Articles by John P. Mello Jr.

A patent for an infrared system that could be used to shut off iPhone cameras and microphones at live performances is one of dozens awarded to Apple last month The company first applied for a patent for the infrared camera system in 2011, according to Patently Apple, which noted the technology's great potential....

Nest on Wednesday introduced an outdoor surveillance camera to complement its indoor Nest Cam The Nest Cam Outdoor will go on sale this fall for US$199. It is easy to mount on any outdoor surface, according to the company, and even has a magnetic base for attaching to gutters....

Polaroid Swing, a new iOS app for creating animated photos, on Tuesday debuted at the App Store. The app has ties both to instant photography pioneer Polaroid and Twitter founder Biz Stone Polaroid Swing lets a "phonetog" capture 1-second videos posing as images that become animated when a phone is tilted, or when they're swiped or tapped.

The U.S. government's campaign to counter the Islamic State's social media presence is bearing fruit, the Associated Press reported Saturday. More anti-ISIS content than pro-ISIS content is appearing on the Net by a ratio of six to one Twitter traffic for accounts affiliated with the Islamic State is down by 45 percent compared to two years ago, ac...

The number of mobile ransomware victims across the globe has increased fourfold compared to a year ago, suggests a Kaspersky Lab report released last week Kaspersky software protected 136,532 users targeted by ransomware from April 2015 to March 2016 -- up from 35,413 in the year-ago period, the company said....

Although an FBI investigation concluded that Hillary Clinton's use of a separate email system during her tenure as Secretary of State may have violated federal law, Director James B. Comey on Tuesday recommended against pursuing any criminal prosecution "Although there is evidence of potential violations of the statutes regarding the handling of cl...

Devialet, the French company that has built a reputation in the audio market for high-end wireless speakers, on Tuesday announced its newest addition: the US$3,000 Phantom Gold The Phantom Gold looks something like a futuristic Faberge egg, and it's priced like one, too....

Twitter fans who want to dress up pix they post to the service can do it with #Stickers, a new feature announced Monday. "Soon, you can browse our rotating sets of stickers to join in on real-time conversations, and select from the library of hundreds of accessories, emoji, and props to make your photos more fun," said Sasank Reddy, a senior produ...

Since mobile computing put an end to the good old days when IT departments had absolute control over software deployed in the enterprise, there's been a rise in employees' use of third-party applications -- a rise that poses security risks to corporate environments That is one of the findings in a report CloudLock released last week....

Almost lost among the deluge of new features in the upcoming version of iOS Apple touted last week was the company's announcement about privacy. "All this great work in iOS 10 would be meaningless to us if it came at the expense of your privacy," Craig Federighi, Apple's senior vice president for software engineering, told attendees at the company...

Sony on Monday announced its new game lineup for the year at the Electronic Entertainment Expo at the Los Angeles Convention Center "We have just concluded the PlayStation E3 Press Conference for 2016 and if ever there was a year dedicated to thrilling entertainment experiences, this is it," noted Shawn Layden, president of Sony Interactive Enterta...

Apple on Monday kicked off its Worldwide Developers Conference with the biggest-ever release of its iOS mobile operating system CEO Tim Cook called iOS 10, coming this fall, "gigantic" and "the mother of all releases."

If crime doesn't pay, Russian ransomware bosses wouldn't know it The average Russian ransomware boss makes US$90,000 a year -- or 13 times the average income for citizens in the country who stick to the "straight and narrow," according to a recent Flashpoint study....

Data stolen from more than 32 million Twitter users has been offered for sale on the dark web for 10 bitcoin, or around US$5,800, LeakedSource reported Wednesday. LeakedSource has added the account and email information to its searchable repository of compromised credentials. The data set came from someone called "[email protected]," who has bee...

Edward Snowden made a greater effort than originally believed to raise his concerns within the NSA before releasing thousands of classified documents detailing programs that allowed the agency to spy on U.S. citizens The truth is more complex than the NSA let on, according to Vice News, which published a report based on documents it secured through...

Facebook top dog Mark Zuckerberg had several of his social media accounts breached and defaced, according to reports that surfaced Sunday Zuckerberg's Twitter, LinkedIn and Pinterest memberships were hacked, but evidence of the attacks quickly disappeared, according to Engadget, which copied and posted samples of the vandalism before they were eras...

The banking trojan -- a type of malware used to steal credentials for bank accounts -- has been a staple of cyberthieves for years. However, ransomware, which has proven both easy to use and highly successful, has started eroding its popularity In a typical banking trojan attack, a robber mounts a phishing campaign to entice a target to open an att...

Facebook on Wednesday introduced DeepText, an artificial intelligence-fueled text analytics engine "Text is a prevalent form of communication on Facebook," wrote Facebook software engineers Ahmad Abdulkader, Aparna Lakshmiratan and Joy Zhang in a post describing its capabilities....

At least 419 million people around the world are blocking advertising on their smartphones, according to a report PageFair released Tuesday Most of those people -- 408 million of them -- are using ad-blocking browsers, notes the report. The use of ad blockers doubled in 2015, and the use of mobile ad-blocking browsers increased 90 percent during th...

Antiquated IT systems are soaking up federal technology dollars and creating risks for both bureaucrats and citizens, the Government Accountability Office reported last week More than 75 percent of the federal IT budget in 2015 went toward the operation and maintenance of nearly obsolete legacy systems that use outdated software languages and unsup...