Articles by John P. Mello Jr

Apple watchers likely will have to wait until September to see if the rumors about a bigger iPad are true Apple suppliers have been told that production of the rumored 12.9-inch iPad Pro won't ramp up until the second half of this year, The Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg reported Thursday....

Identity thieves are using Apple Pay to defraud banks of what could amount to millions of dollars Armed with iPhones, the fraudsters are entering stolen payment card information into Apple Pay. Due to weak authentication procedures at the institutions issuing the cards, they are able to use the stolen cards to make purchases through Apple Pay....

President Barack Obama last week made good on his promise to establish a center for cybersecurity information gathered by agencies of the federal government. It's a laudable initiative -- if it works The Cyber Threat Intelligence Integration Center will, according to a White House fact sheet, connect the dots regarding malicious foreign cyberthreat...

The Federal Communications Commission on Thursday adopted new open Internet rules by a 3-2 vote along party lines The rules, which affect both wired and wireless access, prohibit broadband providers from unreasonably interfering with or unreasonably disadvantaging efforts of consumers and edge providers to reach each other....

Healthcare providers have garnered growing interest from hackers in recent months. More evidence of that trend appeared last week in a report on email trust An email that appeared to come from a healthcare company was four times more likely to be fraudulent than an email purportedly from a social media company like Facebook, which is one of the lar...

Valve on Monday announced that it's getting into the virtual reality hardware business In a terse tease posted to the Web, the company trumpeted its intentions to reveal its SteamVR hardware system next week at the 2015 Game Developers Conference in San Francisco....

Google on Monday announced YouTube Kids, a new mobile app designed to deliver family-friendly video content. In making a play for the tyke market, YouTube joins other streaming video providers like Amazon and Netflix....

Lenovo on Thursday came under fire for preinstalling spyware on some of its laptops The software, Superfish, uses the same techniques cybercriminals often employ to crack encrypted traffic from computers to the Internet....

Apple has been awarded a patent for a virtual reality headset that can use an iPhone or iPod as a display Patent number 8,957,835 was awarded by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office to Apple for a "head-mounted display apparatus for retaining a portable electronic device with display." The abstract describes a device similar to the Gear VR, which w...

Encryption has received a lot of attention lately as a solution to the growing data breach problem, but one of the hang-ups dogging the technology has been its ability to play nice in the cloud That's especially true if an organization wants to control the keys by which its data is scrambled and use services offered by a cloud provider beyond simpl...

Facebook on Thursday announced a new feature for members who want to plan for their passing into the digital beyond Initially rolled out in the United States, the feature allows Facebook members to appoint a "legacy contact" to administer their account when they die. The legacy contact has the power to:...

Box on Tuesday raised the curtain on a new offering that allows its enterprise customers to control the digital keys used to encrypt their data stored in the storage provider's cloud Box is working with Amazon Web Services and Gemalto to bring to market the solution, called "Box Enterprise Key Management," and give its most security-minded customer...

Bug bounty programs are used by individual software makers to improve the quality of their products, but they can have incidental benefits for all software makers, too. One of those is to encourage bug hunters to wear a white hat instead of a black one "An overwhelming majority of people have a vested interest in a secure Internet," explained Alex ...

Motorists in the United States are increasingly at risk of cyberattacks and violations of privacy, as more and more technology is added to their cars "New technologies in cars have enabled valuable features that have the potential to improve driver safety and vehicle performance," said a report released on Sunday by the office of Sen. Ed Markey (D-...

Some proposed rules that the Federal Communication Commission maintains will prevent content discrimination on the Internet drew fire on Thursday from two policy interest groups A four-page "fact sheet" on the rules was released Wednesday by FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler. In it, the chairman outlined what he's proposing to the full commission, which is ...

With Wall Street breathing down its neck for growth, Twitter on Tuesday launched a new advertising initiative that aims to boost revenues and add to its more than 284 million members The initiative aims to expand the reach of "Promoted Tweets" on Twitter. Promoted Tweets are ads that Twitter inserts into its members timelines. Currently, promoted T...

For months, the security community has been waving a red flag about how the nascent Internet of Things could become a cybercriminal's paradise. Last week, those admonitions were given some credence when the Federal Trade Commission recommended that the makers of IoT gadgets adopt some "best practices" to protect consumers from potential violations of their privacy and security...

Since 2010, when it began paying security researchers to find flaws in its programs, Google has paid more than US$4 million to bug hunters. Now it's prepared to pay even more The company announced Friday that it's expanding its Security Rewards Programs to include payments to researchers before they find bugs in Google's software....

Amazon on Wednesday announced WorkMail, a play for the enterprise email market. Offered by Amazon Web Services, WorkMail is aimed at companies that want to move their on-premises email services to the cloud WorkMail reduces complexity and cost, Amazon said. With all mail infrastructure relocated to Amazon's cloud, a company no longer need be concer...

Twitter on Tuesday announced two new offerings that could bolster its efforts to compete with Facebook. The new tools will let users create private groups of up to 20 members; they also will be able to shoot, edit and share video from within Twitter's mobile app Twitter members already can conduct one-on-one private conversations using its direct m...