Articles by John P. Mello Jr.

A rich cache of data on some 533 million Facebook users was posted to a hacker forum over the weekend and is available to download for practically free. The information is from a data breach that occurred in 2019, but hasn't been widely available until now The data was posted to an English-speaking cybercriminal forum called RaidForums by a hacker ...

Online businesses are losing potential customers and substantial amounts of revenue because they're dependent on traditional password systems and outdated customer authentication models, says a report released Tuesday by an access and identity management company Lost customers and revenues are caused by password sharing and friction created at webs...

If the United States wants to out-compete China in key technology markets, Congress and the Biden Administration must act now, maintained a Washington, D.C. think tank in a report released Monday "With the rise of China, the U.S. economic and technology environment has fundamentally and inexorably changed," explained the report by the Information T...

Creating a smooth functioning interface for smart glasses that allows its wearers to operate in an augmented reality world has proven to be a challenging task, but Facebook believes it may have a solution on the human wrist In a blog published last week, the company revealed it has been working on a wrist controller for its AR glasses....

A Big Bang of cash is needed to bring rural Americans into the Information Age, according to a report released Monday by a Washington, D.C. think tank Nearly one-in-five rural Americans don't have broadband Internet access, but that could change with the use of carefully targeted subsidies through a process known as a reverse auction, noted the rep...

A new social media platform based on voice messaging launched Monday Called Swell, free apps for the platform can be found in Apple's App Store and in Google Play....

Malicious online actors used email as their prime vehicle for delivering malware to their victims in the last quarter of 2020, HP and Bromium reported Tuesday The HP-Bromium Threat Insights Report found that 88 percent of malware was delivered by email into its targets' inboxes, many times evading measures at email gateways to filter out the infect...

Microsoft on Monday reported that multiple malicious actors were taking advantage of vulnerabilities in the company's Exchange software last week to attack systems at organizations that have failed to patch the flaws To help organizations that haven't deployed Microsoft's security tools, the company released the malware hashes and known malicious f...

Skeptics of giving computers control over high-risk activities like driving cars were given some ammunition last week when researchers at OpenAI discovered their two-month-old machine vision system could be tricked with a pen and paper into misidentifying objects The AI laboratory published a paper March 4 that revealed their new system could be fo...

A road map for continued U.S. leadership in artificial intelligence was revealed Monday in a 756-page report released by a national commission Two years in the making, the report by the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence made a number of recommendations to make the United States a leader in the AI age. Those include:...

Nostalgia website MyHeritage has launched a new service that allows you to create lifelike animations of faces in still photos The AI-powered service called Deep Nostalgia, launched last week, is free to try and is remarkably accurate in depicting how a person would look if captured on video. Their eyes blink, their head moves and their mouth forms...

Despite an environment conducive to phishing scams, malicious actors achieved only a marginal increase in success in 2020, according to a report from cybersecurity company Proofpoint Catastrophic events, like a pandemic, coupled with hasty technological change such as many people forced to work from home immediately, have been a rich environment in...

Nearly 30,000 Macs in 153 countries have been infected with a new malware strain that security researchers are calling Silver Sparrow Discovered by researchers at Red Canary, the malware has been sitting on it hosts waiting for a payload that never arrived....

Researchers have discovered a way to identify existing drugs that can be potentially repurposed to fight COVID-19 in the elderly The drugs are identified in an article published Monday in the journal Nature Communications by researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Harvard University, and ETH Zurich in Switzerland....

A cyber intruder broke into the computer network of the water treatment system of a Florida city and attempted to poison it with lye News of the attack was made public Monday by officials of Oldsmar, who revealed the attack was foiled by an operator at the facility within minutes of its launch....

Global sales of electric vehicles in 2020 surged despite a drop in overall sales of passenger cars, a market research firm reported Monday Sales of EVs jumped 39 percent globally, reaching 3.1 million units, while sales of passenger vehicles fell 14 percent, Canalys reported....

A step toward engineering a new generation of powerful quantum computers has been made by a team of scientists and engineers at the University of Sydney, Microsoft and EQUS, the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Engineered Quantum Systems The team, which published their findings in the Jan. 25 issue of Nature Electronics, invente...

Microsoft is set to step in with its Bing search engine should Google make good on its promise to cut service to Australia, the country's prime minister revealed Monday Speaking at the National Press Club of Australia, PM Scott Morrison said he has spoken to Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, who is confident Bing could meet the needs of Australians shou...

An online map of surveillance cameras in New York City is in the works The map project is part of a larger campaign called "Ban the Scan," sponsored by Amnesty International, which is partnering on the initiative with several other tech advocacy, privacy, and civil liberties groups....

Google sent a shock wave through the advertising and publishing industries last year when it announced it planned to scrap third-party tracking cookies, which are an important tool for online marketers. Not to worry, the company announced Monday that it has a viable alternative in the wings "It might be hard to imagine how advertising on the Web co...