Articles by John P. Mello Jr

Target acknowledged Thursday that it put information on a back burner that led to the compromise of more than 100 million customer records and will cost the company millions of dollars in losses "Like any large company, each week at Target there are a vast number of technical events that take place and are logged," said Target spokesperson Molly Sn...

A powerful U.S. senator has accused the CIA of spying on a network drive legislative staffers used to prepare a report on abuses -- including torture -- in the agency's detention and interrogation program The search may have violated not only the separation of powers clause of the U.S. Constitution, but also the Fourth Amendment prohibition against...

Surfing the Internet last year was a dangerous proposition, and it isn't getting any safer.On average, 200 samples of malicious software were collected every minute by McAfee Labs, the company reported Monday in its threat report for the last quarter of 2013 All kinds of Internet nastiness increased last year -- from ransomware and suspicious URLs ...

Trawling porn sites used to be the best way to pick up an electronically transmitted disease on your smartphone. That's not the case anymore Every one in five times a mobile user is redirected to a malware site on the Internet, it's done through a malicious ad, according to a report released last week by Blue Coat. That's three times what it was tw...

Workers at a factory in China are on strike after rejecting compensation plans offered as a result of IBM's US$2.3 billion deal to sell its low-end server business to Lenovo More than 1,000 workers brought production to a halt Monday at IBM's International Systems Technology Company server-making factory in Shenzhen, Guangdong, in southeastern Chin...

Maxwell Smart had his Cone of Silence, but silence was the furthest thing from the minds of theAether team that designed Cone.Cone, expected to start selling this summer for US$399, is a wireless speaker with a twist. It connects to a home WiFi network (802.11 a, b,g, n), but it isn't a slave to another device, such as a music player, tablet or computer. Cone attempts to play what listeners want to hear before they know they want to hear it...

Apple on Monday unwrapped its CarPlay auto initiative at the Geneva International Motor Show. The announcement comes less than a month after Google announced its grand plans to bring Android into automobiles with its Open Automotive Alliance CarPlay will enable iPhone users to make calls, consult maps, play music and receive messages either through...

Consumers love their smartphones, but a substantial number of them don't love using them to pay for purchases. With Samsung's introduction of its Galaxy S5 phone last week, the company is betting it can change some of those consumers' minds on that subject Like Apple's iPhone 5s, the S5 has a fingerprint scanner. Unlike the Apple product, though, t...

A British intelligence agency indiscriminately collected photos from the webcams of Yahoo users and stored them on its servers over a period of several years, The Guardian reported Over one six-month period, 1.8 million Yahoo users were targeted by a surveillance program called "Optic Nerve," run by the UK's NSA counterpart, GCHQ, according to a to...

Apple on Tuesday pushed a large update to its OS X Mavericks operating system that includes a patch for a significant security flaw in the software The vulnerability allows Net predators to hijack a secure communication channel from a device running the latest version of Apple's desktop OS and perform mischief such as intercepting user names and pa...

The LaCie Fuel is available at the LaCie Store for US$199.99. It is also available at many other outlets.Cords have been the bane of digital life style since the introduction of personal computers. As wireless devices proliferated, though, the need for cords has declined, thanks to technologies like Bluetooth and WiFi....

Samsung hinted it wasn't about to rock the mobile world with the choice of the warmup band for its Unpacked 2014 event Monday -- the Barcelona Opera House Chamber Orchestra At the event, held at the Mobile World Congress in Spain, it announced a new version of its flagship smartphone, the Galaxy S5, as well as an upgrade of its smartwatch, the Gear...

Security pros weren't very kind to mobile applications last week. A number of firms knocked apps produced for the smartphone market for all kinds of risky behaviors that could lead to trouble not only for mobile device owners, but also for their employers While Android has been a poster child for misbehaving apps in the past, competitor Apple's app...

What's in a name? Microsoft is hoping more traffic to two of its online properties The company has renamed its cloud storage service because of legal entanglements and the website for free versions of its Office productivity apps because of consumer confusion....

IBM and AT&T on Tuesday announced they were forming a global alliance to develop solutions for the Internet of Things. They will be combining their analytic platforms, cloud and security technologies -- all with privacy in mind -- to gain insights from machine-to-machine data collected by a variety of industries Initially, they will focus on soluti...

IBM and AT&T on Tuesday announced they were forming a global alliance to develop solutions for the Internet of Things. They will be combining their analytic platforms, cloud and security technologies -- all with privacy in mind -- to gain insights from machine-to-machine data collected by a variety of industries Initially, they will focus on soluti...

A group of 18 organizations on Thursday announced the formation of WifiForward, a coalition that aims to persuade policymakers to open more unlicensed wireless spectrum for use by WiFi-enabled devices. Members include the American Library Association, the ARRIS Group, Best Buy, Comcast, the Consumer Electronics Association, Google, the International Association of Venue Managers, Microsoft and Time Warner Cable...

"Very big NTP reflection attack hitting us right now. Appears to be bigger than the #Spamhaus attack from last year. Mitigating." That Monday evening tweet from Matthew Prince, the cofounder and CEO of CloudFlare, signaled what's being touted as the largest distributed denial of service attack ever launched on the Internet....

Sigma is known mostly as a maker of lenses for other companies' cameras, but a few years ago it latched on to a new kind of sensor technology and produced an innovative byte snapper that caused a stir in photography circles Now it's introducing a new generation of its Foveon cameras with a redesigned sensor and a speedier image processor....

Defense contractors have begun to bolster their cybersecurity practices in the wake of the massive leaking of government data by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden Seventy-five percent of defense contractors said the Snowden Affair had changed security procedures for their employees in a survey released by ThreatTrack, conducted by Opinion Matter...