Articles by John P. Mello Jr.

A coalition of both right- and left-wing groups called on Congress Monday to "save" the Internet by requiring network neutrality through law "Whenever you see people on the far left and far right joining together about something Congress is getting ready to do, it's been my experience that what Congress is getting ready to do is basically un-Americ...

Popularity may be a menace as well as a benefit for the open source software movement, according to an analyst at Forrester Research in Boston, Mass In a report titled "Vendors Refine Their Open Source Strategies/The Risk of Subverting Open Source Freedoms Mounts," Senior Analyst Michael Goulde cautions the open source community about the corruptin...

A malware-for-sale ring used to distribute customized copies of a data-pilfering Trojan has been cracked by two computersecurity firms ...

The global bandwidth glut that resulted when the telecom bubble burst in the late 1990s finally appears to be abating Signs of the glut's demise are evident in the industry, according to TeleGeography Research in Washington, D.C. "Following several rough years, the global bandwidth market is showing signs of improved health: supply equilibrium, pri...

There's a good reason why Hewlett-Packard notebook computers have become so popular with consumers. They give you a lot for your money Consider HP's latest media center locomotive, the dv8000....

If there's one software category that program makers never tire of taking a crack at it's registry cleaners As many Microsoft Windows users know, the registry is a database of all the settings on a PC. It's one of the most crucial components of the operating system, and it's always a mess....

For anglers, spring is a time for removing the rod and reel from storage and heading to a lake or stream. For phishers of another kind, however, spring is the season for tax scams Phishing -- the use of phony e-mails and Web sites to obtain personal information about people -- has become such a problem for the U.S. Internal Revenue Service (IRS) th...

CyberLink may not be a household name among PC users, but the feisty company makes some robust entertainment software for producing and watching DVDs as well as editing video Certainly, the Taiwanese enterprise has a tough row to hoe, pitted as it is against the likes of Sonic/Roxio, Pinnacle and Ulead, but I've always found its offering up to the ...

Marketers will need to tweak their selling strategies if they want to collar new broadband customers, according to industry experts Although broadband growth has been strong for the last three years -- nearly doubling from 23.7 million subscribers in 2003 to 40.9 million in 2005 -- the "big pitch" by marketers during that time has been the superior...

From billboards to clothing racks, electronic sign makers have paper products in their crosshairs Among the technologies threatening paper's signage dominion are super juiced LEDs (Light Emitting Diodes) and electronic inks and papers....

So you say you want to share slideshows and videos on the Internet without a lot of rigmarole. Problem is, there's just so much noise in the media sharing space, you just don't know where to turn. Well, two well-known Net players have an end-to-end solution for you -- if you're willing to pay a hefty price for it VitalStream, a video streaming play...

Popularity may be a menace as well as a benefit for the open source software movement, according to an analyst at Forrester Research in Boston, Mass In a report titled "Vendors Refine Their Open Source Strategies/The Risk of Subverting Open Source Freedoms Mounts," Senior Analyst Michael Goulde cautions the open source community about the corruptin...

If you're ever starved for conversation at a cocktail party, bring up the subject of computer support. It's sure to start a buzz in the room, since almost everyone has a horror story to tell about the topic The reason everyone has a terrible tale is that customer service in the PC industry is at a woeful state, according to David A. Milman, CEO and...

As a legendary poet-songster once insightfully intoned, you don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows, but it helps if you have an Oregon Scientific regional weather station The Tualatin, Oregon-based company pulled the wraps off its latest meteorological information center in January at CES, the annual show of shows for GadgetSphere...

Some 25 million households in the nation have a wireless network, and that number is growing. So, too, is the number of home networks without a lick of security on them, according to a report released last week by ABI Research in Oyster Bay, N.Y That's because, for most consumers, activating the security features included with their WiFi hardware i...

Concern that a dearth of external e-mail accounts at the FBI will effect the agency's ability to fight crime and terrorism is "overblown," according to Coleen Rowley Rowley is a former principal legal advisor with the bureau known for blowing the whistle on oversights it made prior to the World Trade Center attacks on Sept. 11, 2001....

At the risk of revealing my age, I can remember when a 10 gigabyte hard drive seemed enormous. Of course those were the days before PCs became vaults for music collections, family photo albums and home video libraries Now, it seems, no matter how much hard disk space we have, we always need more, which is why software makers continue to make progra...

A coalition of some 600 organizations opposed to a scheme by America Online and Goodmail Systems to "tax" e-mail claimed on Monday that supporters of the plan have a long-term agenda to make everyone pay for exchanging electronic missives over the Net Referring to an op-ed piece by Esther Dyson, an investor in technology start-ups and editor of cne...

Three computer researchers created a stir Wednesday when they released a paper at a conference in Pisa, Italy, describing how to infect Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) tags with a computer virus, but the likelihood of a digital disease rampaging through the world's supply chains is slim, at least for now "The likelihood of something like this...

Let me set the record straight. I've never been a fan of tablet computers. If the urge to write on an LCD strikes me, I've always found my Palm Tungsten handheld sufficient for that desire. Nevertheless, when Motion Computing of Austin, Texas, introduced the LS800 tablet, it tantalized me For one thing, it's a real tablet, not a laptop with a swive...