Articles by John P. Mello Jr

PCs and TVs received high marks from consumers in a report released Tuesday by the American Customer Satisfaction Index The ACSI Household Appliance and Electronics Study for 2021-2022, based on interviews with more than 9,000 consumers, rates a range of products on a scale of zero to 100....

A new service powered by artificial intelligence that can turn portraits into talking heads was announced Monday by D-ID Called Creative Reality Studio, the self-service application can turn the image of a face into a video, complete with speech....

A new search engine powered by artificial intelligence and natural language processing is offering an alternative to the lists of web pages making up the results of a typical online search Called Andi, the search engine combines the use of large language models -- think OpenAi's GPY-3 -- and live web data to craft an answer to questions posed by se...

Apple refreshed its iPhone, Watch, and AirPods product lines at an online event Wednesday, as well as introducing a new Ultra watch for activity in challenging environments The Apple Watch Ultra is designed to operate in extreme cold and hot environments, as well as under 130 feet of water. It's housed in a rugged titanium case, and its face is mad...

A new phishing-as-a-service offering on the dark web poses a threat to online accounts protected by multi-factor authentication, according to a blog posted Monday by an endpoint security company Called EvilProxy, the service allows threat actors to launch phishing campaigns with the ability to bypass MFA at scale without the need to hack upstream s...

The penchant for tech whistleblowers to quit their jobs with a bang while many of their colleagues engage in "quiet quitting" should be a wake-up call to industry leaders, according to a blog penned by four Forrester analysts A scorching employment market for security, risk and privacy professionals combined with the recruiting of values-based empl...

A Chinese cyber espionage group has been using a fake news site to infect government and energy industry targets in Australia, Malaysia and Europe with malware, according to a blog posted online Tuesday by Proofpoint and PwC Threat Intelligence The group is known by several names, including APT40, Leviathan, TA423 and Red Ladon. Four of its members...

The cloud gaming market appears to be ready for some substantial growth, although it will be tough sledding for new players to enter the scene In her newsletter published Tuesday, consumer technology guru Elizabeth Parks maintained that the cloud gaming market is at an inflection point as heavyweights in the industry continue to ramp up their invol...

Having trouble understanding that person at the end of the support line you've called to get some customer service? A Silicon Valley company wants to make those kinds of problems a thing of the past The company, Sanas, makes software that uses artificial intelligence to remove the accents in the speech of non-native, or even native, English speaker...

The next generation web -- Web3 -- has been hailed as more secure than the current incarnation of cyberspace, but a report released Tuesday warns that may not be so While Web3 may be difficult to subvert on an infrastructure level, there are other points of attack that may offer threat actors more opportunity for mischief than can be found in the l...

The U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), best known for creating the internet, advanced its plan to revolutionize communication among low orbiting satellite networks by selecting 11 teams to work on its Space-Based Adaptive Communications Node program Known as Space-BACN, the project seeks to create a low-cost, reconfigurable opt...

Fake social media accounts are usually associated with bot networks, but some research released Tuesday revealed many social media users are creating their own fake accounts for a variety of reasons One in three U.S. social media users has multiple accounts on the social media platforms that they use, according to a survey of 1,500 U.S. social medi...

Less than 1% of Netflix's 221 million subscribers are playing the service's games each day, according to a report from CNBC Based on statistics from Apptopia, the report revealed that there have been 23.3 million global downloads of Netflix's mobile games and an average of 1.7 million subscribers are engaging with the games daily....

Nearly all the top 10 universities in the United States, United Kingdom, and Australia are putting their students, faculty, and staff at risk of email compromise by failing to block attackers from spoofing the schools' email domains According to a report released Tuesday by enterprise security company Proofpoint, universities in the United States a...

If you're looking for the best digital quality of life in the world, Denmark appears to be the place to go According to a study released Monday by VPN provider Surfshark, Hamlet's homeland finished first among 110 nations based on five "pillars" of measurement: internet affordability, internet quality, infrastructure, security and government....

Meta took a step Tuesday toward abandoning its policy of removing misinformation about Covid from its platforms The company, which owns Facebook and Instagram, is asking its Oversight Board for an advisory opinion on whether measures taken to squash dangerous Covid-19 misinformation should continue or be modified....

The market for home security systems continues to grow despite concerns about false alerts, according to a new report from Parks Associates Security system ownership is at an all-time high in multiple sectors, the report noted, with more than a third of U.S. broadband households (36%) having home security systems and 41% of multi-dwelling unit mana...

A lawsuit against the administrators of more than 10,000 Facebook groups alleged to be part of a broker network for churning out fake product reviews was filed Tuesday by Amazon In its lawsuit, Amazon alleges the administrators have attempted to orchestrate the placement of bogus reviews on Amazon in exchange for money or free products. It added th...

Inflation may be forcing many Americans to reduce their discretionary spending, but shopping still appears to be strong among the luxury set, according to a survey released Wednesday by Saks Higher-income consumers continue to spend on luxury, including health, wellness and fitness products, according to the Saks Luxury Pulse, which is based on a s...

For years, U.S. broadband has received a bad rap by comparing it to the European market. That rap -- and the comparison it's founded on -- is dubious, according to a report released Monday by a D.C. tech think tank Comparisons between U.S. and European broadband prices abound, but their respective markets are built on such entirely different cost s...