Articles by John P. Mello Jr.

The resignation of U.S. Office of Personnel Management Director Katherine Archuleta is drawing mixed reactions from the cybersecurity community Archuleta's departure on July 10, in the wake of a massive data breach resulting in the theft of the personal information of more than 22 million people, is being characterized by security pros as everythin...

PayPal on Monday returned to the Nasdaq as an independent company, no longer tethered to eBay PayPal debuted at a market value 1.4 times its former parent -- US$46.6 billion -- while eBay's capitalization shrunk to $34 billion....

Email has made communicating with elected officials easy, but the Electronic Frontier Foundation this week launched a new tool that is going to make it easier yet The tool, which resides at Democracy.io, allows you to send an electronic missive to your U.S. representative and senators with a minimum of clicks. Typically, you'd have to go to your le...

Swipes, taps, cursor movements and other ways of interacting with electronic devices can be used to protect online merchants from Net fraudsters Many people are familiar with biometric authenticators like irises, fingerprints and voices, but it turns out that how we behave with our machines can be a means of authenticating our identities, too....

News consumption on Facebook and Twitter has increased significantly in the last two years, according to a report released Tuesday by the Pew Research Center and the Knight Foundation Almost two-thirds (63 percent) of Twitter and Facebook members surveyed said they got news from those social networks. For Twitter, that's an 11 point increase from 2...

Ninety-two percent of worldwide profits from smartphones go to Apple, according to press reports citing data released Monday by Cannacord Genuity Samsung is a distant second with 15 percent of the profits. The numbers add up to more than 100 percent, due to companies in the mix that break even or lose money on their smartphone business....

Apple on Thursday released to consumers a preview of the latest versions of its mobile and desktop operating systems -- iOS 9 and OS X El Capitan -- which contain a number of new features, including a revamped two-factor authentication scheme The latest release of iOS also contains two new smart folders. One automatically collects any photos captur...

After a glorious first week of sales following its introduction in April, sales have slid rapidly for the Apple Watch, according to data from Slice Intelligence Sales have plummeted to fewer than 20,000 units a day, down from an average of 200,000 a day during its launch week, when it sold 1.5 million units, reported Slice, which measures online pu...

With so many cybersecurity pros drowning in an ever-rising tide of hack attacks on their computer systems, an emerging approach to defending those systems may be the life preserver they've been looking for The approach doesn't involve beefing up perimeter defenses, carefully scrutinizing network traffic, or applying analytics to employee behavior -...

GoPro on Monday announced the Hero4 Session, a 1-inch cube video camera that weighs just 2.6 ounces -- less than half the heft of an iPhone. Unlike previous GoPro models, you won't need a case to protect it from getting wet. It's designed to withstand a soaking in up to 10 meters of water....

Apple rolled out its new subscription music streaming service Tuesday, and it has been getting mostly raves from reviewers "Apple has built a handsome, robust app and service that goes well beyond just offering a huge catalog of music by providing many ways to discover and group music for a very wide range of tastes and moods," wrote Walt Mossberg ...

Researchers have found a way to significantly improve the performance of fiber networks, which could lead to benefits for both consumers and Internet service providers Information in fiber optic cables degrades with the distance it travels. When you try to increase the speed at which the data is traveling by boosting the power in the network, degra...

A data breach is no picnic for any organization, but for a company that makes its potato salad by protecting other people's passwords, it's the mother of all nightmares. Yet, that has happened to LastPass twice In 2011, the service found anomalies in its network traffic that forced it to reset all its users' master passwords. To make matters worse,...

Amazon's recently released first report on government requests for information revealed that from January to May, it received 813 subpoenas and 25 search warrants The company fully responded and provided all the requested information sought for 542 of the subpoenas. It partially responded and provided only some of the requested information for 126 ...

DxO, known for its top-notch digital imaging software, on Thursday announced a new compact camera designed to allow iPhones and iPads to capture higher-quality digital images The DxO One is the first digital camera that plugs into the Lightning connector found on Apple devices and that uses their Retina display as a viewfinder....

Most consumers pay as much attention to routers as they do to doorknobs. That's not the case with Net marauders. They're finding the devices ripe targets for mischief "We've seen a big increase in malware designed for home routers," said Incapsula researcher Ofer Gayer....

Amazon is developing a mobile app that will be the cornerstone of an Uber-type service for neighborhood package delivery, The Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday Under the scheme, the app would allow Amazon to compensate people to deliver packages in lieu of using a commercial carrier. People would pick up packages at brick-and-mortar stores, wher...

Apple is sending a shiver down the spine of anyone who depends on mobile advertising for a living with the inclusion of ad-blocking extensions for iOS 9 in the next version of its Safari browser The news surfaced last week, after developers discovered the provision in documentation following iOS 9's introduction at the company's Worldwide Developer...

Touchpad pioneer Synaptics has touched up an unlikely area on a keyboard: the spacebar The company last week announced the availability of its SmartBar technology, which adds gesture features to the bar. For example, text can be selected by swiping it. A double-thumb gesture can be used to zoom in and out on a document or image. What's more, the ba...

Microsoft will phase out Patch Tuesday -- its monthly potpourri of software product fixes -- when it rolls out Windows 10, which could be a mixed bag for the operating system's security Patches will be applied automatically as they're ready. That means users no longer will have to wait until the second Tuesday in the month to secure their systems f...