Articles by John P. Mello Jr

Three corporate giants on Tuesday announced they were banding together to provide healthcare for their 1.1 million employees The companies -- Amazon, Berkshire Hathaway and JP Morgan Chase -- plan to form a company "free from profit-making incentives and constraints" in order to improve employee satisfaction with their healthcare coverage as well a...

HomePod, Apple's long-awaited entry into the torrid smart speaker market, will be available Feb. 9, the company announced Tuesday The HomePod, which is not quite 7 inches tall, will be offered in white and space gray. It can be pre-ordered at Apple's website for US$349 starting Friday....

There was some bad news for owners of the latest iPhone models on Monday Batteries in the iPhone 8 and X may have shorter life spans than those in prior models, according to an article in ZDNet....

A bug in the software used by Google Cast devices such as Chromecast and Home can slow down or crash WiFi networks The problem -- initially believed to be isolated to a particular router model made by TP-Link -- appears to affect models made by other manufacturers, including Asus, Linksys, Netgear and Synology....

Community-owned fiber-to-home broadband networks generally charge less for entry-level service than private providers, according to the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University, which released its findings last week Despite lower "teaser rates" private providers offer during the first year of service, publicly-owned fiber-t...

Apple on Monday responded to an open letter from investors who called for the company to address the negative impact of the iPhone on children and teens. Though the company listed a number of controls provided to help parents screen content, it offered little to address the investors' chief concern: the amount of time teens and younger children spend on phones...

The mushrooming popularity of smart speakers like Amazon Echo and Google Home will fuel e-commerce in the coming year "You're going to have a whole new frontier of commerce space driven through voice and brand recognition," said Michael Levine, marketing vice president at Photon....

Scientists at Harvard University on Monday unveiled a metalens that has the potential to shrink the size of any device that uses a camera while at the same time improving performance While traditional lenses are made from glass, metalenses use a flat surface peppered with nanostructures to focus light. One problem with metalenses has been their ina...

Moves that allowed major e-commerce players to jockey for position both off and on the Internet made headlines in 2017 "The year was a triumph for market leaders," said Mike Comstock, a senior adviser at GrandCanals....

The United States on Tuesday accused North Korea of responsibility for a global ransomware attack that locked down more than 300,000 computers in 150 countries earlier this year The U.S. now has enough evidence to support its assertion that Pyongyang was behind the WannaCry attack in May, Homeland Security Advisor Tom Bossert told reporters at a Wh...

Is social media evolving into an antisocial medium? Days after one of its former execs argued that the answer is yes, Facebook published a post addressing the issue "I think we have created tools that are ripping apart the social fabric of how society works," Chamath Palihapitiya, who once served as vice president for growth at Facebook, told an au...

Apple will release a professional version of its all-in-one iMac desktop computer with a US$5,000 price tag on Thursday Up to now, all-in-one computers in general and iMacs in particular have been seen as stylish offerings for home and family, but Apple has changed that in a big way with the iMac Pro....

Some HP laptops users came with a preinstalled program to capture the keystrokes of users, a security researcher recently discovered The researcher, Michael Myng aka "ZwClose," discovered the keylogger software while trying to solve a keyboard problem for a friend. The software is turned off by default....

A method for scrambling data to protect it from the super powerful computers of the future has received a speed boost from a team of researchers from Duke and Ohio State universities and the Oak Ridge National Laboratory. The method uses quantum key distribution to guard data from prying eyes, wrote Nurul T. Islam, Charles Ci Wen Lim, Clinton Caha...

Four big tech players this week moved to improve their handling of open source software licensing violations Red Hat, Google, Facebook and IBM said they would apply error standards in the most recent GNU General Public License agreement, GPLv3, to all of their open source licensing, even licenses granted under older GPL agreements....

A popular technique used by website operators to observe the keystrokes, mouse movements and scrolling behavior of visitors on Web pages is fraught with risk, according to researchers at Princeton's Center for Information Technology Policy The technique offered by a number of service providers uses scripts to capture the activity of a visitor on a ...

Facebook on Tuesday raised the ante for messaging apps photo quality with the announcement of 4K support for Messenger "We're making significant investments in how people communicate visually on Messenger," wrote Facebook Messenger product managers Sean Kelly and Hagen Green in an online post. Starting Tuesday, "people can send and receive photos i...

New version releases of browsers don't get the buzz they used to get, but Firefox Quantum is an exception The latest version of the Mozilla Foundation's browser, released Tuesday, is all about performance. Firefox is twice as fast as it was a year ago, Mozilla claimed. It is not only fast on startup -- it remains zippy even when taxed by multitud...

Facebook on Tuesday announced that it was preparing a plugin for its popular Messenger platform that will allow website visitors to chat with a human or bot without leaving the site Customer Chat is one of a number of changes in the version 2.2 update of the Messenger platform revealed at the Web Summit in Lisbon, Portugal....

A three-pronged banking malware campaign has been infecting Android phones since the beginning of this year, according to security researchers Attackers have been stealing credentials, planting the Marcher banking Trojan on phones, and nicking credit card information. So far, they have targeted customers of BankAustria, Raiffeisen Meine Bank and Sp...