Articles by John P. Mello Jr

Almost lost among the deluge of new features in the upcoming version of iOS Apple touted last week was the company's announcement about privacy. "All this great work in iOS 10 would be meaningless to us if it came at the expense of your privacy," Craig Federighi, Apple's senior vice president for software engineering, told attendees at the company...

Sony on Monday announced its new game lineup for the year at the Electronic Entertainment Expo at the Los Angeles Convention Center "We have just concluded the PlayStation E3 Press Conference for 2016 and if ever there was a year dedicated to thrilling entertainment experiences, this is it," noted Shawn Layden, president of Sony Interactive Enterta...

Apple on Monday kicked off its Worldwide Developers Conference with the biggest-ever release of its iOS mobile operating system CEO Tim Cook called iOS 10, coming this fall, "gigantic" and "the mother of all releases."

If crime doesn't pay, Russian ransomware bosses wouldn't know it The average Russian ransomware boss makes US$90,000 a year -- or 13 times the average income for citizens in the country who stick to the "straight and narrow," according to a recent Flashpoint study....

Data stolen from more than 32 million Twitter users has been offered for sale on the dark web for 10 bitcoin, or around US$5,800, LeakedSource reported Wednesday. LeakedSource has added the account and email information to its searchable repository of compromised credentials. The data set came from someone called "[email protected]," who has bee...

Edward Snowden made a greater effort than originally believed to raise his concerns within the NSA before releasing thousands of classified documents detailing programs that allowed the agency to spy on U.S. citizens The truth is more complex than the NSA let on, according to Vice News, which published a report based on documents it secured through...

Facebook top dog Mark Zuckerberg had several of his social media accounts breached and defaced, according to reports that surfaced Sunday Zuckerberg's Twitter, LinkedIn and Pinterest memberships were hacked, but evidence of the attacks quickly disappeared, according to Engadget, which copied and posted samples of the vandalism before they were eras...

The banking trojan -- a type of malware used to steal credentials for bank accounts -- has been a staple of cyberthieves for years. However, ransomware, which has proven both easy to use and highly successful, has started eroding its popularity In a typical banking trojan attack, a robber mounts a phishing campaign to entice a target to open an att...

Facebook on Wednesday introduced DeepText, an artificial intelligence-fueled text analytics engine "Text is a prevalent form of communication on Facebook," wrote Facebook software engineers Ahmad Abdulkader, Aparna Lakshmiratan and Joy Zhang in a post describing its capabilities....

At least 419 million people around the world are blocking advertising on their smartphones, according to a report PageFair released Tuesday Most of those people -- 408 million of them -- are using ad-blocking browsers, notes the report. The use of ad blockers doubled in 2015, and the use of mobile ad-blocking browsers increased 90 percent during th...

Antiquated IT systems are soaking up federal technology dollars and creating risks for both bureaucrats and citizens, the Government Accountability Office reported last week More than 75 percent of the federal IT budget in 2015 went toward the operation and maintenance of nearly obsolete legacy systems that use outdated software languages and unsup...

Twitter on Tuesday announced a number of changes to tweets, including what will be included in a message's 140-character count The changes, which will be rolled out in the coming months, were outlined by Twitter Senior Product Manager Todd Sherman:...

Toyota andDEKA Research and Development last week announced an agreement that will revive development of the iBot, a wheelchair that can climb stairs The companies revealed their pact to develop mobility solutions for the disabled community at the annual convention of the Paralyzed Veterans of America....

Eset on Wednesday announced that it has fashioned a free tool that victims of all variants of the TeslaCrypt ransomware can use to unlock affected files After the criminal gang behind TeslaCrypt recently abandoned support of the malicious software, an Eset analyst contacted the group anonymously, using the channel TeslaCrypt's operators offered to ...

Wireless mice and keyboards are the perfect accessories for a world in which devices increasingly are shuffling off their connection coils, but those accessories -- especially untethered rodents -- also can create new threats for those who use them One such threat is Mousejack. The attack exploits a vulnerability found in 80 percent of wireless mic...

BitTorrent on Tuesday announced at the Internet & Television Expo an application called "BitTorrent Live" that applies its distributed file-sharing technology to video streaming BitTorrent is able to speed up file downloads by storing pieces of a file on computers throughout the Net and reassembling them when a request is made for the file. BitTorr...

Google last week announced that it would minimize use of Adobe's Flash Player in its Chrome Web browser by the end of the year by turning off its default status When Chrome encounters a Web page, it will report the presence of Flash Player only if a user has indicated that the domain should execute Flash or if the site is in one of the top 10 domai...

Google on Thursday introduced Gboard, an app that combines search with a new soft keyboard for mobile devices running iOS Gboard, which supports glide typing, allows users to perform searches from the keyboard without leaving the application they're in. Once the information is found, they can paste it into their application without leaving the keyb...

The daily barrage of data breach news appears to be eroding confidence in security solutions Fifty percent of IT pros aren't confident about the ability of their security measures to protect their data, according to a survey released last week byBarkly....

A forum on Reddit, /r/ Technology, on Monday announced it was considering blocking links to websites that require visitors to turn off their ad blockers before viewing content on the site "It has come to our attention that many websites such as Forbes and Wired are now requiring users to disable ad blockers to view content. Because Forbes requires ...