Articles by John P. Mello Jr

Samsung and Xiaomi on Monday announced a new sensor for smartphone cameras comparable to those used in high-end DSLR shutterboxes The new Isocell Bright HMX packs 108 megapixels on a three-quarter-inch sensor, similar to the sensors found in digital cameras that use interchangeable lenses....

The Russian hacking group known for stealing sensitive emails from the Democratic National Committee during the 2016 presidential election season has been cracking into printers, phones and video decoders to gain access to corporate networks, the Microsoft Security Response Center Team reported on Monday The group, known by a number of names includ...

Cloudflare, an Internet infrastructure and website security company, on Monday announced that it was cutting service to 8chan, an online forum it called a "cesspool of hate." The move was motivated by the role 8chan played in mass shootings in El Paso, Texas; Christchurch, New Zealand; and Poway, California....

Capital One Financial Corporation on Monday announced a data breach affecting some 100 million people in the United States and another 6 million in Canada. The FBI arrested the alleged perpetrator of the breach in Seattle Capital One on July 19 discovered someone had accessed its data stored online and obtained personal information of credit card c...

Apple's 2019 crop of iPhones haven't been released yet but there's already talk about its 2020 plans, largely because that will be the first year the company's mobile lineup will support 5G Ming-Chi Kuo, an Apple analyst known for his accurate predictions, wrote in a note to investors that he believes all three iPhones introduced in 2020 will suppo...

A flaw in a Facebook app designed for children under 13 years old allows kids to chat online with people unapproved by their parents The messaging app is designed to give parents control over who their kids text and video chat with online, but a bug in the software lets a contact approved to chat with one child talk to another without the approval ...

The United States Federal Trade Commission on Monday announced that Equifax has agreed to pay a minimum of US$575 million as part of a global settlement of claims against it arising from a 2017 data breach that affected 147 million Americans The settlement with the FTC, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and 50 states and territories potenti...

The U.S. Treasury Department has "very serious concerns" about Facebook's new Libra cryptocurrency, according to Secretary Steve Mnuchin "Libra could be misused by money launderers and terrorist financiers," he told reporters at a White House press conference Monday....

Alan Turing, the British mathematician known for his World War II code-breaking exploits and for a test to distinguish between human and machine intelligence, will be on 50-pound notes in the UK by the end of 2021 The Bank of England, which made the announcement Monday, explained that Turing, who died in 1954, was chosen from a field of 989 eligibl...

A security researcher has found a flaw in the popular video conferencing app Zoom that could be used to turn on the camera on a Macintosh computer without a user's permission The vulnerability allows any website to forcibly join a user to a Zoom call, with their video camera activated, without a user's permission, explained Jonathan Leitschuh in a ...

State motor vehicle departments have become a rich source of facial recognition data for and FBI and Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents Researchers at Georgetown Law's Center on Privacy & Technology used public records requests to gather a cache of documents that show the agencies have turned state DMV databases into the foundation of a vas...

Security researchers on Monday reported that Chinese hackers are the likely perpetrators of a series of cyberattacks against telecommunications companies around the world The campaign, dubbed "Operation Soft Cell," has been active since 2012, according to Cybereason, an endpoint security company based in Boston....

A Democrat and a Republican on Monday filed a U.S. Senate bill to require companies to report to financial regulators and to the public what consumer data they collect and how they leverage it for profit "When a big tech company says its product is free, consumers are the ones being sold," said Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo.

Facebook's plans to mint its own digital coin next year will test the company's consumer credibility. After being savaged for months for its cavalier attitude toward users' privacy, the social network will be asking those same users to trust its new cryptocurrency The currency, called "Libra," will be stashed in a digital wallet, the first product ...

Account hijacking has become a nettlesome problem at Instagram so it has decided to do something about it. The social media company on Monday said it has begun testing a simpler method for users to reclaim their compromised accounts The move, first reported by Motherboard, allows users locked out of their hacked accounts to ask for a six-digit code...

A study that estimates Google last year raked in US$4.7 billion from news content has drawn widespread criticism. That $4.7 billion is a conservative estimate, according to the News Media Alliance, the news industry trade group that released the study Monday. That's because the estimate doesn't take into account Google's advertising revenue from p...

Microsoft whetted the appetite of power-hungry Xbox gamers at its E3 preview in Los Angeles on Sunday, with new details about its next-generation gaming console code-named "Project Scarlett." Expected to arrive in time for the 2020 holiday season, the new Xbox will have a custom-designed AMD processor based on the latest Zen 2 and Radeon RDNA techn...

Apple dangled the next versions of iOS, macOS and watchOS before developers' eyes during Monday's keynote event at its World Wide Developers Conference in San Jose, California In this round of operating system upgrades, Apple seems focused on improvements....

Privacy, a new muscular Mac Pro workstation, and the debut of iPadOS were topline items Monday at Apple's World Wide Developers Conference in San Jose, California During its more than two-hour presentation at the forum, Apple emphasized new features in its products aimed at protecting users' data and privacy....

Apple on Tuesday refreshed its iPod touch line of media players with a faster processor, greater storage capacity and improved communications features The new iPod is built on Apple's A10 Fusion chip, the same processor used in the iPhone 7. According to Apple, the power upgrade delivers two times faster performance than previous models and three t...