Articles by John P. Mello Jr.

Citing information from documents obtained from the Federal Bureau of Investigation under the Freedom of Information Act, a civil liberties group Tuesday maintained the federal agency has had chronic problems with its use of anti-terror letters to collect personal information about American citizens The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) also ass...

Advertising inside video games will near the US$1 billion mark by the beginning of the next decade, according to a report released by a technology research firm In-game advertising will grow from $77.7 million in 2006 to $971.3 million in 2011, the Yankee Group report predicted....

Some 30 percent of businesses in the UK leave data, some of it sensitive, on their PCs when they dispose of them, according to research findings released this week by computer maker Lenovo In the survey of 300 businesses commissioned by the UK-Ireland arm of the company, 29 percent of IT managers in large companies with 1,000 or more employees and ...

Social and community networks may be great hangouts for Web surfers who shop but not so great for retailers looking for virtual "ka-chings." That was one of the findings in a report released Saturday by JupiterResearch of New York, based on a survey conducted in March of more than 2,000 online consumers....

The popularity of social networking sites like MySpace and user-generated content sites like YouTube are inducing traditional news organizations to rethink their approach to the Web Outfits like Fox News, CNN, USA Today and MSNBC have begun to incorporate social networking tools into their sites, as well as actively soliciting content from their us...

Social networking Web sites such as MySpace and Facebook provide a means for people to share their lives with others, but are these sites turning their subscribers' free content into economic gain -- a new form of sharecropping? It certainly seems that way, according to Nicholas G. Carr, author of Does IT Matter?...

A method for screening new hires that counts the likes of Google among its adherents may create some fertile ground for future employment lawsuits That's the opinion of two attorneys writing the New York Law Journal this week....

If there's one prospect that sends shivers down the spines of shutterbugs everywhere, it's the expectation that some day, some way, all their photos will disappear in a computer mishap There are several ways to guard against such disasters, but a neat, mobile way to do it is with the Polaroid Media Backup Photo Edition (US$119 to $149)....

International business travelers will be able to access the Internet for a flat monthly fee through more than 100,000 wireless hotspots around the world under a new service announced Monday by Boingo Wireless Boingo, a Santa Monica, Calif.-based aggregator of WiFi networks, said its new service will cost 29 euros, or US$39, per month for unlimited ...

There are lots of disk defraggers in the market, but Raxco PerfectDisk is one of the best that I've seen to date. Now the Gaithersburg, Md., company is expanding the scope of its flagship product to further improve computer performance and security Raxco's new product, PerfectDisk Rx Suite (US$39.95), is built around five components: a disk optimiz...

A promising technology that involves controlling light with magnets could improve the speed and reduce the juice requirements of future computer chips The technology, developed by researchers at the U.S. Navy Research Laboratory in Washington, D.C., and the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada, combines knowledge from two budding research fiel...

A bane of shutterbugs everywhere is the question of what to do with their photos after shooting them In the days when film was king, it wasn't unusual to find closets with shoeboxes stuffed with prints or boxes of slides....

Call centers for PC companies placed dead last in customer satisfaction in a survey released Tuesday by an international consulting group The Ann Arbor, Mich.-based CFI Group found PC call centers scored a 64, the lowest customer satisfaction score of all the industries surveyed, which included catalog sales, banking, cell phone service and cable a...

Banks looking to increase opportunities to cross-sell products to their online customers will turn in the coming years to Web-based personal finance management tools to do so, according to a research report released Tuesday "With the online banking market maturing, banks are seeking ways to engage their customers on their Web site[s] beyond just ch...

If there's one thing Windows users share -- other than their conflicted emotions toward Microsoft -- it's an insatiable yearning to boost the performance of their computers Windows, despite all its warts, gives them a dizzying number of ways to to do that -- with the right tools....

Worldwide revenues from standalone open source software will reach US$5.8 billion by 2011, according to a report released last week by IDC Revenue from open source software will grow at a compound annual growth rate of 26 percent from 2006 to 2011, according to predictions from the Framingham, Mass.-based research firm....

Video rental purveyor Netflix and TV shopping channel QVC led a customer satisfaction index of the top 100 online retailers released Friday by ForeSee Results, of Ann Arbor, Mich The index, calculated twice a year by the firm, ranked the Web sites of Netflix and QVC, with scores of 85, as the kings of customer satisfaction among Internet retail's t...

As the market for online banking matures, competition is heating up for a group of consumers no longer loyal to their primary financial institution Some 31 percent of online consumers who have a checking or savings account are "switchers" -- people who can be enticed to desert their primary bank with promotional offers like high interest rates on d...

A new installment of Mozilla's sterling e-mail program, Thunderbird, has been released, and while this new variant doesn't blow the doors off its predecessor, version 1.5, it has some tantalizing enhancements that spurred me to upgrade to the new edition without hesitation A major change in the application that immediately attracted me to it was it...

Social networking Web sites such as MySpace and Facebook provide a means for people to share their lives with others, but are these sites turning their subscribers' free content into economic gain -- a new form of sharecropping? It certainly seems that way, according to Nicholas G. Carr, author of Does IT Matter....