Articles by John P. Mello Jr.

If thermostats were cars, Nest Labs' would be a Cadillac Selling for US$249, the gadget brings design verve -- the company was founded by Tony Fadell, the former leader of the team at Apple that designed numerous generations of the iPod and iPhone -- and mobile technology to a device that barely registers on many consumers' consciousness scale....

A week-long cyber attack on some of the nation's largest banks last week most likely wasn't the Armageddon headline writers made it out to be "It's ridiculous to consider an attack that takes your website offline for a few hours the world's worst nightmare scenario," Jeffrey Carr, CEO of Taia Global and author of Inside Cyber Warfare: Mapping the C...

Electric car maker Tesla Motors on Tuesday introduced a network of solar-powered rapid charging stations for its vehicles beginning with several locations across California The network of "supercharger" stations already is in operation in six California locations: Folsom, Gilroy, Coalinga, Lebec, Barstow and Hawthorne. Tesla makes its cars in Fremo...

When Paul Steiner published his 1993 cartoon in The New Yorker with the caption, "On the Internet, no one knows you're a dog," little did he know it would become a mantra among security professionals, especially those concerned about authenticating identities on the Net The job of finding ways to identify dogs in cyberspace has been assigned to the...

Internet Explorer is too dangerous to use, according to warnings from throngs of security experts, including Germany's Federal Office for Information Security The German government agency issued an alert that advises citizens to avoid using Internet Explorer and use an alternate browser until a patch can be found for a vulnerability discovered last...

Someone with the Twitter handle @AnonymousOwn3r made a grab for 15 minutes of fame last week by claiming responsibility for taking down the network for Internet's largest registrar, GoDaddy GoDaddy discredited that claim. "The service outage was not caused by external influences," CEO Scott Wagner said in a statement. "It was not a 'hack' and it wa...

Once upon a time, security shiners involving Apple were as rare as Windows Vista lovers, but now it seems that a week doesn't go by without the name of Steve Jobs' baby being dragged through the digital mud Last week's episode involved the hacktivist group AntiSec and the FBI. AntiSec claimed it compromised an FBI laptop and stole more than 12 mill...

Swappers using the popular file-sharing protocol BitTorrent are spied on constantly by monitoring services, some of them seeking to identify media pirates, researchers at the University of Birmingham in the United Kingdom reported Tuesday Monitoring is particularly intense for files that are currently popular among sharers -- less so with less popu...

Oracle acted swiftly last week to close a zero-day vulnerability in its Java technology, but given Java's track record, that patch is just one hit in a long game of wackamole played with hackers A number of security companies discovered the vulnerability over the weekend of Aug. 25. They noticed that a popular and notorious root kit, Blackhole, was...

Better management of memory and updates highlight the latest release of the Mozilla Foundation's Web browser, Firefox 15 Firefox's development team has steadily improved the browser's memory management over recent months, but with this release of the program, it's targeting a major contributor to the software's piggish memory ways: add-on applicati...

Research released last week fingered the iPhone as the source of a text messaging exploit that could be used to steal sensitive information from smartphone users or work mischief on their hardware The flaw, revealed by a well-known security researcher and jailbreaker of iPhones, involves the "reply to" line in SMS messages....

The Starship Enterprise has its deflector shields to defend itself from attacks by enemy weaponry, and if all goes well with a pilot program launched Tuesday by the U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT), road warriors will have wireless systems to defend themselves from collisions with other vehicles Under the year-long Safety Pilot program set i...

A well-known iOS hacker who uses the handle "pod2g" revealed a flaw in Apple's mobile operating system, iOS, that he says can be exploited to alter the "reply to" information in SMS messages Such a tactic could be used by cybermiscreants to pry sensitive information from the recipient of a message or divert them to a malicious website....

It's no secret that Sony Computer Entertainment sees mobile gaming as a large contributor to its bottom line in the future. That vision became clearer Tuesday when Sony revealed more details about its PlayStation Mobile service The skeleton of the program was revealed earlier this summer at the E3 conference in Los Angeles, but at Gamescom in Colog...

The attack last week on journalist Mat Honan's iCloud account has the potential to strip the silver lining from the cybernimbus Honan had his digital life destroyed when hackers, in a convoluted effort to hijack his Twitter account, ended up trashing everything connected to his Apple iCloud account....

As digital horror stories go, Mat Honan's is a doozy The Wired reporter had his iCloud account hacked and had his digital life wiped from cyberspace....

Some folks' answer to wallet security is chaining it to their belts. Google's is to chain it to the cloud The Search Giant added some security features to its Google Wallet product last week intended to make it safer for consumers to use. For example, credit card information no longer resides in the Google Wallet mobile app. Its new home is in the ...

Siemens, which made the industrial controllers targeted by the Stuxnet cyberweapon, announced last week that it was releasing some patches aimed at foiling attacks on its hardware similar to those mounted by the now-famous worm Previous versions of the controllers used in SCADA (Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition) systems allowed DLL (Dynamic...

Facebook on Thursday released its first quarterly earnings report since its monster IPO in May During the period, Facebook reported revenues of US$1.18 billion but couldn't turn a profit, losing $157 million, or eight cents a share....

Microsoft security researcher Terry Zink pulled the pin on a virtual grenade when he aired his belief that he'd discovered a botnet manned by Android zombies After examining some spam, Zink found suggestions that the junk mail was being generated from Android smartphones with access to Yahoo mail accounts....