Articles by John P. Mello Jr

Apple on Tuesday aimed to calm anxiety among its iCloud users with reassurances that the service hadn't been breached in a ransomware-style attack "Apple takes security very seriously and iCloud was not compromised during this incident," reads a company statement. "Impacted users should change their Apple ID password as soon as possible and avoid u...

The Department of Justice last week unsealed indictments against five members of the Chinese military who were accused of hacking into the computer systems of U.S. companies to steal everything from trade secrets to confidential corporate correspondence China's initial response was to deny any wrongdoing and charge that the United States had hacke...

Apple vowed Tuesday to fix a persistent bug in its iOS mobile operating system that punishes former iPhone users. The flaw, which has been in iMessage since the release of iOS 5, prevents former iPhone users from receiving SMS messages from current users Apple recently fixed a server-side iMessage bug that was causing an issue for some users, and i...

Many shutterbugs are familiar with this bugaboo: They shoot scads of photos of a vacation or event, but they never quite get the time to put the pics in a form where they can be shared with friends and family Google now has an app for that. It's called "Stories." Google on Tuesday added Stories to its Google+ social network. ...

The U.S. Justice Department on Monday kicked up a notch the Obama administration's efforts to curb China's economic espionage activity against American businesses A grand jury indicted five members of the Chinese army on DoJ allegations they conspired to hack into the networks of U.S. companies to steal information that would be useful to their com...

Another digital currency was brought to its knees last week when the administrators of Doge Vault had to suspend operations after they discovered their online wallet service had been attacked by hackers Following an investigation of the incident and the reconstruction of some of their damaged information from a backup, the administrators contacted ...

The FCC on Thursday approved by voice vote proposed rules governing neutrality on the Internet Following a public comment period and review of those comments by the commission, the agency will finalize the rules, possibly as soon as the end of this year....

With Sony's PlayStation 4 increasing its commanding lead over the Xbox One, Microsoft made a play Tuesday to goose sales of its computer game console The company announced it would start selling Xbox One without its Kinect controller -- which allows a US$100 price cut -- and it removed the requirement that Xbox users subscribe to Live Gold to acces...

Parrot has added a new model to its line of airborne drones -- the Bebop. Demonstrated in San Francisco over the weekend, the lightweight Bebop includes some snappy features, such as built-in image stabilization, a 14-megapixel camera with a fish-eye lens, and support for the Oculus Rift virtual reality headset Although a price hasn't been announce...

The Reveton Gang is at it again. This time, though, they're targeting users of Android phones -- typically visitors to porn sites The gang that pioneered the idea of locking up a target's computer and demanding a ransom to unlock it has turned its attention to the rapidly growing mobile market....

If you have a story to tell -- even a dull one -- Adobe Voice can improve your presentation. The free app can't make your story more compelling, but it can give you a better shot at getting it across. Adobe Voice is available for the iPad 2 and above running iOS 7.To kickstart your use of Voice, Adobe offers a welcome page with a pair of sample sl...

Small businesses have been an elusive market for sellers of online advertising. That's because the value proposition of those ads is a tough sell Facebook hopes to reduce some of the resistance in the small business community to advertising online with a series of summer boot camps, dubbed "Facebook Fit," that combine business advice with a soft se...

A simmering conflict between Oculus, a virtual reality startup Facebook bought last month for $2 billion, and ZeniMax Media began to boil Monday ZeniMax las week claimed one of its former employees, John Carmack, improperly shared some of its tech with Oculus for use in its Rift virtual reality headset, which is touted as having the power to bring ...

As the volume and sophistication of cyberattacks increase, system defenders in the trenches are losing confidence in their ability to protect their organizations' information assets, suggests a survey released last week by Websense and the Ponemon Institute The survey of almost 5,000 global IT security pros found that more than half of them (57 per...

Snapchat built its popularity on pictures that disappear, but new features added to the latest version of the program shows its creators want it to be more than a one-trick app Both text and video chatting on Thursday became available in the mobile app for Android and iOS devices. "Until today, we felt that Snapchat was missing an important part of...

Smarting from speculation that the U.S. intelligence community hoarded knowledge about the Heartbleed bug that's placed millions of servers and devices that access the Internet at risk, the White House Tuesday gave the public some insight into how it decides to release information about vulnerabilities in computer software and hardware "This admini...

Microsoft's Internet Explorer Web browser has a flaw that allows hackers to commandeer control of computers, FireEye reported Saturday Although the never-seen-before vulnerability can be found in all versions of the browser, hackers are targeting IE versions 9 through 11, according to a blog post by the three researchers who made the discovery....

Cybersquatting is a seedy practice that's as old as dot-com, but the upcoming expansion of domain names could be breathing new life into the practice, while offering seamier elements on the Net an invitation for mischief In the early days of the Internet, nimble squatters would register domain names of brands, then sell them back to the owners for ...

Reports that the FCC is abandoning its support of Net neutrality are incorrect, the agency's chairman claimed Thursday The reports appeared just prior to the release by the FCC of a notice that it is proposing some new Open Internet rules. The old rules were rejected by a federal court in January and tossed back to the FCC for a rewrite....

The folks who introduced the masses to ex post facto focusing upped their game Tuesday with the introduction of a new camera aimed at shooters who take their photography seriously The Illum, by Lytro, contains an updated version of the company's innovative Light Field engine, which allows the focus in a photo to be manipulated after it's shot. Unl...