Articles by John P. Mello Jr.

April may be the cruelest month in the minds of poets, but January is the cruelest month for retailers January, also known as Returnuary in retail circles, can be a month when merchants see their margins melt due to product returns....

Artificial intelligence was an inescapable technology in 2025 and will be even more so in 2026, particularly in cybersecurity While generative AI has posed significant challenges for infosec pros, the spread of agentic AI in the new year will further burden already-stressed security teams. On the flip side of that coin, though, is the promise of AI...

Deepfakes are a growing problem for any organization jacked into the internet. They can be especially dangerous when weaponized by nation-states and cybercriminals "When people think about deepfakes, they often picture fake videos or voice-cloned calls," noted Arif Mamedov, CEO of Regula Forensics, a global developer of forensic devices and identit...

An e-commerce customer service support company is predicting a 45% increase in customer returns following Christmas, a development that will tax many retailers' support systems and erode their holiday profits "The 45% increase in returns directly causes support teams to slow down, with the time taken to solve an issue climbing by 28%," Dublin, Irel...

A new law took effect in Australia on Tuesday that bans anyone under 16 from having a social media account on platforms such as TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, Snapchat, X (formerly Twitter), Twitch, Reddit, and Threads Platforms that violate the law face fines of up to AU$49.5 million, or about US$33 million....

If you're thinking of letting your employees use AI browsers like Comet and Atlas, think again That's the advice in a recent report from influential global technology advisory firm Gartner....

Samsung raised the ante in the foldable smartphone market on Tuesday with the introduction of the Galaxy Z TriFold The three-panel phone folds out to create a 10-inch QXGA+ display (2160 x 1584) with a peak brightness of 1600 nits and a 120Hz refresh rate....

The United States urgently needs a virtual cybersecurity academy to train cyber defenders for national security, according to the Internet Security Alliance (ISA) It noted in a recent update to its National Defense Cyber Threat Report that the federal government needs to muster the resolve shown at the end of World War II when the U.S. established ...

With energy demand soaring -- largely due to the growth of data centers supporting a burgeoning AI industry -- concerns have arisen about where the nation will find the energy capacity to meet its power needs A new report by the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF) argues that capacity can be found in the near- and medium-term, g...

More than four out of five consumers agree that high-value content -- detailed descriptions, multiple images and videos, and customer reviews -- is more important to them when they're making a purchasing decision than brand recognition, according to the 2025 Omnichannel Shopping Benchmarks report by product experience management solutions provider Syndigo...

As the Trump Administration mulls slapping tariffs on foreign robotics, it's being warned that such a move could disrupt efforts to revive manufacturing in the United States The U.S. Commerce Department has begun collecting comments in an investigation authorized by section 232 of the Trade Expansion Act of 1962, which allows the agency to impose t...

AI browsers, like Perplexity's Comet and Brave's Leo, can offer conveniences not found in conventional browsers, but they also pose potentially higher risks "The ability to quickly gather and summarize available information without having to invest hours of clicking and reading is incredibly valuable," observed Andy Bennett, CISO of Apollo Informat...

Corporate real estate firms are enthusiastically embracing artificial intelligence, but few are achieving the goals they expected from the technology, according to the results of a survey of more than 1,000 real estate leaders across 16 global markets The number of companies running corporate real estate (CRE) AI pilots has exploded from 5% to 92% ...

A call to disrupt the People's Republic of China's economic espionage campaign against the United States was sounded in a new report by a Washington, D.C., technology think tank "China’s campaign of economic espionage against the United States spans cyber intrusions, insider theft, and technology transfer disguised as collaboration," declared the...

Enterprises are overestimating the reliability of their cloud providers and need to rethink their cloud strategy, according to Sam Barker, vice president of telecoms market research at Juniper Research He maintained in a company blog that enterprises over-rely on a single provider for their cloud services, although that may change in the wake of th...

Shoppers will be looking for year-end deals like they always do as the holidays approach, but more of them will be using artificial intelligence to do it, according to a report released Monday by the global management consulting firm Boston Consulting Group (BCG) GenAI tools such as ChatGPT, Gemini, and Google AI have become practical shopping aids...

Criminals are monetizing stolen identities at higher rates and stealing larger sums, while more victims report severe emotional distress, including self-harm Those are the findings of the 2025 Consumer Impact Report, prepared by the Identity Theft Resource Center (ITRC), a nonprofit organization founded to provide identity theft victim assistance a...

One of the main obstacles to bringing a commercial quantum computer to market is reducing qubit error rates, the analog of bit error rates in the digital world. IBM has reportedly made an advancement in the space by running its advanced error-correction algorithm on off-the-shelf AMD hardware In a paper submitted Friday to arXiv, IBM researchers re...

The electric vehicle market is headed toward a "recalibration" in 2026, according to the tech analysis site TechSpot "The global electric vehicle market is facing an unexpected reckoning," wrote Skye Jacobs for TechSpot. "Once hailed as the future of transportation, battery-powered cars are now rapidly losing value, eroding the finances of private ...

New research by NewsGuard has revealed that the latest version of OpenAI's video creation tool Sora 2 can be prompted to advance false or misleading information 80% of the time NewsGuard, which rates the credibility of news and information websites, maintained that its findings demonstrate the ease with which bad actors can weaponize the powerful n...