Articles by John P. Mello Jr.

Texting while walking can be dangerous, but Apple could be aiming to make it less so, judging from a patent awarded Thursday by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office Apple has found an innovative way to use an electronic communication device's camera to continuously capture and present video images as background within a text-messaging session, its ...

Ask the Internet That's the pitch in HTC's TV ads for its new flagship smartphone, the HTC One M8. It's a pitch that hopes to acquire by word of mouth what HTC was unable to get for its predecessor: consumer mindshare....

Bogus web traffic is creating a crisis for advertisers on the Web Advertisers pay for page views. They assume that those views are tied to living eyeballs. When those views aren't tied to eyeballs -- as when they're generated by automated means -- advertisers can get testy....

While Twitter rose to notoriety by being the place where people spilled the minutiae of their lives, there are times when its users don't want everyone in the online world to see what they're thinking. For those occasions, there's direct messaging When direct messages are sent by one tweeter to another, there's a certain expectation of privacy ther...

Alibaba is putting some skin in the mobile-messaging game with a US$215 million investment in Tango; the companies announced the funding on Thursday Mobile messaging apps are hot. Facebook recently scooped up WhatsApp for $19 billion, and Japanese e-commerce titan Rakuten recently acquired Viber for $900 million.

Microsoft's tip of a news event next week triggered an avalanche of prophecy that the long-awaited version of Office for the iPad was about to be released. Microsoft is billing the event in San Francisco on March 27 as a "briefing and news focused on the intersection of cloud and mobile computing." While Microsoft officially withheld further detai...

"Target was certified as meeting the standard for the payment card industry in September 2013. Nonetheless, we suffered a data breach." Those words by Target Chairman, President, and Chief Executive Officer Gregg Steinhafel affirmed what security experts know as gospel: Compliance does not equal security "Just because you pass a PCI audit does not ...

Alibaba, which controls 80 percent of the e-commerce in China, is going public -- but not in its native land Alibaba Group on Sunday announced its decision to begin the process of an initial public offering in the United States, saying the move would make it a more global company and enhance its transparency, while allowing it to pursue its long-te...

Target acknowledged Thursday that it put information on a back burner that led to the compromise of more than 100 million customer records and will cost the company millions of dollars in losses "Like any large company, each week at Target there are a vast number of technical events that take place and are logged," said Target spokesperson Molly Sn...

A powerful U.S. senator has accused the CIA of spying on a network drive legislative staffers used to prepare a report on abuses -- including torture -- in the agency's detention and interrogation program The search may have violated not only the separation of powers clause of the U.S. Constitution, but also the Fourth Amendment prohibition against...

Surfing the Internet last year was a dangerous proposition, and it isn't getting any safer.On average, 200 samples of malicious software were collected every minute by McAfee Labs, the company reported Monday in its threat report for the last quarter of 2013 All kinds of Internet nastiness increased last year -- from ransomware and suspicious URLs ...

Trawling porn sites used to be the best way to pick up an electronically transmitted disease on your smartphone. That's not the case anymore Every one in five times a mobile user is redirected to a malware site on the Internet, it's done through a malicious ad, according to a report released last week by Blue Coat. That's three times what it was tw...

Workers at a factory in China are on strike after rejecting compensation plans offered as a result of IBM's US$2.3 billion deal to sell its low-end server business to Lenovo More than 1,000 workers brought production to a halt Monday at IBM's International Systems Technology Company server-making factory in Shenzhen, Guangdong, in southeastern Chin...

Maxwell Smart had his Cone of Silence, but silence was the furthest thing from the minds of theAether team that designed Cone.Cone, expected to start selling this summer for US$399, is a wireless speaker with a twist. It connects to a home WiFi network (802.11 a, b,g, n), but it isn't a slave to another device, such as a music player, tablet or computer. Cone attempts to play what listeners want to hear before they know they want to hear it...

Apple on Monday unwrapped its CarPlay auto initiative at the Geneva International Motor Show. The announcement comes less than a month after Google announced its grand plans to bring Android into automobiles with its Open Automotive Alliance CarPlay will enable iPhone users to make calls, consult maps, play music and receive messages either through...

Consumers love their smartphones, but a substantial number of them don't love using them to pay for purchases. With Samsung's introduction of its Galaxy S5 phone last week, the company is betting it can change some of those consumers' minds on that subject Like Apple's iPhone 5s, the S5 has a fingerprint scanner. Unlike the Apple product, though, t...

A British intelligence agency indiscriminately collected photos from the webcams of Yahoo users and stored them on its servers over a period of several years, The Guardian reported Over one six-month period, 1.8 million Yahoo users were targeted by a surveillance program called "Optic Nerve," run by the UK's NSA counterpart, GCHQ, according to a to...

Apple on Tuesday pushed a large update to its OS X Mavericks operating system that includes a patch for a significant security flaw in the software The vulnerability allows Net predators to hijack a secure communication channel from a device running the latest version of Apple's desktop OS and perform mischief such as intercepting user names and pa...

The LaCie Fuel is available at the LaCie Store for US$199.99. It is also available at many other outlets.Cords have been the bane of digital life style since the introduction of personal computers. As wireless devices proliferated, though, the need for cords has declined, thanks to technologies like Bluetooth and WiFi....

Samsung hinted it wasn't about to rock the mobile world with the choice of the warmup band for its Unpacked 2014 event Monday -- the Barcelona Opera House Chamber Orchestra At the event, held at the Mobile World Congress in Spain, it announced a new version of its flagship smartphone, the Galaxy S5, as well as an upgrade of its smartwatch, the Gear...