Articles by John P. Mello Jr.

The widespread adoption of open-source software by corporations and governments has raised some security concerns in the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS), and the agency is responding It has funded a three-year grant reportedly worth US$1.24 million to -- among other things -- set up a daily auditing program of major open-source applicati...

North American advertisers spent US$5.75 billion on search engine marketing in 2005, a 44 percent increase over the previous year, according to a report released Monday by the Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization (SEMPO) The report, based on a survey of 553 respondents and conducted by Radar Research and Intellisurvey in November 2005,...

Peddling pornography has always been big business on theInternet, but apparently it isn't lucrative enough for some skin merchants Pornographers are turning to click fraud to supplement income generated by their Web sites, according to Kessler International, a cybercrime investigations firm based in New York City....

Cool electronic gadgets can be seductive not only to consumers, but to the makers of the gadgets themselves. And that is costing those makers money According to a report released by Forrester Research yesterday, consumer technology companies are leaving some US$3.8 billion on the table today because they're failing to leverage their knack for selli...

As revelers wish each other happy New Year this weekend, members of the open-source community will be reveling in events from the past year -- a year that saw their movement make significant strides in strengthening its position on the technology landscape "This year we saw a lot of CIOs and a lot of big businesses signing off on open-source projec...

Blackmail, the shakedown and the sting are age-old forms of thuggery in theanalog world, and now they're finding the digital world a fertile place fortheir poisoned fruits, according to security experts interviewed byTechNewsWorld The experts say that criminal elements -- including organized crime in Russia,Eastern Europe and Asia -- are increasing...

There are lots of software heavyweights in the digital imaging editing field -- sluggers such as Microsoft, Adobe and Ulead -- so it's a wonder that a fine program like Paint Shop Pro has continued to chug along over the years without being derailed as has been the case with so many worthwhile independents However, the maker of PSP, Jasc Software, ...

Web surfers are annoyed as hell and they're doing something about it That's the thrust of the findings in a survey to be released next week by Hostway, a Chicago-based Web site hosting service with more than 400,000 global clients....

Falling prices, the limping economy, natural disasters -- nothing has been able to put a crimp in the double-digit growth of the personal computer market over the last three years. Analysts expect a significant slowdown in 2006, but that is not to say that the worldwide growth rate for the market won't be one that many industries would kill to have...

Although blogging has gained a certain amount of notoriety in the media, its tool base remains relatively immature. There are some viable tools available to bloggers offered by hosting services like Blogger and Typepad, but a truly integrated approach has been lacking But, as any savvy technologist knows, such gaps in the fabric of things tech don'...

For the last several days, Google has set the online and financial worlds buzzing with an expected deal with America Online that could be cut as early as today. Although opinion varies on the wisdom and impact of the move, there's one point on which everyone agrees: The maneuver will add fuel to the simmering feud between Microsoft and the Net's favorite search engine...

As the holiday shopping season starts its last leg today, online merchants are smiling and offline retailers are preparing for the annual Saturday surge Shopping on the Net has been brisk since Thanksgiving....

If handheld computers survive the onslaught on their market by mobile phones with their panoply of features that seem to multiply on a daily basis, it will be in large part, ironically, to their wireless capabilities That fact hasn't been lost on Palm, which can trace its lineage to the innovators who single handedly created the space from scratch....

Online holiday sales are on a pace to crack US$26 billion this year -- an 18 percent leap over last year, according to JupiterResearch in New York City "Reports we've seen from Mastercard and Visa indicate that online transactions are up sharply during this period relative to last year," Jupiter Senior Vice President, Research David Schatsky told t...

Listen. Do you hear that yowling?No. That's not your neighbor's cat in heat. It's mainstream computer makers taking a gander at the latest margin figures on PCs With the average price of a computer hovering around US$675 and the probability that $250 "system specials" will be needed to boost holiday sales, manufacturers are wringing their hands and...

Threats from malware -- viruses, worms, Trojans, spyware and such -- climbed 48 percent in 2005, compared to the previous year, according to the annual Sophos Security Threat Management Report The report, expected to be released today and a copy of which was obtained by TechNewsWorld, noted that there were 15,907 new malware threats this year compa...

In recent days Massachusetts has softened its tough stance on what file formats it will store its documents in -- a stance that placed it squarely at loggerheads with Microsoft -- but, according to one state legislator, the software giant should not start breathing easy yet The policy adopted by the state contains a standard within a standard, asse...

High oil prices. Natural disasters. Slumping economy. Pink slip epidemics. None of that appeared to bother shoppers as they stormed Web outlets on the day after Thanksgiving, the day that's become known as Black Friday According to Patty Freeman Evans, a retail analyst with Jupiter Research in New York City, Black Friday was a day of historic propo...

Electronic information has its advantages over paper, but it has its share of snags, too. One of them is finding saved items In the analog world, some folks keep tabs on their important data bits by scribbling them on post-it notes and sticking them to any available surface in sight, creating a festive jungle sure to obscure future attempts at info...

Sloth can be a deadly sin, or at least a potentially litigious one, and the rise of blogging on the Internet has peaked concern about this pitfall The issue arises because bloggers, many or most of them amateurs, often overdose on cut-and-paste editing, which can result in copyright violations, Paul Llewellyn, an attorney with Kaye Scholer in New Y...