Articles by John P. Mello Jr.

First, it was flaming smartphones. Now it's exploding washing machines That's the situation Samsung found itself in last week when the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission issued a warning about certain top-load washing machines made by the company between March 2011 and April 2016....

Medical device manufacturer Animas on Tuesday warned that its OneTouch Ping insulin pump system was susceptible to hacking "We have been notified of a cybersecurity issue with the OneTouch Ping, specifically that a person could potentially gain unauthorized access to the pump through its unencrypted radio frequency communication system," reads the ...

Google on Tuesday unveiled a new smartphone and home hub that squarely aim at products from market leaders Apple and Amazon The company's new branded smartphone, called "Pixel," marks a departure from past efforts. Up to now, Google's Nexus phones were made by a variety of manufacturers that sold them under their brands....

Facebook on Monday announced Marketplace, a new mobile app that facilitates buying and selling between peers Marketplace allows members of a community to discover, buy and sell items, noted Facebook Product Management Director Mary Ku....

It's no longer a question whether hackers will influence the 2016 elections in the United States -- only how much they'll be able to sway them Leaked emails already have cost a Democratic Party chairperson her job, and the FBI last month issued a flash warning that foreign cyberadversaries had breached two state election databases....

Germany's data protection regulator on Tuesday ordered Facebook to stop collecting and storing data from WhatsApp users in the country Facebook also must delete any data it already may have harvested from German WhatsApp users, according to Johannes Caspar, Hamburg Commissioner for Data Protection and Freedom of Information, who issued the order....

The website of prominent security blogger Brian Krebs is back online this week after sustaining one of the largest distributed denial of service attacks in Internet history DDoS attacks typically disrupt service at a website by flooding it with junk traffic. In this case, garbage traffic assaulted Krebs' site at 620 gigabits per second. By comparis...

Yahoo on Thursday disclosed that a data breach in late 2014 resulted in the theft of information from at least 500 million customer accounts. Based on a recent investigation, it appears that state-sponsored hackers carried out the attack, the company said....

GoPro earlier this week refreshed its product line, announcing two new action cameras, a cloud service and a drone Its new Hero5 Black camera (US$399.99) can capture 4K video at 30 frames a second and still photos at 12 megapixels, with RAW and WDR support....

Nikon on Monday announced its new KeyMission line of shooters, marking its entry into the 360-degree and action camera business The KeyMission 360 (US$499.95, pictured above) can corral 360-degree video in 4K UHD at 24p, as well as in the more traditional HD 1080p. It also shoots 30-megapixel stills....

Congress earlier this month lowered the hammer on the U.S. Office of Personnel Management in a report on the massive data breach that resulted in the theft of 4.2 million former and current government employees' personnel files, as well as 21.5 million individuals' security clearance information, including fingerprints associated with 5.6 million of them...

Confidential information about international athletes surfaced on the Internet Wednesday -- the second such exposure this week Russian hackers allegedly stole the information from the World Anti-Doping Agency. It includes confidential data on medical drug exemptions given to 25 athletes from eight countries.

The iPhone 7 may be the best version of Apple's smartphone to date, but it's garnering lukewarm reactions from reviewers and pundits The practical improvements in the new iPhone are praiseworthy, wrote Andrew Cunningham in his review for Ars Technica, but he cautioned would-be buyers about the price they would have to pay for the upgrade....

At the request of the FBI, Israeli authorities last week arrested Itay Huri and Yarden Bidani, both 18 years old, for operating vDOS, a DDoS-for-hire service that raked in more than half a million dollars in two years DDoS attacks flood websites with garbage data in order to disrupt their operation and deny users access....

Apple raised the ante for cameras in flagship phones with the announcement of its iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus on Wednesday Others already have taken the dual-camera approach to smartphone photography -- notably HTC, LG and Huawei....

The death of the printed book appears to have been greatly exaggerated Nearly three quarters of participants (73 percent) in a recent Pew Research Center study said they had read a book in the last year, largely on paper....

Apple used to guard details about a new iPhone more closely than Fort Knox, but that doesn't seem to be the case any more. The shift has been glaring with the iPhone 7, slated for introduction on Wednesday It's widely believed that the new iPhone has no headphone jack. Sound is piped to the user through a set of EarPods that connect to the phone th...

Apple cofounder Steve Wozniak recently said removing the headphone jack in the next version of the iPhone is going to "tick off a lot of people." It's been rumored for months that Apple would be scrapping the 3.5 mm headphone jack in the iPhone 7 it's expected to unveil next week Such a move, Wozniak said in an interview, could upset users who have...

Snapchat and Instagram, look out. Apple has you in its sights. The company is working on a video-sharing app with features similar to those found in Snapchat and Instagram, Bloomberg reported last week The app, possibly slated for release in 2017, will allow users of Apple devices to record a video, apply filters and draw on it, then share it with ...

The European Union on Tuesday nailed Apple with a US$14.5 billion bill for back taxes "The European Commission has today has adopted a decision that Apple's tax benefits in Ireland are illegal," said EC Competition Chief Margrethe Vestager at a press conference in Brussels....