Articles by John P. Mello Jr.

Mobile applications are quietly attracting more and more malevolent attention -- and for good reason. They contain a trove of private information about their users. In the iOS universe alone, 82.78%, or about 1.55 million apps, track private user data, according to the trends tracker Exploding Topics Mobile apps have also proven to be particularly ...

AI will become the new UI, spending will increase to counter disinformation, and increased use of Earth intelligence gathered from space will be disruptive technologies in the near future, according to a report released Monday by global technology research firm Gartner The three technologies were among 12 that Gartner predicted would define the fut...

Merchants lose billions to fraud every year, but theft estimates are often underestimated. That's because, as a report released Wednesday pointed out, the actual cost of fraud can be much higher According to the 2025 LexisNexis True Cost of Fraud Study, U.S. merchants incur an average cost of US$4.61 for every $1 of fraud, while in Canada, costs ar...

During the dawn of the PC era, a single program was touted as the "killer app" that fired the market for personal computers. That program was a spreadsheet called VisiCalc. Now, another spreadsheet could have a similar impact on the AI market Announced Monday, along with US$4.3 million in venture funding, the new spreadsheet, cloud-based Sourcetabl...

Americans spend an average of six hours and 40 minutes a day staring at the screens of their computers, phones, and other electronic devices If that sounds like a lot, it is, but it's only two minutes above the global average, according to a worldwide screen time study released Wednesday by Comparitech, a reviews, advice, and information website fo...

Although many women take the traditional IT route into cybersecurity, a large portion (37%) have entered cyber from non-IT or military positions, according to a survey released Friday by ISC2, the organization that maintains and administers the Certified Information Systems Security Professional (CISSP) certification exam The organization reported ...

For decades, Geostationary Earth Orbit (GEO) operators were in the communications catbird's seat 22,000 miles above the Earth, but the arrival of Low Earth Orbit (LEO) networks, like Elon Musk's Starlink, is bringing the Old Guard in satellite com down to terra firma "The proprietary and specialized GEO infrastructure of the past is now weighing do...

AI may be ushering in a new breed of malicious threat actors who know even less about hacking than script kiddies but can produce professional-grade hacking tools In a report released Tuesday, Cato CTRL, the threat intelligence arm of cybersecurity company Cato Networks, explained how one of its researchers, who had no malware coding experience, tr...

Agentic AI's potential for improving customer satisfaction and streamlining workflows is bolstering its appeal in customer service circles and fueling what could be a US$47.1 billion market by 2030, according to Markets and Markets. Moreover, Gartner predicts that 80% of all common customer service issues will be solved by AI agents without human intervention by 2029...

A call for organizations to take quantum security seriously has been sounded in a new report by Forrester Research The report titled "Quantum Security Isn’t Hype -- Every Security Leader Needs It" acknowledged that the commercial availability of quantum computers that can crack traditional asymmetric cryptography is still five to 10 years away. H...

One knock against smartphones with built-in parental controls is that while they may give mom and dad a measure of comfort, they're just too uncool for kids. Human Mobile Devices (HMD), a Finland-based phone maker, believes it can address that problem with its new HMD X1 phone announced on Sunday "At HMD, we believe kids shouldn’t have to choose ...

Agentic AI — getting AI to perform tasks rather than just create content from prompts — is coming to the Opera browser On Monday, the Norwegian company announced that its agent, Browser Operator, works inside Opera and will perform tasks on the web for users....

An education technology company is taking Alphabet and Google to court over AI overviews displayed with search results The company, Chegg, of Santa Clara, Calif., announced Monday that it is filing the lawsuit in the U.S. District Court in the District of Columbia, alleging "Google unfairly exercises its monopoly power within search and other anti-...

As online markets become increasingly competitive, retailers are turning to "subscribe and save" services to sustain sales and build customer retention "For retailers, it's a great trade to sacrifice some margin to gain the retention of a subscription from a shopper," said Reilly Newman, founder and brand strategist at Motif Brands, a brand transfo...

A weeks-long brute force attack campaign by malicious actors has reached mammoth proportions, according to a non-profit security organization The Shadowserver Foundation reports that the campaign, which has been ongoing since January, involves as many as 2.8 million IP addresses daily, targeting VPN devices, firewalls, and gateways from vendors lik...

In an apparent attempt to keep pace with its rival Uber, ride-hailing service Lyft plans to launch a fleet of robotaxis in Dallas "as soon as 2026." According to a report Monday in TechCrunch, the new robocabs will be powered by Mobileye technology while Marubeni, a Japanese conglomerate, will perform fleet management. When operational, ride seeker...

Nearly half the traffic on the internet is generated by automated entities called bots, and a large portion of them pose threats to consumers and businesses on the web "[B]ots can help in creating phishing scams by gaining user’s trust and exploiting it for scammers. These scams can have serious implications for the victim, some of which include ...

The Chinese AI app DeepSeek has created a splash in the artificial intelligence world not seen since OpenAI introduced ChatGPT. All the attention garnered by the AI model, however, could pose a threat to its success in the United States, as other technology companies based in countries Uncle Sam considers "adversary states" have discovered Although...

A popular app from China sent the tech markets plummeting Monday, fueled by fear that the United States may be losing its primacy in artificial intelligence Nvidia shares dropped 16.9%, contributing to a 1.5% slide in the S&P 500, while tech titans contributed to the Nasdaq Composite Index falling 3.1%, its worst decline in over a month....

An emphasis on fiber optic broadband delivery blunts the effectiveness and reach of a federal program created to close the gap between internet haves and have-nots, according to a report released Tuesday by the Information Technology & Innovation Foundation (ITIF) The Washington, D.C. tech think tank maintained that the Broadband Equity, Access, an...