Articles by John P. Mello Jr

Google on Monday posted to the Internet a previously unpublicized flaw that could pose a security threat to users of the Microsoft Windows operating system Google notified both Microsoft and Adobe of zero day vulnerabilities in their software on Oct. 21, wrote Neel Mehta and Billy Leonard, members of Google's Threat Analysis Group, in an online pos...

Internet bots have many useful online purposes, but they have a dark side, too, as three researchers demonstrated in their analysis of Twitter traffic during the first presidential debate between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump Bots are used to automate functions on the Net. For example, if you belong to several social networks, you could use a bo...

Apple on Thursday unveiled two new MacBook Pro laptops, adding a touch more power to the line Both the new 13-inch and 15-inch models will be offered in silver and space gray. They have a Touch Bar that replaces the row of function keys found on laptops, as well as a Touch ID fingerprint scanner incorporated into the power button. They sport a Forc...

Xiaomi on Tuesday fired another shot in the shrinking bezel wars, as it announced a smartphone with a front that's more than 90 percent display The Mi Mix is a 6.4-inch phone that's stylishly crafted by French designer Philippe Starck. It sports a feature set that indicates Xiaomi wants to compete at the high end of the smartphone market....

A refresh of Apple's flagship laptop, the MacBook Pro, likely will be the highlight of an event scheduled for this Thursday at the company's headquarters in Cupertino, California The update to its flagship MacBook line couldn't come at a more critical time. ...

Tesla on Wednesday announced plans to install hardware that will allow all of its cars to become driverless The equipment will enable self-driving at a safety level substantially greater than human-driven cars, according to the company....

Apple appears to be shifting its driverless car ambitions into a lower gear.Changes in the company's automotive strategy have resulted in hundreds of job cuts and the shelving of plans to build a car of its own, Bloomberg reported Monday "Project Titan" -- Apple's internal name for the automotive initiative -- has a new focus, according to the repo...

When the new president takes up residence at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave., cybersecurity will be on the shortlist for action. What's a president to do? TechNewsWorld asked more than a dozen experts what should be at the top of the new leader of the free world's cyberagenda. Following are some of their responses....

Watch out, Apple. HP on Wednesday introduced a new generation of premium computer products that could generate the kind of excitement in the market that's usually the domain of the folks at One Infinite Loop Among the new HP offerings are a new tablet-laptop convertible, a svelte laptop, an innovative all-in-one model, and a 4k display designed for...

Cyanogen, the maker of an alternative version of Android, on Tuesday announced that it was going modular. Future releases of its open source firmware product will not support a full stack of the Android OS The new modular setup will bring a slew of benefits to phone makers and developers, according to Cyanogen....

Project Noto, one of Google's most ambitious undertakings ever, has reached a milestone. Noto now supports 800 languages and 100 writing scripts, the companies announced last week Google and Monotype launched the open source initiative to create a typeface family that supports all the languages in the world, even rarely used languages.

First, it was flaming smartphones. Now it's exploding washing machines That's the situation Samsung found itself in last week when the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission issued a warning about certain top-load washing machines made by the company between March 2011 and April 2016....

Medical device manufacturer Animas on Tuesday warned that its OneTouch Ping insulin pump system was susceptible to hacking "We have been notified of a cybersecurity issue with the OneTouch Ping, specifically that a person could potentially gain unauthorized access to the pump through its unencrypted radio frequency communication system," reads the ...

Google on Tuesday unveiled a new smartphone and home hub that squarely aim at products from market leaders Apple and Amazon The company's new branded smartphone, called "Pixel," marks a departure from past efforts. Up to now, Google's Nexus phones were made by a variety of manufacturers that sold them under their brands....

Facebook on Monday announced Marketplace, a new mobile app that facilitates buying and selling between peers Marketplace allows members of a community to discover, buy and sell items, noted Facebook Product Management Director Mary Ku....

It's no longer a question whether hackers will influence the 2016 elections in the United States -- only how much they'll be able to sway them Leaked emails already have cost a Democratic Party chairperson her job, and the FBI last month issued a flash warning that foreign cyberadversaries had breached two state election databases....

Germany's data protection regulator on Tuesday ordered Facebook to stop collecting and storing data from WhatsApp users in the country Facebook also must delete any data it already may have harvested from German WhatsApp users, according to Johannes Caspar, Hamburg Commissioner for Data Protection and Freedom of Information, who issued the order....

The website of prominent security blogger Brian Krebs is back online this week after sustaining one of the largest distributed denial of service attacks in Internet history DDoS attacks typically disrupt service at a website by flooding it with junk traffic. In this case, garbage traffic assaulted Krebs' site at 620 gigabits per second. By comparis...

Yahoo on Thursday disclosed that a data breach in late 2014 resulted in the theft of information from at least 500 million customer accounts. Based on a recent investigation, it appears that state-sponsored hackers carried out the attack, the company said....

GoPro earlier this week refreshed its product line, announcing two new action cameras, a cloud service and a drone Its new Hero5 Black camera (US$399.99) can capture 4K video at 30 frames a second and still photos at 12 megapixels, with RAW and WDR support....