Articles by John P. Mello Jr

Before your company finds itself embroiled in a lawsuit over a data breach that spills personal information about your customers all over the Internet, you might want to take a look at some recent research by Carnegie Mellon and Temple Universities Data breach victims are six times less likely to file litigation against a company if they receive fr...

A camera that allows photographers to control the focus in a picture after it's shot is set to start shipping on Friday ...

Google on Tuesday rebuffed a request by a European Union privacy body to delay implementation of changes in the search giant's privacy policies set to take effect on March 1 "[W]e have notified over 350 million authenticated Google users and provided highly visible notifications on our homepage and in search results for our non-authenticated users,...

Internet privacy appeared on the big stage last week when the Obama administration unveiled its plans on the subject, which included a bill of rights for consumer privacy The president's privacy framework evoked reactions from stakeholders ranging from enthusiastic to guardedly optimistic....

Google's privacy practices came under fire again last week for undermining the privacy practices of someone else. Namely, Apple Apple is one of the few browser makers that turns off by default a website's ability to push third-party cookies to a Web surfer....

A deal worth billions to Yahoo has reportedly hit a snag The deal between Yahoo and two of its Asian partners, China's Alibaba Group and Japan's SoftBank, has reached an impasse, according to a report Tuesday in The Wall Street Journal. The accord would, among other things, save Yahoo US$4 billion in U.S. taxes....

Mobile shopping received a setback last week when security researchers discovered flaws in Google Wallet that could potentially expose its PIN to enterprising hackers When Google introduced its wallet, it bragged that it was secure because transaction information was stored in a "secure element" in Wallet-enabled phones. What researchers at a secur...

Google has brought its Chrome Web browser to the Android Market A beta edition of the browser is available from the app shop now for free, but since its operation is restricted to the latest version of the mobile operating system, Android 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich), only about 1 percent of Android's millions of users will be able to take the software...

Google last week announced it's beefed up security at the Android Market with a malware sniffing system called "Bouncer." Bouncer analyzes new and existing apps, as well as developer accounts. Before apps are allowed to be sold in the market, they're analyzed to see if they contain any known malware, spyware or trojans....

Social networks are popular with lots of folks, including terrorists. That's why the FBI is looking for a contractor that will design an "early warning system" for it based on monitoring chatter on the likes of Facebook, Twitter and Google+ To identify potential "bad actors," the agency will be looking for terrorist keywords like "gangs," "small po...

Encrypting data on your computer may protect you from hackers and thieves, but it won't protect you from crime investigators That was the finding of a federal district court in Colorado Monday in a case involving a woman who refused to decrypt the files on her laptop for government prosecutors....

As far as SOPA's critics are concerned, "if something works, break it" seemed to be the motto of the U.S. Congress last week as it rushed to pass a controversial bill that security experts maintained could throw a bomb into the gearbox of the Internet The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), filed in the U.S. House of Representatives, and its Senate coun...

Thin is all the rage in electronics these days, and nowhere is that more evident than in the notebook computer realm, where Intel has created a deafening buzz with its Ultrabook platform However, Intel's archrival, AMD, isn't sitting on its silicon when it comes to thin computers. It has a version of its upcoming Trinity chip designed for super sli...

Despite the pleas of some regulators and the advertising industry, the overlords of the Internet -- the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) -- plunged forward last week with its plan to drastically expand the number of generic top level domains on the Net Generic Top Level Domains (gTLDs) are what come after the dot in an In...

Facebook will be among the Internet services that can be accessed in new car models from Mercedes Benz Facebook access is just one of the new features in the second generation telematics system, called "Mbrace2," which will begin appearing in new Mercedes models this spring....

A group of computer enthusiasts have begun working on creating a satellite network that could be used to thwart censorship on the Internet Called the "Hackerspace Global Grid" (HGG), the network could provide a way for activists to access the Net when a repressive regime suppresses access within its borders....

GoDaddy, the Internet's largest registrar of domains, would like the world to forget it ever supported the much-maligned Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) now before Congress. Namecheap, the second largest registrar, wants to make sure the world never forgets it....

Imagine the paint on your house powering the electric devices inside it ...

Massive data sets -- a season's worth of baseball statistics, for example, or health data from around the world -- can contain some very revealing knowledge. The problem confronting researchers, though, is finding it That may be a little easier with some tools developed by scientists at Harvard University and the Broad Institute....

Facebook will be disrupting the online lives of its members in the coming weeks with the redesign of their profile pages....