Articles by John P. Mello Jr

In a move influenced by Edward Snowden's revelations about the NSA's email snooping, Yahoo and Google last week announced that they were cooperating on end-to-end encrypting their webmail products "We will release source code this fall so that the open source community can help us refine the experience and hunt for bugs," said Yahoo Chief Informati...

Dropbox, which acquired Mailbox last year, on Tuesday announced the availability of a Mac-only desktop beta version of the program. The beta is free, but you need a "betacoin" to download it. Betacoins are being emailed to existing users of the program, as well as people who sign up at the Mailbox website "We believe Mailbox is the fastest, most de...

Twitter likes to experiment with its social network from time to time, but its latest tinkering with its members' timelines appears to be ticking off more than a few tweeters The experiment opens timelines to tweets members' followers have tagged as favorites, as well as to some popular tweets gleaned from their followers' timelines....

Microsoft has some good news for action-cam fans who like to capture their outdoor adventures in hours of nonstop video. It's found a way to bring time-lapse photography to first-person video footage Called "Hyperlapse," the technology can shrink hours of video into minutes without the jitter, shake and artifacts previously associated with the time...

Yahoo and Google last week announced they'd be teaming up to secure their Web mail systems with encryption by the end of next year "Our goal is to make end-to-end encryption fully available in 2015," Yahoo Vice President of Information Security Alex Stamos said at the Black Hat hackers' conference in Las Vegas.

News that a Russian gang has stockpiled more than a billion purloined user name and password combinations has revved up the Internet's reputation as a post industrial Wild, Wild West Just how much havoc will be raised by the gang remains to be seen. The data thieves so far appear content to use their ill-gotten trove for spamming, according to Hold...

USIS, the contractor that did the background checks on Washington Navy Yard shooter Aaron Alexis and NSA leaker Edward Snowden, on Thursday reported that its computer systems have been breached "Our internal IT security team recently identified an apparent external cyberattack on USIS' corporate network," said US Investigation Services, which perfo...

BlackBerry -- the "sick man of mobile" -- is poised for better times That was the sentiment expressed by CEO John Chen in an internal memo distributed to BlackBerry employees last week....

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security last week sounded an alarm warning retailers of a family of malicious programs aimed at compromising point-of-sale systems. Attackers used such software last year in massive data breaches that nicked millions of consumer records at Target and Nieman Marcus Variants of the Backoff family -- capable of scrapin...

A routine scan of a Texas man's Gmail by Google has led to his arrest on child pornography possession and promotion charges John Henry Skillern, 41, of Houston was arrested by police July 30 following a tip by Google to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. He has been charged with one count each of child pornography possession an...

USB flash drives could be at risk of a pernicious attack on their firmware Over the past two decades, USB devices, aka "thumb drives," have proliferated all over the world, because USB has proven to be a versatile standard. That versatility, though, also makes USB devices vulnerable to what could be a very nasty firmware attack by hackers, noted Ka...

Old tricks that have helped hackers penetrate computers for months or longer worked again last week at Goodwill and Stubhub Taking a page from the gang that pillaged payment card and personal information from Target last year, hackers clipped payment card information from an undisclosed number of Goodwill Industries International customers....

Government snooping on Americans would be curtailed under a bill introduced Tuesday in the U.S. Senate The measure, sponsored by Senate Judiciary Chairman Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., would ban bulk collection of domestic information, limit the scope of searches by government agencies, and add transparency and reporting requirements. Further, it would ref...

It appears Apple is close to acquiring talk radio app Swell for US$30 million.Much of Swell's development team will be joining Apple, and the app will be shut down sometime this week, Re/code reported Although Swell managed to raise $7.2 million from the likes of DFJ, Google Ventures and InterWest Partners, it hasn't been able to get much traction ...

In a rare move, Apple on Thursday rolled out a beta version of its upcoming desktop operating system, OS X Yosemite, to a million "testers." The company pulled the wraps off Yosemite at the World Wide Developers Conference in June and has been tweaking it for developers since that time, but this latest version is a beta that as many as one million ...

A patent awarded on Tuesday to Apple may be a tip-off of what the company is planning for the smartwatch it's widely expected to introduce this fall The patent (U.S. Patent 8,787,006) for something Apple referenced in its application as "iTime" is for an electronic wristband that contains a recessed area for an electronic device, such as a watch bo...

A failure to communicate between security pros and company brass may be contributing to the inability of a significant number of organizations to reduce the risk of cyberattacks on their systems That was one of the findings last week in a study conducted by the Ponemon Institute and sponsored by Websense....

The European Union last year adopted a "common position" on how purchases made within mobile and online applications should be treated by operators of app stores. Now, seven months later, Google has been heaped with praise for striving to comply with EU guidance on in-app buys, while Apple has been rebuked for dragging its feet In its common positi...

It may not be a marriage made in heaven, but the cloud is pretty close Just hours after IBM and Apple announced they had entered a strategic partnership, speculation began to spread about the possible integration of two of their most well-known products: What if Siri and Watson were to hook up?...

Novartis' Alcon eye care division has entered an in-license agreement governing all ocular medical uses for Google's smart contact lenses, it announced Tuesday Google unveiled a prototype of its glucose-monitoring lens in January....