Articles by John P. Mello Jr

A Web standards milestone announced Tuesday could point to the end of the road for pesky passwords. The new standard, WebAuthn, has won near-final approval from the World Wide Web Consortium, which establishes Web standards....

A group of nonprofits on Monday announced they would fund an initiative to study Facebook's role in elections and democracy The organizations will pay the expenses of researchers whose projects are accepted for the initiative, and Facebook will give the scholars access to proprietary data that has met the company's new standards for heightened use...

Gesture control and a curved body may be in the iPhone's future Apple has been experimenting with those features for the iPhone, and they could be ready for prime time in two to three years, Bloomberg reported Wednesday, citing "people with knowledge in the matter."

The Mozilla Foundation on Tuesday unveiled its plans for Firefox Reality, a browser designed specifically for mixed reality headsets The browser combines the beneftis of Mozilla's existing Firefox browser -- most notably the robust performance of its Firefox Quantum technology -- with Servo, its experimental Web engine....

Apple on Tuesday announced a refresh of its iPad as part of a new approach to the education market. CEO Tim Cook and other Apple officials also outlined a number of new education initiatives at an event held at Lane Tech College Prep High School in Chicago The new 32-gigabyte, 9.7-inch iPad, which will sell to consumers for US$329 and to students f...

Facebook on Sunday confirmed that its Messenger and Lite apps for Android smartphones routinely collect call and text histories The call and text history logging are opt-in features for people using Messenger or Facebook Lite on Android devices, the company said in a post.

A hardware wallet for virtual currencies with millions of users has been compromised by a 15-year-old security researcher Saleem Rashid explained how he cracked the firmware on the wallet produced by Ledger in an online post Tuesday....

Many Facebook members reportedly have shuttered their accounts in the wake of reports that Cambridge Analytica, a voter profiling company working for Donald Trump's presidential campaign, harvested data from 50 million users, unbeknownst to them The data firm used the information to develop techniques that formed the basis of its work for Trump's ...

Google on Wednesday said it will stop serving ads for cryptocurrencies and related content in June The ban includes but is not limited to initial coin offerings, cryptocurrency exchanges, cryptocurrency wallets, and cryptocurrency trading advice....

Fitbit on Tuesday added a new smartwatch to its wearables line with a pricetag of US$199.95 The Fitbit Versa, which will reach global retail outlets in next month, will be the lightest metal smartwatch in the U.S. market. It includes a new dashboard that simplifies the way health and fitness data is accessed on the device....

Americans were targeted on social media by Russian agents on a mission to harvest personal information, The Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday The agents pretended to work for organizations promoting African-American businesses as a ruse to obtain personal information from black business owners during the 2016 presidential election campaign, ac...

Sony Semiconductor Solutions, Nikon, Foxconn, Scenera and Wistron have formed an alliance to create standards that allow surveillance and IP cameras to play well with each other The NICE Alliance, unveiled Monday, aims to create a new smart camera ecosystem, along the lines of the mobile ecosystems that have become so familiar. The "NICE" acronym s...

Apple's plans to open a number of healthcare centers for its employees surfaced this week Called the "AC Wellness Network," the centers will offer "a unique concierge-like healthcare experience for employees and their dependents," according to a website Apple set up for the initiative.

Samsung on Sunday raised the curtain on the latest models of its flagship Galaxy smartphones, the S9 and S9+, featuring improved imaging and audio performance Two standout features in the 12-megapixel rear-facing camera are improved low light performance and super slow-mo video....

As beneficial as artificial intelligence can be, it has its dark side, too. That dark side is the focus of a 100-page report a group of technology, academic and public interest organizations jointly released Tuesday AI will be used by threat actors to expand the scale and efficiency of their attacks, the report predicts. They will employ it to comp...

Within an hour of the shooting at a Florida High School last week, divisive messages began pouring out of Twitter accounts believed to be controlled by Russia At a rapid speed, messages began flooding Twitter using popular hashtags like #guncontrolnow, #gunreformnow and #Parklandshooting to exploit the rampage by a lone gunman with an assault rifle...

Google's Chrome Web browser on Thursday began blocking some of the Net's most annoying types of ads Chrome's built-in ad filter blocks ads based on standards devised by the Coalition for Better Ads, an industry group whose membership roster includes Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Procter & Gamble, Unilever and The Washington Post....

Google on Tuesday rolled out a developer preview of its new AMP story format, which is designed to give content publishers an easy way to deliver news and information on mobile devices with visually rich, tap-through stories "On mobile devices, users browse lots of articles, but engage with few in-depth," noted Rudy Galfi, product manager for AMP a...

Critics have begun weighing in on Apple's HomePod smart speaker, and they're loving the device's sound but don't have much affection for its smarts The HomePod's sound outclassed top-shelf competitor SonosOne, according to Matthew Panzarino, writing for TechCrunch....

Intel has designed a pair of smart glasses that won't make you look like a hopeless geek Called "Vaunt," the peepers, which are still in the prototype phase, look like ordinary glasses, save for a faint, red glimmer that occasionally appears on the right lens....