Articles by John P. Mello Jr.

A refresh of Apple's flagship laptop, the MacBook Pro, likely will be the highlight of an event scheduled for this Thursday at the company's headquarters in Cupertino, California The update to its flagship MacBook line couldn't come at a more critical time. ...

Tesla on Wednesday announced plans to install hardware that will allow all of its cars to become driverless The equipment will enable self-driving at a safety level substantially greater than human-driven cars, according to the company....

Apple appears to be shifting its driverless car ambitions into a lower gear.Changes in the company's automotive strategy have resulted in hundreds of job cuts and the shelving of plans to build a car of its own, Bloomberg reported Monday "Project Titan" -- Apple's internal name for the automotive initiative -- has a new focus, according to the repo...

When the new president takes up residence at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave., cybersecurity will be on the shortlist for action. What's a president to do? TechNewsWorld asked more than a dozen experts what should be at the top of the new leader of the free world's cyberagenda. Following are some of their responses....

Watch out, Apple. HP on Wednesday introduced a new generation of premium computer products that could generate the kind of excitement in the market that's usually the domain of the folks at One Infinite Loop Among the new HP offerings are a new tablet-laptop convertible, a svelte laptop, an innovative all-in-one model, and a 4k display designed for...

Cyanogen, the maker of an alternative version of Android, on Tuesday announced that it was going modular. Future releases of its open source firmware product will not support a full stack of the Android OS The new modular setup will bring a slew of benefits to phone makers and developers, according to Cyanogen....

Project Noto, one of Google's most ambitious undertakings ever, has reached a milestone. Noto now supports 800 languages and 100 writing scripts, the companies announced last week Google and Monotype launched the open source initiative to create a typeface family that supports all the languages in the world, even rarely used languages.

First, it was flaming smartphones. Now it's exploding washing machines That's the situation Samsung found itself in last week when the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission issued a warning about certain top-load washing machines made by the company between March 2011 and April 2016....

Medical device manufacturer Animas on Tuesday warned that its OneTouch Ping insulin pump system was susceptible to hacking "We have been notified of a cybersecurity issue with the OneTouch Ping, specifically that a person could potentially gain unauthorized access to the pump through its unencrypted radio frequency communication system," reads the ...

Google on Tuesday unveiled a new smartphone and home hub that squarely aim at products from market leaders Apple and Amazon The company's new branded smartphone, called "Pixel," marks a departure from past efforts. Up to now, Google's Nexus phones were made by a variety of manufacturers that sold them under their brands....

Facebook on Monday announced Marketplace, a new mobile app that facilitates buying and selling between peers Marketplace allows members of a community to discover, buy and sell items, noted Facebook Product Management Director Mary Ku....

It's no longer a question whether hackers will influence the 2016 elections in the United States -- only how much they'll be able to sway them Leaked emails already have cost a Democratic Party chairperson her job, and the FBI last month issued a flash warning that foreign cyberadversaries had breached two state election databases....

Germany's data protection regulator on Tuesday ordered Facebook to stop collecting and storing data from WhatsApp users in the country Facebook also must delete any data it already may have harvested from German WhatsApp users, according to Johannes Caspar, Hamburg Commissioner for Data Protection and Freedom of Information, who issued the order....

The website of prominent security blogger Brian Krebs is back online this week after sustaining one of the largest distributed denial of service attacks in Internet history DDoS attacks typically disrupt service at a website by flooding it with junk traffic. In this case, garbage traffic assaulted Krebs' site at 620 gigabits per second. By comparis...

Yahoo on Thursday disclosed that a data breach in late 2014 resulted in the theft of information from at least 500 million customer accounts. Based on a recent investigation, it appears that state-sponsored hackers carried out the attack, the company said....

GoPro earlier this week refreshed its product line, announcing two new action cameras, a cloud service and a drone Its new Hero5 Black camera (US$399.99) can capture 4K video at 30 frames a second and still photos at 12 megapixels, with RAW and WDR support....

Nikon on Monday announced its new KeyMission line of shooters, marking its entry into the 360-degree and action camera business The KeyMission 360 (US$499.95, pictured above) can corral 360-degree video in 4K UHD at 24p, as well as in the more traditional HD 1080p. It also shoots 30-megapixel stills....

Congress earlier this month lowered the hammer on the U.S. Office of Personnel Management in a report on the massive data breach that resulted in the theft of 4.2 million former and current government employees' personnel files, as well as 21.5 million individuals' security clearance information, including fingerprints associated with 5.6 million of them...

Confidential information about international athletes surfaced on the Internet Wednesday -- the second such exposure this week Russian hackers allegedly stole the information from the World Anti-Doping Agency. It includes confidential data on medical drug exemptions given to 25 athletes from eight countries.

The iPhone 7 may be the best version of Apple's smartphone to date, but it's garnering lukewarm reactions from reviewers and pundits The practical improvements in the new iPhone are praiseworthy, wrote Andrew Cunningham in his review for Ars Technica, but he cautioned would-be buyers about the price they would have to pay for the upgrade....