Articles by John P. Mello Jr.

Sony Semiconductor Solutions, Nikon, Foxconn, Scenera and Wistron have formed an alliance to create standards that allow surveillance and IP cameras to play well with each other The NICE Alliance, unveiled Monday, aims to create a new smart camera ecosystem, along the lines of the mobile ecosystems that have become so familiar. The "NICE" acronym s...

Apple's plans to open a number of healthcare centers for its employees surfaced this week Called the "AC Wellness Network," the centers will offer "a unique concierge-like healthcare experience for employees and their dependents," according to a website Apple set up for the initiative.

Samsung on Sunday raised the curtain on the latest models of its flagship Galaxy smartphones, the S9 and S9+, featuring improved imaging and audio performance Two standout features in the 12-megapixel rear-facing camera are improved low light performance and super slow-mo video....

As beneficial as artificial intelligence can be, it has its dark side, too. That dark side is the focus of a 100-page report a group of technology, academic and public interest organizations jointly released Tuesday AI will be used by threat actors to expand the scale and efficiency of their attacks, the report predicts. They will employ it to comp...

Within an hour of the shooting at a Florida High School last week, divisive messages began pouring out of Twitter accounts believed to be controlled by Russia At a rapid speed, messages began flooding Twitter using popular hashtags like #guncontrolnow, #gunreformnow and #Parklandshooting to exploit the rampage by a lone gunman with an assault rifle...

Google's Chrome Web browser on Thursday began blocking some of the Net's most annoying types of ads Chrome's built-in ad filter blocks ads based on standards devised by the Coalition for Better Ads, an industry group whose membership roster includes Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Procter & Gamble, Unilever and The Washington Post....

Google on Tuesday rolled out a developer preview of its new AMP story format, which is designed to give content publishers an easy way to deliver news and information on mobile devices with visually rich, tap-through stories "On mobile devices, users browse lots of articles, but engage with few in-depth," noted Rudy Galfi, product manager for AMP a...

Critics have begun weighing in on Apple's HomePod smart speaker, and they're loving the device's sound but don't have much affection for its smarts The HomePod's sound outclassed top-shelf competitor SonosOne, according to Matthew Panzarino, writing for TechCrunch....

Intel has designed a pair of smart glasses that won't make you look like a hopeless geek Called "Vaunt," the peepers, which are still in the prototype phase, look like ordinary glasses, save for a faint, red glimmer that occasionally appears on the right lens....

Three corporate giants on Tuesday announced they were banding together to provide healthcare for their 1.1 million employees The companies -- Amazon, Berkshire Hathaway and JP Morgan Chase -- plan to form a company "free from profit-making incentives and constraints" in order to improve employee satisfaction with their healthcare coverage as well a...

HomePod, Apple's long-awaited entry into the torrid smart speaker market, will be available Feb. 9, the company announced Tuesday The HomePod, which is not quite 7 inches tall, will be offered in white and space gray. It can be pre-ordered at Apple's website for US$349 starting Friday....

There was some bad news for owners of the latest iPhone models on Monday Batteries in the iPhone 8 and X may have shorter life spans than those in prior models, according to an article in ZDNet....

A bug in the software used by Google Cast devices such as Chromecast and Home can slow down or crash WiFi networks The problem -- initially believed to be isolated to a particular router model made by TP-Link -- appears to affect models made by other manufacturers, including Asus, Linksys, Netgear and Synology....

Community-owned fiber-to-home broadband networks generally charge less for entry-level service than private providers, according to the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University, which released its findings last week Despite lower "teaser rates" private providers offer during the first year of service, publicly-owned fiber-t...

Apple on Monday responded to an open letter from investors who called for the company to address the negative impact of the iPhone on children and teens. Though the company listed a number of controls provided to help parents screen content, it offered little to address the investors' chief concern: the amount of time teens and younger children spend on phones...

The mushrooming popularity of smart speakers like Amazon Echo and Google Home will fuel e-commerce in the coming year "You're going to have a whole new frontier of commerce space driven through voice and brand recognition," said Michael Levine, marketing vice president at Photon....

Scientists at Harvard University on Monday unveiled a metalens that has the potential to shrink the size of any device that uses a camera while at the same time improving performance While traditional lenses are made from glass, metalenses use a flat surface peppered with nanostructures to focus light. One problem with metalenses has been their ina...

Moves that allowed major e-commerce players to jockey for position both off and on the Internet made headlines in 2017 "The year was a triumph for market leaders," said Mike Comstock, a senior adviser at GrandCanals....

The United States on Tuesday accused North Korea of responsibility for a global ransomware attack that locked down more than 300,000 computers in 150 countries earlier this year The U.S. now has enough evidence to support its assertion that Pyongyang was behind the WannaCry attack in May, Homeland Security Advisor Tom Bossert told reporters at a Wh...

Is social media evolving into an antisocial medium? Days after one of its former execs argued that the answer is yes, Facebook published a post addressing the issue "I think we have created tools that are ripping apart the social fabric of how society works," Chamath Palihapitiya, who once served as vice president for growth at Facebook, told an au...