Articles by John P. Mello Jr.

With nearly a month to spare, startup Omate burst through its Kickstarter goal of US$100,000 this week and is on its way to shipping its TruSmart smartwatch in time for the holiday season More than $250,000 have been pledged so far toward the device, which is perhaps the closest thing yet to an Android smartphone that can be worn on a wrist....

In an abrupt about-face, Instagram has begun cracking the whip over developers using "insta" and "gram" in the titles of their apps In a letter sent to several developers earlier this week, Instagram said it had "clarified" its guidelines and determined that "use of 'INSTA' and 'GRAM' for an application that works with Instagram is harmful to the I...

Competition heated up in the OLED TV market Tuesday as Samsung announced it was shipping its first production model using the technology and that it would sell for US$8,999 ...

Content management systems like WordPress and Joombla have become popular targets for hackers in recent times because flaws in those systems can be leveraged for mischief across literally millions of websites WordPress is running on some 73 million websites and Joomla some 35 million, so if you're a cybercriminal with a fresh vulnerability to one o...

Consumers with an itch for a hybrid car can now spend less scratch for one. Chevy announced Tuesday that the 2014 models of its Volt plug-in hybrid vehicle will carry a sticker price of US$34,995, a $5,000 cut from the current model. A federal tax credit of up to $7,500 for some buyers of green vehicles could lower the price further....

DDoS attacks have long been a weapon of Internet dissidents to punish those they disagree with, while cybercriminals use them to create a digital smoke screen to hide their misdeeds DDoS attackers typically flood a website with traffic, denying legitimate users access to the server....

For the first time in more than a decade, SmugMug has given itself a major facelift The new look for the image watering hole comes a scant two months after Flickr, another picture Web oasis, overhauled its Web presence -- a move that received mixed reviews from some of its 89 million or so users....

Ransomware has made the jump from personal computers to the Android world Android.FakeAV.C, a new breed of ransomware, has been spotted in Asia -- almost half (48 percent) in India and Indonesia -- according to an alert by Bitdefender security researcher Liviu Arsene....

Despite yeoman efforts by Google to close a critical hole in its Android mobile operating system that allows any app to be turned into a malicious Trojan, programs are still appearing in the company's Google Play store with the flaw A number of apps containing the so-called MasterKey vulnerability were discovered by cybersecurity firm Bitdefender l...

There's been a standard for super-fast SD cards for two years now, but signs of products deploying the technology have been absent. That is, they were absent until Tuesday, when Toshiba announced plans to deliver a new line of SD cards using UHS-II technology to the market this fall The advance notice gives device makers time to start designing pro...

While not many taxpayers consider the Internal Revenue Service a friend, most do expect the agency to protect their data like a brother That's why news revealed last week about a database the IRS posted online of filings for so-called Section 527 organizations, such as political campaign committees, was particularly disturbing. (see Breach Diary be...

Nokia is expected to bring its monster 41-megapixel camera sensor to its line of Windows Phone 8 handsets Thursday at its "Zoom Reinvented" event in New York City Nokia's 808 PureView technology has been in one of its Symbian phones for a while with little notice given to it, but the company apparently hopes that will change with the expected intro...

Encryption combined with cloud storage has been hailed as a highly secure way for organizations to protect their data from Net marauders, but their value may be overstated, contend two security pros While encrypting data is better than not encrypting it, where it's decrypted can be an important security consideration, said Steve Weis, CTO and cofou...

Canon took a step forward Tuesday in solving a problem that's been plaguing DSLR videographers for a long time: maintaining smooth video with a camera's autofocusing system ...

Procrastinators may have been surprised Monday when they tried to catch up on their news feeds by using their old dependable Google Reader only to find out it didn't exist anymore That's right -- Google has shut down its RSS aggregator for good. While it's too late for those who failed to jump ship before the July 1 cutoff date to save their data, ...

If you own an iPhone or Android mobile phone and work at a BlackBerry shop, it will be simpler from now on to keep the personal information and apps on your device segregated from those you use for work That's thanks to BlackBerry's Tuesday release of Secure Work Space, an iOS and Android solution that gives handsets running those operating system...

Adobe Reader and Oracle Java aren't alone in having a bull's eye painted on their code by hackers. WordPress also is becoming a popular target for Internet outlaws It's quite a large target, too. About 18 percent of the sites on the Web -- about 60 million of them -- use WordPress....

Comcast this week announced new software for its set-top boxes, opening a window into how cable TV companies hope to retain customers tempted to move their eyeballs to online-only alternatives Comcast X2, which debuted at the National Cable and Telecommunications Association's Cable Show under way in Washington, D.C., blends cable offerings like on...

Among the issues on the agenda for the talks over the weekend between China's President Xi Jinping and U.S. President Obama were cybersecurity and hacker attacks on U.S. targets by hackers based in China Even if China had the will to act against hackers within its territory, doing so wouldn't be easy, noted FireEye CTO Ashar Aziz....

The Obama administration on Tuesday targeted patent trolls with a number of initiatives aimed at curbing activity it blames for stymieing innovation in America The initiatives include five executive orders and seven legislative recommendations that will "protect innovators from frivolous litigation and ensure the highest-quality patents in our syst...