Articles by John P. Mello Jr

Essential, a company founded by Andy Rubin, the "father of Android," on Tuesday pulled off the wraps on a new high-end smartphone The Essential Phone, priced at US$699, includes radios for connecting to all major U.S. carriers....

Microsoft on Tuesday announced a refresh of its Surface Pro tablet-laptop computer Although Microsoft said the fifth generation of the unit has been redesigned from the inside out with more than 800 new custom parts, the Surface Pro looks similar to its predecessor....

The public got a rare view into how Facebook tries to keep offensive and dangerous content offline in a report published Sunday Confidential documents leaked to The Guardian exposed the secret rules by which Facebook polices postings on issues such as violence, hate speech, terrorism, pornography, racism and self-harm, as well as such subjects as s...

A British data watchdog has raised questions about whether it was appropriate for a healthcare trust to share data on 1.6 million patients with DeepMind Health, an artificial intelligence company owned by Google The trust shared the data in connection with the test phase of Streams, an app designed to diagnose acute kidney injuries. However, the sh...

Echo isn't just for sound anymore Amazon on Tuesday announced Echo Show, a new version of its popular smart speaker that comes with a 7-inch color touchscreen, 5-inch front-facing camera and dual 2-inch Dolby speakers....

A 7-year-old flaw in Intel chips could enable hijackers to gain total control of business computers and use them for malicious purposes The Intel AMT (active management technology) vulnerability is the first of its kind, according to Embedi, which released technical details about it last week....

Odds appear good that Apple will be joining Amazon and Google in the smart speaker competition with a Siri-powered device it plans to introduce at its World Wide Developers Conference next month, according to MacRumors, which cited a report by Ming-Chi Kuo of KGI Securities The new home-AI product will have excellent acoustics with one woofer and s...

Gender bias affects contributions to the open source community, according to a paper published Monday in the open access journal PeerJ Computer Science Female programmers' suggestions for code changes in open source projects -- called "pull requests" -- were accepted more often than those of their male counterparts -- 78.7 percent for women versus ...

Three high-profile Internet brands this week announced initiatives to combat "fake news" online Google on Tuesday revealed that it had tweaked its search processes to help bring high-quality content to the top of search result pages....

Uber CEO Travis Kalanick has a reputation of playing fast and loose with rules, but it appears that a maneuver his company performed on iPhones took his ride-hailing outfit to the brink of ruin a couple of years ago When Apple discovered Uber was planting code on iPhones that persisted on the devices even after the ride-hailing app was removed, App...

Apple reportedly has begun testing a premium iPhone with a revamped display and body, which could be one of three new models the company is expected to launch this fall. The other two likely will be upgrades to the two existing iPhones The new design will incorporate curved glass and stainless steel. It will increase the surface area of the display...

Just as the Shadow Brokers hacker group started crowing about a dump of never-seen-before flaws in Windows, Microsoft announced it already had fixed most of the exploits "Today, Microsoft triaged a large release of exploits made publicly available by Shadow Brokers," Microsoft Principal Security Group Manager Phillip Misner wrote in a Friday post....

An alleged spam kingpin with possible ties to election meddling in the United States was arrested in Spain last week under a U.S. international warrant The alleged spam czar, Pyotr Levashov, was taken into custody in Barcelona while vacationing with his family, according to news reports....

Screaming sirens serenaded Dallas residents in the early morning hours Saturday after a cyberattack set off the city's emergency warning system All of the city's 156 sirens were set off more than a dozen times, The Dallas Morning News reported....

There are more than three dozen previously unknown flaws that pose a potential threat to consumers using some Samsung TVs, watches and phones, a security researcher reported Monday Hackers could exploit the vulnerabilities found in Samsung's Tizen operating system to gain remote access and control of a variety of the company's products, Amihai Neid...

Imagination on Monday announced that Apple would no longer use its intellectual property, and the company's stock sank faster than a bottomless boat on the news Apple planned to discontinue its use of the company's IP in new products in 15 months to two years, ending the license and royalty agreement between the companies, Imagination said....

UK Home Secretary Amber Rudd on Sunday called for greater government access to encrypted content on mobile apps Apps with end-to-end encryption, like Facebook's WhatsApp, should not be allowed to conceal terrorists' communications from law enforcement, Rudd said in an appearance on The Andrew Marr Show, a BBC broadcast....

Apple on Tuesday announced an iPad update, a red iPhone 7 and 7 Plus, and a new video-editing app for iOS The iPad upgrade has a 9.7-inch, 2048 x 1536-pixel Retina display with 264 pixels per inch, and Apple's A9 64-bit processor....

Apple is stockpiling resources to make a splash in the augmented reality market The company is not only marshaling internal resources behind its AR efforts, but also hiring talented outsiders and acquiring companies with expertise in AR hardware, 3D gaming and virtual reality software, Bloomberg reported Monday....

Facebook on Monday moved to prevent spy applications from accessing its users' data The company has updated its Facebook and Instagram policies to prohibit developers from using data obtained from those platforms in surveillance tools, according to Rob Sherman, deputy chief privacy officer at Facebook....