Articles by John P. Mello Jr.

Apple will release a professional version of its all-in-one iMac desktop computer with a US$5,000 price tag on Thursday Up to now, all-in-one computers in general and iMacs in particular have been seen as stylish offerings for home and family, but Apple has changed that in a big way with the iMac Pro....

Some HP laptops users came with a preinstalled program to capture the keystrokes of users, a security researcher recently discovered The researcher, Michael Myng aka "ZwClose," discovered the keylogger software while trying to solve a keyboard problem for a friend. The software is turned off by default....

A method for scrambling data to protect it from the super powerful computers of the future has received a speed boost from a team of researchers from Duke and Ohio State universities and the Oak Ridge National Laboratory. The method uses quantum key distribution to guard data from prying eyes, wrote Nurul T. Islam, Charles Ci Wen Lim, Clinton Caha...

Four big tech players this week moved to improve their handling of open source software licensing violations Red Hat, Google, Facebook and IBM said they would apply error standards in the most recent GNU General Public License agreement, GPLv3, to all of their open source licensing, even licenses granted under older GPL agreements....

A popular technique used by website operators to observe the keystrokes, mouse movements and scrolling behavior of visitors on Web pages is fraught with risk, according to researchers at Princeton's Center for Information Technology Policy The technique offered by a number of service providers uses scripts to capture the activity of a visitor on a ...

Facebook on Tuesday raised the ante for messaging apps photo quality with the announcement of 4K support for Messenger "We're making significant investments in how people communicate visually on Messenger," wrote Facebook Messenger product managers Sean Kelly and Hagen Green in an online post. Starting Tuesday, "people can send and receive photos i...

New version releases of browsers don't get the buzz they used to get, but Firefox Quantum is an exception The latest version of the Mozilla Foundation's browser, released Tuesday, is all about performance. Firefox is twice as fast as it was a year ago, Mozilla claimed. It is not only fast on startup -- it remains zippy even when taxed by multitud...

Facebook on Tuesday announced that it was preparing a plugin for its popular Messenger platform that will allow website visitors to chat with a human or bot without leaving the site Customer Chat is one of a number of changes in the version 2.2 update of the Messenger platform revealed at the Web Summit in Lisbon, Portugal....

A three-pronged banking malware campaign has been infecting Android phones since the beginning of this year, according to security researchers Attackers have been stealing credentials, planting the Marcher banking Trojan on phones, and nicking credit card information. So far, they have targeted customers of BankAustria, Raiffeisen Meine Bank and Sp...

Reviews of Apple's next generation iPhone X have started appearing online, and for the most part, critics have showered praise on the product "The iPhone X is clearly the best iPhone ever made," wrote Nilay Patel for The Verge....

Researchers have found a way to use neural networks to create DSLR-quality photos from snapshots taken with low-end smartphones A team of scientists at the ETH ZurichComputer Vision Lab recently published a paper describing a deep learning approach that uses neural networks to translate photos taken by cameras with limited capabilities into DSLR-qu...

A new feature that Facebook recently has been testing in a handful of countries could hurt publishers everywhere if it should roll out globally The feature removes users' Liked pages from their main News Feed and aggregates them in a separate space called "Explore."

Google on Monday rolled out an online payment service that's designed to accelerate the online checkout process While the new offering isn't quite Amazon One-Click, it will eliminate many of the annoying steps that can slow down the online purchase process and often result in abandoned shopping carts....

Apple and General Electric on Wednesday announced a new software development kit for Apple's mobile operating system, iOS. The SDK, which will be available for download next week, enables developers to create applications for Predix, an Internet of Things platform made by GE "Together, Apple and GE are fundamentally changing how the industrial worl...

As Google's new Pixel 2 smartphones get ready to hit the shelves, reviews of the models have begun mushrooming online While the new phones generally have received positive grades, many reviewers found the their design boring....

Amazon on Wednesday pulled the wraps off a new premium e-reader that's waterproof and has a sharp 300 pixels-per-inch display The Kindle Oasis has a 7-inch Paperwhite display and sports an aluminum back and ergonomic shape that makes it easier to read for prolonged periods. It has a battery life measured in weeks, and it can charge from zero to ful...

Apple has made a retro version of iTunes available, 12.6.3, reviving features removed by the mammoth 12.7 overhaul it released last month. News of the release surfaced Monday in a post on Reddit by user vista980622 The company was low key about the release, saying in an online post dated Sept. 23 that the retro version was for business partners who...

Apple's use of facial recognition to unlock its iPhone X may open the gates for developers champing at the bit to bring the technology to the Android world Face ID, which will replace fingerprint scanning in Apple's new US$1,000 iPhone X, uses Apple's TrueDepth 3D camera to verify the owner of a phone and unlock it....

A refresh of Google's critically acclaimed Pixel smartphones is expected Wednesday when the company holds its annual product launch event at the SFJAZZ center in San Francisco Although their features won't be known officially until Google raises the curtain on the phones at the event, leaks -- including photos -- have given the public a good idea o...

Microsoft on Monday announced that it has been working on a language for a computer that doesn't exist The company unveiled the language -- as yet unnamed -- at its Ignite conference in Orlando, Florida. Part of its Visual Studio product, it will run on a quantum simulator and quantum computer....