Articles by John P. Mello Jr.

Ever since smartphone makers started incorporating fingerprint scanners as a means of unlocking mobile phones, the Chaos Computer Club has attacked the technology with vigor Not long after Apple added Touch ID to its iPhones, the German hackers demonstrated how to lift prints from a surface and create a flexible pad containing the print that could ...

Concern over government surveillance has been so heightened by confidential information leaked by former intelligence hand Edward Snowden that writers in free countries are as worried as those in autocratic nations, according to a report released Monday by the PEN American Center Three-quarters of writers in countries classified as "free" by Freedo...

Instagram recently added some new filters -- the first time it has done so in two years The addition of the five new filters brings the total number in the app to 24....

Check Point Software Technologies recently revealed a flaw in millions of routers that allows the devices to be controlled by hackers The company's Malware and Vulnerability Group detected 12 million Internet-connected devices that have the flaw....

Privacy's future appears muddy at best, judging from a survey released Thursday by the Pew Research Center and Elon University's Imagining the Internet Center More than 2,500 Internet experts and analysts were narrowly divided on whether policy makers and technology innovators would create a secure, popularly accepted and trusted privacy-rights inf...

A group of some 150 companies last week moved closer to eliminating the bane of many an online user: the password The FIDO Alliance, which counts among its members Microsoft, PayPal, Google, Bank of America, Visa and MasterCard, released version 1.0 of its open specifications for strong authentication on the Internet without the use of passwords....

On behalf of Sony Pictures Entertainment, high-powered attorney David Boies sent a letter to a number of news outlets Sunday demanding that the organizations refrain from publishing stories based on material hackers recently stole from the company and that they destroy any of the pilfered data in their possession The letter to the news organization...

Microsoft last week began to accept bitcoins as payment for digital content purchases Bitcoins can be credited to a Microsoft account by anyone in the United States at the currency's market value -- currently around US$352 per bitcoin -- and used to buy content at the Windows Store or stores that carry Xbox games, music and video. ...

Since the hacker group calling itself "Guardians of Peace" announced its attack on Sony Pictures Entertainment late last month, things have gone downhill for the company After confidential documents were leaked to the Internet over several days, a denouement of sorts was reached last week, when a security company examining the stolen data discovere...

Two password manager makers on Tuesday announced new features that allow their users to minimize the hassle of resetting passwords One of the first things online users are advised to do after a data breach -- and there have been more than few of those lately -- is to change their passwords. Few users act on that advice, though, because creating uni...

Still reeling from a cyberintrusion that exposed massive amounts of personnel data from its entertainment division on the Internet, Sony was attacked again over the weekend. This time, hackers disrupted the company's PlayStation Network However, unlike the foray against Sony Pictures Entertainment, which is still under investigation, the company qu...

Apple for two years surreptitiously removed from iPods any music not purchased at its iTunes store, prosecutors charged Wednesday in federal court The accusations surfaced in the U. S. District Court for the Northern California, during the trial of a 10-year-old class-action lawsuit claiming Apple violated federal and state laws starting in 2006, w...

Twitter on Tuesday announced a revamp of its system for reporting abuse on its service "In our continuing effort to make your Twitter experience safer, we're enhancing our in-product harassment reporting and making improvements to 'block' [followers]," said Shreyas Doshi, Twitter's director of product management....

Cyberspies will flourish and hackers will target Apple devices more often in 2015 Until now, Russia, China and the United States have dominated the cyberespionage scene, but their success will start to attract new players to the practice....

The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday heard arguments in Elonis v. United States, also known as "the Facebook threat case." At the center of the case are a number of threats posted in the form of rap lyrics to a Facebook page created by Anthony Elonis. The targets of the threats were his estranged wife and an FBI agent....

A sophisticated malware program called "Regin" has been used in systematic spying campaigns against a range of international targets since at least 2008, Symantec reported on Sunday Regin is a backdoor-type Trojan with a structure that displays a degree of technical competence rarely seen in malware, according to Symantec....

Has software glut got you down? Do you reuse passwords because creating unique ones for all your online accounts would cause a memory overload? If your answer to those questions is yes, you may be interested in a bit of jewelry called the "Everykey," by a startup with the same name ...

Apple has removed the word "free" from download buttons in its iOS and OS X app stores, replacing it with "get." European regulators recommended the action to Apple and Google earlier this year....

IBM on Tuesday introduced Verse, its entry into the reinventing email derby. Verse, which will be available in both an enterprise and freemium edition, integrates the many ways people communicate with each other every day -- email, meetings, calendars, file sharing, instant messaging, social media, video chats and more -- into a single collaboration environment...

The U.S. Postal Service and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration last week confirmed that their computer systems were targeted in months-long cyberattacks that appear to have originated in China The attack on USPS compromised information of an estimated 800,000 employees. Data at risk includes names, date of birth, Social Security number...