Articles by John P. Mello Jr

If you want to give the gift of privacy this holiday season, you may want to check out the 2022 edition of Mozilla's Privacy Not Included buyer's guide, released Wednesday. The annual guide contains privacy reviews of more than 75 popular consumer electronics gifts and will be continuously updated throughout the giving season Among the potential gi...

A technology platform watchdog group reported Monday that it had found more than 100 Facebook groups, some with tens of thousands of members, where business management accounts are bought and sold in violation of the social network's rules The accounts can be used to run multiple pages and ad campaigns, creating new opportunities for online scams, ...

Mozilla believes the high-tech industry has lost its soul by putting profits ahead of people and is going to try and do something about it. It has announced Mozilla Ventures, a US$35 million venture capital fund to finance early-stage startups producing products and technologies that advance values such as privacy, inclusion, transparency, and human dignity. ...

Schools are spending a flood of money on security products. Still, according to a new report from Parks Associates, not enough thought is given to how the products can be leveraged to better respond to violence in schools The market research and consulting company in Addison, Texas, noted in its report that while schools have boosted the use of acc...

Nearly 50% of all phishing attacks targeting government personnel in 2021 aimed to pilfer the credentials of those workers, according to a report released Wednesday by an endpoint-to-cloud security company Phishing attacks on civil servants jumped 30% from 2020 to 2021, with one out of every eight workers exposed to phishing threats during the peri...

A C-level executive will be fired for their firm's use of employee monitoring in 2023. That's one of the security, privacy, and risk predictions aired by Forrester on Monday In the coming year, lawmakers will be paying increased attention to workplace monitoring, and whistleblowers may also be demanding monitoring information to support complaints ...

Kids who play video games three hours or more a day performed better in cognitive skills tests involving impulse control and working memory than kids who never play video games, according to research released Monday The study of nearly 2,000 children was conducted by researchers at the University of Vermont in Burlington and sponsored by the Nation...

A large-scale phishing campaign built on typosquatting is targeting Windows and Android users with malware, according to a threat intelligence firm and cybersecurity website The campaign currently underway uses more than 200 typosquatting domains that impersonate 27 brands to hoodwink web surfers to download malicious software to their computers an...

In five years, 40% of large organizations worldwide will be using a combination of Web3, AR cloud, and digital twins in metaverse projects aimed at increasing revenue, research and advisory firm Gartner predicted Monday at its IT symposium in Orlando, Fla Gartner's metaverse prediction was part of a top 10 list of strategic technology trends releas...

Sharing high-resolution media online can unintentionally expose sensitive biometric data, according to a report released Tuesday by a cybersecurity company That can be particularly dangerous, the 75-page report by Trend Micro noted, because people don't know that they're exposing the information....

Many operators of semi-automated motor vehicles drive as if their autos are fully automated, despite the crash risks of doing so, according to a study released Tuesday by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS) The study, based on a survey of 600 users of Cadillac's Super Cruise system, Nissan/Infiniti's ProPilot system, and Tesla's Autop...

Online sales in the U.S. should reach US$209.7 billion during this year's holiday season, an increase of 2.5% over 2021, according to a report released Monday by Adobe The report forecasts sales from Nov. 1 to Dec. 31, 2022, and is based on analytics gathered from more than one trillion visits to U.S. retail websites and 100 million SKUs in 18 prod...

Applying artificial intelligence to medical images can be beneficial to physicians and patients, but developing the tools to do it can be challenging. Google on Tuesday announced it's ready to meet that challenge with its new Medical Imaging Suite "Google pioneered the use of AI and computer vision in Google Photos, Google Image Search and Google L...

Hijacking of social media accounts has reached epidemic proportions in the last 12 months, according to the Identity Theft Resource Center The non-profit, which provides assistance to the victims of identity theft, revealed in its 2022 Consumer Impact Report that social media takeovers have increased by 1,000% during the period....

A company that uses artificial intelligence to detect firearms in active shooting settings has been awarded a US$1.25 million grant by the U.S. Air Force to integrate the technology into existing unmanned aerial vehicles This is the third R&D grant the Air Force has awarded ZeroEyes, whose main line of business is protecting schools with its gun de...

For years companies have been allowing their workers to mix business and pleasure on their mobile devices, a move that's increased anxiety among cybersecurity professionals. Now a network security outfit says it has a way to secure personal mobile devices that might allow cyber warriors to sleep less fitfully Cloudflare on Monday announced its Zero...

PCs and TVs received high marks from consumers in a report released Tuesday by the American Customer Satisfaction Index The ACSI Household Appliance and Electronics Study for 2021-2022, based on interviews with more than 9,000 consumers, rates a range of products on a scale of zero to 100....

A new service powered by artificial intelligence that can turn portraits into talking heads was announced Monday by D-ID Called Creative Reality Studio, the self-service application can turn the image of a face into a video, complete with speech....

A new search engine powered by artificial intelligence and natural language processing is offering an alternative to the lists of web pages making up the results of a typical online search Called Andi, the search engine combines the use of large language models -- think OpenAi's GPY-3 -- and live web data to craft an answer to questions posed by se...

Apple refreshed its iPhone, Watch, and AirPods product lines at an online event Wednesday, as well as introducing a new Ultra watch for activity in challenging environments The Apple Watch Ultra is designed to operate in extreme cold and hot environments, as well as under 130 feet of water. It's housed in a rugged titanium case, and its face is mad...