Articles by John P. Mello Jr

Cyberattacks this week by supporters of Wikileaks on the home sites of Visa and MasterCard may have been designed to grab headlines rather than actually disrupt the companies' financial operations The wave of electronic assaults, referred to as "Operation Payback" by the activists mounting the attacks, were aimed at the home sites of the credit car...

The bones of a plan to balance consumer privacy and businesses' need to gather data online was aired yesterday by the Federal Trade Commission and was greeted with both praise and criticism In a 122-page preliminary report, the agency called for any company collecting or using consumer data that can be linked to a specific consumer, computer or dev...

Apple's iPad has had the tablet market to itself for eight months now, but that's about to change. Leading the charge on the electronic slate's logy perch is the Samsung Galaxy Tab, a seven-inch tablet running Google's Android operating system Rather than take on the iPad head-to-head, Samsung decided to set its tablet apart from Apple's by making ...

Social networking began as a fascination of the young on college campuses, but it has grown to embrace all age groups all over the world. It's a phenomenon with a potential that's barely been scratched, especially in business. Barry Libert, though, would like to see that change, and he's ready to show companies how to do it ...

Shopping for clothes online has always been challenging for shoppers, but Google thinks it can make it less so with its new Boutiques offering Boutiques uses a combination of cutting-edge search technology and expert opinion to enable apparel shoppers -- right now, limited to women -- to create customized boutiques for putting together just the rig...

Given the dominance of the major players in the browser market, any press release announcing a new one might as well be a suicide note. That hasn't discouraged developers from introducing new browsers. Some of those browsers have even been able to spark some initial buzz -- although the kind of buzz volume surrounding RockMelt hasn't been heard in browser circles in some time...

Facebook pulled the wraps off its new mobile platform Wednesday at a special event held at its headquarters in Palo Alto, Calif. The offerings in the platform were designed to appeal to consumers, businesses and developers and to expand the reach of the social network's geolocation technology, Places For many of the social network's fans and follow...

A vestige of the music wars at the turn of the century was shut down Wednesday by a federal district court judge in Manhattan File-sharing service LimeWire was ordered by Judge Kimba M. Wood to stop distributing its peer-to-peer software because its overwhelming use was to encourage its users to make unauthorized copies of copyrighted material....

By mixing and matching the elements of its competitors' mobile ecosystems, Microsoft hopes its new smartphone software will succeed where its past efforts failed Windows Phone 7 will have a walled app store and interface with computers through desktop software created for Microsoft's Zune media player -- practices similar to Apple's iPhone busines...

AOL went on a buying binge this week It made headlines with the purchase of the TechCrunch blog network, but on the same day it also bought two promising startups -- Thing Labs and 5min Media....

Once more, with feeling Microsoft has launched a program to reward users of its search engine, Bing. The program awards points for searches conducted with the engine. The points can be later traded for products, services or charitable contributions....

A "significant compromise" of U.S. military networks has been acknowledged by the Pentagon two years after the breach was reported in the press "In 2008, the U.S. Department of Defense suffered a significant compromise of its classified military computer networks," Deputy Secretary of Defense William S. Lynn III wrote in an article in the September...

An overture by WikiLeaks to the U.S. Defense Department to collaborate on sanitizing classified documents on the Afghan war before the whistleblowing website makes the material public has been spurned by the federal agency "[T]he Department of Defense will not negotiate some 'minimized' or 'sanitized' version of a release by WikiLeaks of additional...

Google's expansion into advertising outside the virtual world received a boost Wednesday when it landed a new client: DirecTV. The deal with the satellite TV provider will add another 18.7 million households to Google TV Ads' reach, bringing the total number of households reached by the service to 30 million Under the deal, Google will manage Direc...

Satellite television provider Dish Network plans to release a load of apps this fall that will allow its subscribers to watch its program offerings on Apple's iFamily of mobile devices -- the iPhone, iPad and iPod -- as well as Research In Motion Blackberries and smartphones running Google's Android operating system Although the mobile service itse...

With 3D movies now mainstream fare in theaters and 3D TVs adorning retail shelves, it was only a matter of time before 3D consumer camcorders would begin to hit the market. That time was this week as two camcorder makers, Panasonic and DXG USA announced 3D camcorder products ...

Twitter on Wednesday launched its @earlybird service, aimed at providing its some 75 million members with daily deals and creating a revenue stream for itself The first offering from the service was a discount on tickets to see the critically panned movie "The Sorcerer's Apprentice" from Disney and producer Jerry Bruckheimer....

Despite predictions to the contrary, Adobe Flash won't be supplanted any time soon as a major video distribution vehicle on the World Wide Web, according to a software engineer at the Net's largest video sharing site, YouTube "[W]hile the

The top dog in Internet telephony is set to expand its reach with the release of new development software. SkypeKit is aimed at allowing software writers to integrate the Net phone service into a variety of consumer electronics devices and computer software programs "For nearly seven years, Skype has revolutionized communications through software t...

Four out of five consumers don't know the speed of their broadband connections. Do they care? Apparently not -- but the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) does, and it's starting two projects to clarify how fast U.S. broadband speeds are In a survey released Tuesday on consumer broadband experience, the FCC found that 80 percent of consumer br...