Articles by John P. Mello Jr.

Hundreds of millions of dollars soon could start flowing into online betting emporiums due to Monday's U.S. Supreme Court decision giving states the power to regulate sports wagering "Right now there's a tremendous black market for illegal, offshore sports book being offered to U.S. citizens," said Matthew Kalish, chief revenue officer of DraftKing...

A newfound flaw in email clients that use PGP and S/MIME to encrypt messages can be exploited to expose the plain text of the missives, according to a paper published Monday By injecting malicious snippets of text into encrypted messages, attackers can use the flaw to make the email client exfiltrate decrypted copies of the emails, explained the au...

Google on Tuesday revealed some major new features in the next version of its Android operating system for mobile devices Now in public beta, the OS known as "Android P" includes features designed to address growing concerns about phone addiction and distraction....

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella on Monday sounded a call for computing to empower everyone "The world is becoming a computer," Nadella said in the opening keynote address at Build 2018, the company's premiere event for developers in Seattle....

Facebook plans to offer members a tool that to prevent tracking of their online activity outside the network The Clear History feature will allow users to see which websites and applications send Facebook information when they use them, delete the data and prevent Facebook from collecting and storing it in the future....

Four trade groups representing 4,000 publishers on Monday blasted Google's approach to compliance with Europe's General Data Protection Rules. The new rules are set to take effect at the end of the month Under its new GDPR-compliant policy, Google, as a provider of digital advertising services to publishers, will have sole control over data sent to...

Amazon plans to bring a home robot to market as early as 2019 Codenamed "Vesta," after the Roman goddess of home and family, the project is several years old, but hiring for it recently has ramped up with an eye toward placing prototypes in employees' homes by the end of the year, Bloomberg reported Monday, citing people familiar with the plans....

Apple plans to launch a news subscription service within the next year The new service will combine features from its recent Texture acquisition and Apple's existing news app, Bloomberg reported Tuesday, citing people familiar with the matter....

Facebook has developed a new advertising service designed to predict the future behavior of consumers, The Intercept reported Friday, after viewing a confidential document describing the offering The service uses FBLearner Flow, an artificial intelligence prediction engine the company introduced in 2016....

A Web standards milestone announced Tuesday could point to the end of the road for pesky passwords. The new standard, WebAuthn, has won near-final approval from the World Wide Web Consortium, which establishes Web standards....

A group of nonprofits on Monday announced they would fund an initiative to study Facebook's role in elections and democracy The organizations will pay the expenses of researchers whose projects are accepted for the initiative, and Facebook will give the scholars access to proprietary data that has met the company's new standards for heightened use...

Gesture control and a curved body may be in the iPhone's future Apple has been experimenting with those features for the iPhone, and they could be ready for prime time in two to three years, Bloomberg reported Wednesday, citing "people with knowledge in the matter."

The Mozilla Foundation on Tuesday unveiled its plans for Firefox Reality, a browser designed specifically for mixed reality headsets The browser combines the beneftis of Mozilla's existing Firefox browser -- most notably the robust performance of its Firefox Quantum technology -- with Servo, its experimental Web engine....

Apple on Tuesday announced a refresh of its iPad as part of a new approach to the education market. CEO Tim Cook and other Apple officials also outlined a number of new education initiatives at an event held at Lane Tech College Prep High School in Chicago The new 32-gigabyte, 9.7-inch iPad, which will sell to consumers for US$329 and to students f...

Facebook on Sunday confirmed that its Messenger and Lite apps for Android smartphones routinely collect call and text histories The call and text history logging are opt-in features for people using Messenger or Facebook Lite on Android devices, the company said in a post.

A hardware wallet for virtual currencies with millions of users has been compromised by a 15-year-old security researcher Saleem Rashid explained how he cracked the firmware on the wallet produced by Ledger in an online post Tuesday....

Many Facebook members reportedly have shuttered their accounts in the wake of reports that Cambridge Analytica, a voter profiling company working for Donald Trump's presidential campaign, harvested data from 50 million users, unbeknownst to them The data firm used the information to develop techniques that formed the basis of its work for Trump's ...

Google on Wednesday said it will stop serving ads for cryptocurrencies and related content in June The ban includes but is not limited to initial coin offerings, cryptocurrency exchanges, cryptocurrency wallets, and cryptocurrency trading advice....

Fitbit on Tuesday added a new smartwatch to its wearables line with a pricetag of US$199.95 The Fitbit Versa, which will reach global retail outlets in next month, will be the lightest metal smartwatch in the U.S. market. It includes a new dashboard that simplifies the way health and fitness data is accessed on the device....

Americans were targeted on social media by Russian agents on a mission to harvest personal information, The Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday The agents pretended to work for organizations promoting African-American businesses as a ruse to obtain personal information from black business owners during the 2016 presidential election campaign, ac...