Articles by John P. Mello Jr.

A US$5 stock drop, a hacker attack on celebrities using your cloud, and charges of worker abuse in the factory of an overseas supplier aren't the kind of news a company wants to see as it's poised to announce a refresh of its iconic product, but that's what Apple must deal with this week The Labor Day weekend was barely over when news broke that a ...

Recommending movies and TV shows you've watched on Netflix to individual Facebook friends just got easier. The company on Tuesday launched a new social recommendation feature that lets users pick and choose the contacts they'd like to interact with after viewing a video Netflix previously allowed its members to recommend what they'd watched to thei...

If you want to see an IT pro twitch, bring up Shadow IT in a conversation "Shadow IT" is a term applied to technology deployed by an organization's users outside the purview of the IT department. It's bothersome to system shepherds because it can open up an organization to data leakages. It's also growing....

Hackers appear to have stolen data from JPMorgan Chase and at least one other U.S. bank in retaliation for economic sanctions against Russia The raid on the banks' computer systems resulted in the theft of gigabytes of sensitive data, Bloomberg reported Wednesday evening....

The recent data breach at Community Health Systems, in which Chinese hackers stole the personal information of 4.3 million patients, was another sign of a disturbing trend that security researchers at Websense have been observing for months: Healthcare providers are coming under cyberattack at an alarming rate "We've seen a 600 percent increase in ...

Instagram on Tuesday released Hyperlapse, a free iPhone app that takes the jitters out of time-lapse video. It was just two weeks ago that Microsoft demonstrated a similar technology that bears the same name The Instagram app "is the most impressive effect to hit smartphone video in recent memory," Ross Rubin, principal analyst with Reticle Researc...

Amazon appears to be readying an advertising platform to compete with Google's AdWords It has started talking up its new Amazon Sponsored Links platform with potential partners and is anticipating a launch later this year, The Wall Street Journal reported Monday....

The U.S. Transportation Security Administration, part of the Department of Homeland Security, has spent more than a billion dollars on full-body scanners designed to strengthen airport security. It turns out that at least one model of the scanner in use for four years -- the Rapiscan Secure 1000 full-body scanner -- easily could have been foiled by a savvy bad actor. In addition, it harbored software flaws that made it vulnerable to cyberattacks...

In a move influenced by Edward Snowden's revelations about the NSA's email snooping, Yahoo and Google last week announced that they were cooperating on end-to-end encrypting their webmail products "We will release source code this fall so that the open source community can help us refine the experience and hunt for bugs," said Yahoo Chief Informati...

Dropbox, which acquired Mailbox last year, on Tuesday announced the availability of a Mac-only desktop beta version of the program. The beta is free, but you need a "betacoin" to download it. Betacoins are being emailed to existing users of the program, as well as people who sign up at the Mailbox website "We believe Mailbox is the fastest, most de...

Twitter likes to experiment with its social network from time to time, but its latest tinkering with its members' timelines appears to be ticking off more than a few tweeters The experiment opens timelines to tweets members' followers have tagged as favorites, as well as to some popular tweets gleaned from their followers' timelines....

Microsoft has some good news for action-cam fans who like to capture their outdoor adventures in hours of nonstop video. It's found a way to bring time-lapse photography to first-person video footage Called "Hyperlapse," the technology can shrink hours of video into minutes without the jitter, shake and artifacts previously associated with the time...

Yahoo and Google last week announced they'd be teaming up to secure their Web mail systems with encryption by the end of next year "Our goal is to make end-to-end encryption fully available in 2015," Yahoo Vice President of Information Security Alex Stamos said at the Black Hat hackers' conference in Las Vegas.

News that a Russian gang has stockpiled more than a billion purloined user name and password combinations has revved up the Internet's reputation as a post industrial Wild, Wild West Just how much havoc will be raised by the gang remains to be seen. The data thieves so far appear content to use their ill-gotten trove for spamming, according to Hold...

USIS, the contractor that did the background checks on Washington Navy Yard shooter Aaron Alexis and NSA leaker Edward Snowden, on Thursday reported that its computer systems have been breached "Our internal IT security team recently identified an apparent external cyberattack on USIS' corporate network," said US Investigation Services, which perfo...

BlackBerry -- the "sick man of mobile" -- is poised for better times That was the sentiment expressed by CEO John Chen in an internal memo distributed to BlackBerry employees last week....

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security last week sounded an alarm warning retailers of a family of malicious programs aimed at compromising point-of-sale systems. Attackers used such software last year in massive data breaches that nicked millions of consumer records at Target and Nieman Marcus Variants of the Backoff family -- capable of scrapin...

A routine scan of a Texas man's Gmail by Google has led to his arrest on child pornography possession and promotion charges John Henry Skillern, 41, of Houston was arrested by police July 30 following a tip by Google to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. He has been charged with one count each of child pornography possession an...

USB flash drives could be at risk of a pernicious attack on their firmware Over the past two decades, USB devices, aka "thumb drives," have proliferated all over the world, because USB has proven to be a versatile standard. That versatility, though, also makes USB devices vulnerable to what could be a very nasty firmware attack by hackers, noted Ka...

Old tricks that have helped hackers penetrate computers for months or longer worked again last week at Goodwill and Stubhub Taking a page from the gang that pillaged payment card and personal information from Target last year, hackers clipped payment card information from an undisclosed number of Goodwill Industries International customers....