human form."

An established, clandestine network of compromised computers could become the launching pad for a superworm that would have a massive impact on the Internet The malware network was created by an unpublicized Trojan -- a malicious program that poses as a benign one -- called Sinit, which has already infected hundreds of thousands of computers, accor...

Digital video recorders that allow consumers to skip commercials in television programs they record might be more difficult to find in the future due to the "chilling effect" of a court case ended by a federal judge last Friday Judge Florence-Marie Cooper dismissed a lawsuit filed against 28 entertainment companies by five owners of a ReplayTV DVR ...

Linux is irritating Microsoft, and the software giant isn't going to take it anymore On Monday, the maker of the Windows operating system launched what it says will be a prolonged advertising campaign to "get the facts" before the IT community about the cost benefits of its OS over its open-source competitor....

Lawyers for the makers of "Grand Theft Auto: Vice City" (GTA/VC) are proposing to move a lawsuit against the controversial video game from state to federal district court in Florida "Big, powerful corporations usually try to make it as difficult as possible to litigate against them, so they move cases into the arena that is most costly for the plai...

The past year was a good year for bad guys on the Web. Fraud complaints surged 60 percent to 120,000 from 75,000 a year ago, according to the Internet Crime Complaint Center in Fairmont, West Virginia The Center, which changed its name last week from the Internet Fraud Complaint Center, maintains a database on Internet crime and acts as a clearingh...

Distributing software for sharing files on the Internet is legal even if the application is being used for illegal activity, the Supreme Court of The Netherlands ruled last Friday In upholding a lower court ruling, the high court found that Sharman Networks, maker of the Kazaa file-sharing application, did not infringe on the rights of music and mo...

Within six months, Philips Electronics expects to release a new interoperable digital rights management (DRM) system. That will be good news for music consumers currently befuddled by a hodgepodge of schemes promoted by the likes of Apple, Microsoft, Napster and RealNetworks "It is Philips' opinion that DRM solutions will be necessary to enable the...

Customers of big banks, beware. You might be surfing the Web with a bull's-eye on your browser. That's because Internet scam artists have targeted the customers of large financial institutions for their nefarious efforts The technique used by the grifters is a cyberspace version of the old bait-and-switch tactic that in the Internet age could be ca...

A scheme to counter the Balkanization of digital rights management (DRM) on the Internet was unveiled Wednesday by a standards group whose members include ARM, ContentGuard, Macrovision, Microsoft, Nippon Telegraph and Telephone (NTT), Universal Music Group and VeriSign The group -- called the Content Reference Forum (CRF) -- has posted specificati...