Articles by John P. Mello Jr

For years the security industry has stressed the importance of strong passwords. Some recent research from Home Security Heroes starkly shows the value of that advice Using artificial intelligence, the crew at the home security information and reviews website cracked passwords in the four- to seven-character range either instantly or in a matter of...

Social media fueled the bank run on the Silicon Valley Bank, a run that sent shock waves throughout the U.S. banking industry, according to a 53-page report released last week by a group of university professors In their study, the boffins used Twitter data to show that the failure of SVB was preceded by a large spike of public communication on Twi...

Tech execs looking to get the most value for their organizations from generative AI need to understand the basics of the technology, according to a report released Tuesday by Forrester Research "The tech world has been disappointed by several recent bubbles promising much but delivering no real value, but generative AI is already improving content ...

A collateral beneficiary of the feverish pace of generative artificial intelligence development appears to be the humanoid robot A Norwegian company called 1X Technologies, formerly Halodi Robotics, which describes itself as a manufacturer and inventor of androids, recently attracted $23.5 million in a round of funding led by the OpenAI Startup Fun...

The FBI's Denver office is cautioning consumers about using free public charging stations, saying bad actors can use the USB ports at the juice stops to introduce malware and monitoring software onto devices "Carry your own charger and USB cord and use an electrical outlet instead," the agency recommended in a recent tweet....

If crime doesn't pay, some cybercriminals wouldn't know it. A top team member in a cybercrime outfit like Conti can make an estimated US$1.1 million a year, according to a report released Monday by Trend Micro Since cybercrime groups don't file reports with the SEC, the salary earned by a top money maker in a large criminal enterprise like Conti re...

Online raiders are stealing IP addresses and converting them to cash by selling them to so-called proxyware services Malicious actors are planting proxyware on computers without the owner's knowledge, then selling the unit's IP address to a proxyware service, making as much as US$10 a month for every compromised device, the threat research team at ...

Tax fraud schemes in 2022 netted scammers $5.7 billion, more than twice the amount of the previous year, according to the Internal Revenue Service, and there doesn't appear to be any letup in sight While scams may be on the rise, the good news is that the core tactics used by fraudsters remain basically unchanged, which means that by understanding ...

A strong credential solution that promises cost savings for enterprises and better privacy for users was announced Monday by AU10TIX, an Israeli identity verification and management company The firm stated it's working with Microsoft on Reusable ID, a technology that uses verifiable credentials to enable enterprises to simplify and accelerate ongoi...

Google opened up its ChatGPT competitor Bard to the public in the United States and the United Kingdom Tuesday, although access will require getting on a waitlist "Today we're starting to open access to Bard, an early experiment that lets you collaborate with generative AI," Google Vice President for Product Sissie Hsiao and Vice President for Rese...

The large multimodal language model, GPT-4, is ready for prime time, although, contrary to reports circulating since Friday, it doesn't support the ability to produce videos from text GPT-4 can, however, accept image and text input and produce text output. Over a range of domains -- including documents with text and photographs, diagrams, or screen...

Apple may be considering expanding the repertoire of its popular AirPods line beyond entertainment and into the realm of health Speculation about giving AirPods health chops was fueled over the weekend by Mark Gurman, who predicted in his Power On newsletter for Bloomberg that Apple would be upgrading the product in the next year or two to make it ...

CRM powerhouse Salesforce joined the ranks of Google and Microsoft Tuesday when it announced its own generative AI technology to deliver personalized content across every sales, service, marketing, commerce, and IT interaction in every Salesforce cloud Called Einstein GPT, the technology integrates with OpenAI and provides Salesforce customers with...

The global rising tide of cyber threats from nation-states should be a red flag for private sector security leaders in all industries to prepare for more frequent and brazen attacks in the future, according to Forrester Research To help companies prepare for the changing nation-state attack landscape, Forrester unveiled on March 2 a new model to de...

Elon Musk reportedly has been approaching artificial intelligence researchers in recent weeks with an eye toward setting up a research lab to develop an alternative to OpenAI's ChatGPT The move stems from Musk's dissatisfaction with the safeguards OpenAI has included in ChatGPT to prevent it from producing text that might offend users, according to...

Less than a week after it imposed search limits on the AI version of its Bing search engine, Microsoft is raising those limits In the wake of some embarrassing reports of erratic behavior by the new Bing, Microsoft decided last Friday to limit a user's daily usage to five chat "turns" per session and 50 turns per day....

Vint Cerf, known as the father of the internet, raised a few eyebrows Monday when he urged investors to be cautious when investing in businesses built around conversational chatbots The bots still make too many mistakes, asserted Cerf, who is a vice president at Google, which has an AI chatbot called Bard in development....

Tech layoffs have been grabbing headlines recently, for good reason Google's parent company, Alphabet, has laid off 12,000, about 12% of its workforce. Facebook's parent Meta has chopped 11,000 workers from the rolls, and IBM slashed 3,900 employees, 1.5% of its global workforce....

Microsoft may have ushered in a paradigm shift Tuesday with the release of new versions of its search engine, Bing, and web browser, Edge -- both now powered by artificial intelligence The new offerings, available in preview at Bing.com, combine browsing and chat into a unified experience that improves both tasks. When searching, for example, more ...

OpenAI CTO Mira Murati stoked the controversy over government oversight of artificial intelligence Sunday when she conceded in an interview with Time magazine that the technology needed to be regulated "It's important for OpenAI and companies like ours to bring this into the public consciousness in a way that's controlled and responsible," Murati t...