Articles by John P. Mello Jr.

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...

Cisco is taking a radical approach to AI security in its new AI Defense solution In an exclusive interview Sunday with Rowan Cheung of The Rundown AI, Cisco Executive Vice President and CPO Jeetu Patel said that AI Defense is "taking a radical approach to address the challenges that existing security solutions are not equipped to handle."

Shipments of personal computers grew in 2024, fueled by businesses replacing old hardware and Microsoft's looming end of support for its Windows 10 operating system According to market research firm Canalys, PC shipments climbed 3.8% in 2024 to 255.5 million units from 246.3 million in 2023. IDC, another research firm, pegged 2024 shipments higher ...

An eleventh-hour move by the Biden Administration to regulate how American AI technology is shared with the world is coming under fire from the nation's tech sector According to the White House, the Interim Final Rule on Artificial Intelligence Diffusion (IFR) streamlines licensing hurdles for both large and small chip orders, bolsters U.S. AI lead...

Fact-checkers are headed to the dustbin of history at Meta "We will end the current third-party fact-checking program in the United States and instead begin moving to a Community Notes program," Meta's Chief Global Affairs Officer Joel Kaplan announced in a company blog on Tuesday....

When it comes to cybersecurity in 2025, artificial intelligence is top of mind for many analysts and professionals Artificial intelligence will be deployed by both adversaries and defenders, but attackers will benefit more from it, maintained Willy Leichter, CMO of AppSOC, an application security and vulnerability management provider in San Jose, C...

Quantum computing made significant strides in 2024, but it's yet to demonstrate a practical advantage over classical digital computers, according to a recent trends report released by Forrester Research "Despite improvements in qubit count, coherence time, and gate fidelity, the technology remains experimental, with broad-scale applications likely ...

While artificial intelligence has juiced the marketing departments of smartphone makers like Apple and Samsung, it isn't generating much enthusiasm among users, according to a survey released Monday by a used electronics selling site The survey by SellCell of more than 2,000 iPhone and Samsung users found that 73% of iPhone and 87% of Samsung users...

Google announced a major step forward in the development of a commercial quantum computer on Tuesday, releasing test results for its Willow quantum chip Those results show that the more qubits Google used in Willow, the more errors it reduced and the more quantum the system became....

A sophisticated mobile phishing campaign targeting job seekers intended to install dangerous malicious software on their phones was revealed Tuesday by security researchers The campaign discovered by Zimperium zLabs targets Android mobile phones and aims to distribute a variant of the Antidot banking trojan that the researchers have dubbed AppLite ...

Cyberattacks on consumers and retailers surged during Black Friday week, according to a report released Wednesday by a cybersecurity platform provider The provider, Darktrace, of Cambridge, England, reported that an analysis of its customer data for November revealed a 327% increase in worldwide Christmas-themed phishing from the first week to the ...

A near-production model of a solar-powered car will be on display at CES 2025 Aptera Motors has announced that a "production intent" version of its eponymously named solar-powered vehicle will be displayed at the mammoth consumer electronics show, which will be held January 7-10 in Las Vegas....