Articles by John P. Mello Jr.

Twitter on Tuesday announced a number of changes to tweets, including what will be included in a message's 140-character count The changes, which will be rolled out in the coming months, were outlined by Twitter Senior Product Manager Todd Sherman:...

Toyota andDEKA Research and Development last week announced an agreement that will revive development of the iBot, a wheelchair that can climb stairs The companies revealed their pact to develop mobility solutions for the disabled community at the annual convention of the Paralyzed Veterans of America....

Eset on Wednesday announced that it has fashioned a free tool that victims of all variants of the TeslaCrypt ransomware can use to unlock affected files After the criminal gang behind TeslaCrypt recently abandoned support of the malicious software, an Eset analyst contacted the group anonymously, using the channel TeslaCrypt's operators offered to ...

Wireless mice and keyboards are the perfect accessories for a world in which devices increasingly are shuffling off their connection coils, but those accessories -- especially untethered rodents -- also can create new threats for those who use them One such threat is Mousejack. The attack exploits a vulnerability found in 80 percent of wireless mic...

BitTorrent on Tuesday announced at the Internet & Television Expo an application called "BitTorrent Live" that applies its distributed file-sharing technology to video streaming BitTorrent is able to speed up file downloads by storing pieces of a file on computers throughout the Net and reassembling them when a request is made for the file. BitTorr...

Google last week announced that it would minimize use of Adobe's Flash Player in its Chrome Web browser by the end of the year by turning off its default status When Chrome encounters a Web page, it will report the presence of Flash Player only if a user has indicated that the domain should execute Flash or if the site is in one of the top 10 domai...

Google on Thursday introduced Gboard, an app that combines search with a new soft keyboard for mobile devices running iOS Gboard, which supports glide typing, allows users to perform searches from the keyboard without leaving the application they're in. Once the information is found, they can paste it into their application without leaving the keyb...

The daily barrage of data breach news appears to be eroding confidence in security solutions Fifty percent of IT pros aren't confident about the ability of their security measures to protect their data, according to a survey released last week byBarkly....

A forum on Reddit, /r/ Technology, on Monday announced it was considering blocking links to websites that require visitors to turn off their ad blockers before viewing content on the site "It has come to our attention that many websites such as Forbes and Wired are now requiring users to disable ad blockers to view content. Because Forbes requires ...

It appears there won't be a lot of design changes in the next iPhone, according to a schematic photo NowhereElse published online Monday It shows what's purported to be Apple's upcoming iPhone 7 to be the same size as the 6s....

Viv Labs CEO Dag Kittlaus on Monday demonstrated at Disrupt NY 2016 technology that was designed to make people-to-machine interactions as natural as people-to-people interactions Kittlaus, the former CEO of Siri, and other Siri vets cofoundedViv in 2012....

The Islamic State group's cyberwar capabilities are unsophisticated, but they won't be that way for long That was the conclusion of a 25-page report released last week byFlashpoint....

India's telecommunications ministry has rejected Apple's proposal to sell refurbished iPhones in the country, Bloomberg reported this week Officials rejected the proposal based on rules that prohibit importing used electronics, according to Reuters....

A federal magistrate in Los Angeles ordered the girlfriend of an alleged gang member to open her phone using her fingerprint so prosecutors could look at the data on it for a case they were working on, the Los Angeles Times reported last week Paytsar Bkhchadzhyan, 29, of Los Angeles pleaded no contest to identity theft earlier this year. Within 45 ...

Apple on Thursday made its CareKit platform available through the GitHub open source community CareKit joins two other previously released Apple frameworks for developing healthcare apps -- HealthKit and ResearchKit. It was designed to enable developers to create apps that give users a more active role in managing their health....

As consumers turn to ad blockers to avoid advertising on their mobile and computer screens, marketers and content providers who depend on pitches to pay the bills are searching frantically for ways to counter the pesky programs.BlockIQ offers them one BlockIQ, owned by AdSupply, which recently merged withAdaptive Medias, has launched BlockBypass. T...

Some major players in both the new and old economies on Tuesday announced an alliance to pave the way for self-driving cars in America Ford, Google, Lyft, Uber and Volvo raised the curtain on their Self-Driving Coalition for Safer Streets, which will work with lawmakers, regulators and the public to raise awareness of the safety and societal benefi...

A white hat hacker last week announced the discovery of more than a half-dozen security flaws in some software Facebook used on its corporate network While performing penetration testing of some third-party software in a network appliance Facebook used, Orange Tsai, a security researcher forDevcore, discovered seven vulnerabilities that attackers c...

Opera on Wednesday announced that it would add a free VPN service to the latest version of its browser VPNs, or virtual private networks, add an extra level of security for Web surfers. Companies use them to provide secure communications for employees remotely accessing office systems, and consumers use them to block unwanted snooping on their onli...

If the rash of data breaches in recent months has done anything for businesses, it's raised their awareness of cyber liability insurance The market for cyber liability insurance is expected to increase dramatically as businesses become more aware that their current policies don't adequately cover cyber-risks, according to theNational Association of...