Articles by John P. Mello Jr.

Security pros weren't very kind to mobile applications last week. A number of firms knocked apps produced for the smartphone market for all kinds of risky behaviors that could lead to trouble not only for mobile device owners, but also for their employers While Android has been a poster child for misbehaving apps in the past, competitor Apple's app...

What's in a name? Microsoft is hoping more traffic to two of its online properties The company has renamed its cloud storage service because of legal entanglements and the website for free versions of its Office productivity apps because of consumer confusion....

IBM and AT&T on Tuesday announced they were forming a global alliance to develop solutions for the Internet of Things. They will be combining their analytic platforms, cloud and security technologies -- all with privacy in mind -- to gain insights from machine-to-machine data collected by a variety of industries Initially, they will focus on soluti...

IBM and AT&T on Tuesday announced they were forming a global alliance to develop solutions for the Internet of Things. They will be combining their analytic platforms, cloud and security technologies -- all with privacy in mind -- to gain insights from machine-to-machine data collected by a variety of industries Initially, they will focus on soluti...

A group of 18 organizations on Thursday announced the formation of WifiForward, a coalition that aims to persuade policymakers to open more unlicensed wireless spectrum for use by WiFi-enabled devices. Members include the American Library Association, the ARRIS Group, Best Buy, Comcast, the Consumer Electronics Association, Google, the International Association of Venue Managers, Microsoft and Time Warner Cable...

"Very big NTP reflection attack hitting us right now. Appears to be bigger than the #Spamhaus attack from last year. Mitigating." That Monday evening tweet from Matthew Prince, the cofounder and CEO of CloudFlare, signaled what's being touted as the largest distributed denial of service attack ever launched on the Internet....

Sigma is known mostly as a maker of lenses for other companies' cameras, but a few years ago it latched on to a new kind of sensor technology and produced an innovative byte snapper that caused a stir in photography circles Now it's introducing a new generation of its Foveon cameras with a redesigned sensor and a speedier image processor....

Defense contractors have begun to bolster their cybersecurity practices in the wake of the massive leaking of government data by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden Seventy-five percent of defense contractors said the Snowden Affair had changed security procedures for their employees in a survey released by ThreatTrack, conducted by Opinion Matter...

Running a US$300 billion company is challenging for anyone, but it can be even more challenging when you have a tech titan looking over your shoulder That's the situation facing new CEO Satya Nadella, because just as he assumes Microsoft's helm, Bill Gates has decided to take on a new role in the affairs of the company he founded....

A new version of Google Maps for the iPhone and iPad hit the App Store Tuesday. Added to the app's repertoire is the ability to notify a driver when a faster alternative route is available When Google Maps' navigation feature is running, traffic conditions will be monitored by the app. When it determines that an alternative route can get you to you...

Unlike in 1984, when the Macintosh was introduced, there weren't any Apple ads at the Super Bowl this year. Instead, on the day after the Massacre in the Meadowlands, the company raised the curtain on a 127-second video celebrating the 30th anniversary of the Mac -- on YouTube Video for the project was shot entirely with iPhones over a 36-hour peri...

The holiday data breach at Target was opened up with stolen credentials from a vendor in the company's supply chain, according to reports that surfaced last week. That kind of attack is getting more and more common these days "About 80 percent of data breaches originate in the supply chain," Torsten George, vice president of marketing for Agiliance...

Facebook on Thursday announced next week's launch of Paper, a free app for iOS that combines user and curated content into a personalized news medium Users can create stories as well as receive stories based on their interests and organized into sections. Section stories are chosen by both human and machine curators....

Smartphones have been steadily stealing shutterbugs from digital camera makers, but most of those converts are coming from the point-and-shoot snapper crowd. The next step for phone makers is to target more sophisticated photographers who use cameras with interchangeable lenses. Apple appears to be getting ready for that battle The United States Pa...

Samsung and Google on Monday solidified their business relationship, announcing a far-reaching, global cross-licensing agreement that will cover not only existing patents, but also intellectual property developed by the sprawling companies over the next 10 years Under the agreement, the companies will give each other access to their patent portfoli...

With breaking news about data breaches a common occurrence, you'd think security threats to an organization's data would be something CEOs and their management teams were kept in the know about. Apparently not Some 80 percent of IT pros in the United States and United Kingdom said they did not frequently communicate with executive management about ...

The Internet went dark in China on Tuesday. For some eight hours, more than 618 million Chinese couldn't access cyberspace. The outage occurred when two-thirds of all Web traffic in the country was redirected to a single IP address located in the United States The address belongs to Dynamic Internet Technology, a company with ties to Falun Gong, a ...

LogMeIn on Tuesday announced that it will be shutting down its free service and unifying its existing portfolio of paid products in a single offering Existing users of LogMeIn Free will be given seven days from the next time they log on to the service to upgrade to the premium service at a discounted price of US$49....

While most folks know the value of money, few know the latest value of a Bitcoin, a virtual currency prone to wide price swings. Those swings haven't deterred those on the digital leading edge from speculating in the currency -- or bad app writers from cooking up ways to steal it "Bitcoins -- and indeed any digital property of any value -- will be ...

Following reports of adware being distributed through extensions for Google's Web browser Chrome, the search giant has removed two applets from it its online store Pulled from the Chrome Web Store were "Add to Feedly" and "Tweet This Page." Both extensions were mentioned in an Ars Technica report Friday about adware vendors buying popular Chrome ex...