Articles by John P. Mello Jr

Oracle acted swiftly last week to close a zero-day vulnerability in its Java technology, but given Java's track record, that patch is just one hit in a long game of wackamole played with hackers A number of security companies discovered the vulnerability over the weekend of Aug. 25. They noticed that a popular and notorious root kit, Blackhole, was...

Better management of memory and updates highlight the latest release of the Mozilla Foundation's Web browser, Firefox 15 Firefox's development team has steadily improved the browser's memory management over recent months, but with this release of the program, it's targeting a major contributor to the software's piggish memory ways: add-on applicati...

Research released last week fingered the iPhone as the source of a text messaging exploit that could be used to steal sensitive information from smartphone users or work mischief on their hardware The flaw, revealed by a well-known security researcher and jailbreaker of iPhones, involves the "reply to" line in SMS messages....

The Starship Enterprise has its deflector shields to defend itself from attacks by enemy weaponry, and if all goes well with a pilot program launched Tuesday by the U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT), road warriors will have wireless systems to defend themselves from collisions with other vehicles Under the year-long Safety Pilot program set i...

A well-known iOS hacker who uses the handle "pod2g" revealed a flaw in Apple's mobile operating system, iOS, that he says can be exploited to alter the "reply to" information in SMS messages Such a tactic could be used by cybermiscreants to pry sensitive information from the recipient of a message or divert them to a malicious website....

It's no secret that Sony Computer Entertainment sees mobile gaming as a large contributor to its bottom line in the future. That vision became clearer Tuesday when Sony revealed more details about its PlayStation Mobile service The skeleton of the program was revealed earlier this summer at the E3 conference in Los Angeles, but at Gamescom in Colog...

The attack last week on journalist Mat Honan's iCloud account has the potential to strip the silver lining from the cybernimbus Honan had his digital life destroyed when hackers, in a convoluted effort to hijack his Twitter account, ended up trashing everything connected to his Apple iCloud account....

As digital horror stories go, Mat Honan's is a doozy The Wired reporter had his iCloud account hacked and had his digital life wiped from cyberspace....

Some folks' answer to wallet security is chaining it to their belts. Google's is to chain it to the cloud The Search Giant added some security features to its Google Wallet product last week intended to make it safer for consumers to use. For example, credit card information no longer resides in the Google Wallet mobile app. Its new home is in the ...

Siemens, which made the industrial controllers targeted by the Stuxnet cyberweapon, announced last week that it was releasing some patches aimed at foiling attacks on its hardware similar to those mounted by the now-famous worm Previous versions of the controllers used in SCADA (Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition) systems allowed DLL (Dynamic...

Facebook on Thursday released its first quarterly earnings report since its monster IPO in May During the period, Facebook reported revenues of US$1.18 billion but couldn't turn a profit, losing $157 million, or eight cents a share....

Microsoft security researcher Terry Zink pulled the pin on a virtual grenade when he aired his belief that he'd discovered a botnet manned by Android zombies After examining some spam, Zink found suggestions that the junk mail was being generated from Android smartphones with access to Yahoo mail accounts....

A technical error that affected 28 million Windows users in Europe could cost Microsoft billions in penalties The glitch, which disabled the display of a browser choice screen in Windows, violates an agreement between Microsoft and European Union (EU) regulators....

Despite dire warnings, the Internet didn't break last week when the FBI pulled the plug on the server controlling the DNSChanger botnet An estimated 300,000 computers are still infected by the malware that ties them to the botnet, which was designed for large-scale click fraud. Those machines' connections to the Internet depended on a server the FB...

To listen to Microsoft's Steve Ballmer talk, you'd think he was the prime minister of a besieged nation, rather than the captain of one of the largest software companies in the world In an interview Tuesday with CRN, a website for VARs and technology integrators, the flamboyant head of Microsoft pledged to compete with arch rival Apple on every fro...

Those who follow the exploits of Stuxnet will remember June 24, 2012, as Big Sleep day for the infamous malware. On that day, it stopped replicating "It's more like neutered, rather than dead," Eric Byres, CTO and vice president for engineering at Tofino Security Products, told TechNewsWorld. "The June 24 date stops it from replicating, but if it h...

Claims by a team of international cyrptographic researchers that they've "cracked" the RSA encryption used on a number of smartcards and secure tokens has set off a tempest in security circles The scientists from France, Italy, Norway and the United States have found a method for compromising the code in as little as 13 minutes. They plan to divulg...

Zynga made a number of announcements at its Unleashed event in San Francisco Tuesday, most of them aimed at the same goal: making its services "stickier" to its players "Social games have become a crowded marketplace," Scott Steinberg , digital game consultant and principal in TechSavvyGlobal.com, told TechNewsWorld. "It's hard to sustain interest ...

There's evidence that Google's consumer privacy policy is being extended to government contracts for its software services, according to SafeGov.org. Citing contracts in Texas, Illinois and California, the group contends that Google's privacy policy is the "minimum standard" for handling customer data under the contracts....

After several missed deadlines, Asus has finally introduced a combination smartphone, tablet and notebook computer aimed at consumers who are tired of toting around disparate devices ...