Articles by John P. Mello Jr

Internet search powerhouse Google garnered 37.6 percent of all U.S. search queries on the Internet in this year's second quarter, according to comScore Networks, a Net metrics service firm. That's the largest market share that Google has had in a quarter since comScore began compiling its search reports in December 2003 Google's 5.65 billion U.S.

A report by an Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) panel on domain hijacking that was intended to raise a red flag in the Internet community about the practice has been met with mixed reaction, leaving at least one victim seeing red The Security and Stability Advisory Committee (SSAC) report was issued last week during ICANN...

Action yesterday by the body that governs the Internet to create a .mobi domain is being touted as a major advance toward making the Web more hospitable to mobile phone users, but according to one analyst the move might be more redundant than revolutionary "The answer isn't having another extension; the answer is having more applications and more c...

RSS stands for Real Simple Syndication, but for technologists with an eye on the Internet's future, it stands for much, much more The technology provides a way for people to opt to have information delivered to their computer desktops without having to burn time surfing the Web....

E-mail authentication -- considered by many spam fighters as an important first step in reducing unsolicited correspondence on the Internet -- will be the focus of a summit conference to be held in New York City next Tuesday The day-long confab at the Marriott Marquis will be moderated by Esther Dyson, editor of Release 1.0, who will also deliver t...

Pop-up advertising on the Web might be annoying, but not as annoying as what would happen if trademark law were used to squash them, according to a federal appellate court in New York The U.S. 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals this week upended a decision by a lower court that used trademark law to block the ads of one pop-up purveyor....

Now that summer has finally arrived, you can start to train your thoughts on vacation -- and what to bring with you when you take it What do you consider essential carry-alongs? A good book? How about a laptop? Better yet, a laptop with wireless networking so you can plug into the Internet whenever you hit a WiFi hotspot in your travels....

European consumers are being driven away from online banking and commerce by fears that their identities will be stolen and their financial resources raided by information highwaymen Survey results released yesterday by Entrust, a publicly traded digital identity security firm located in Addison, Texas, showed 13 percent of consumers in the United ...

Gateway has come to the table with its 17-inch widescreen notebooks a little later than some of its competitors, but its latest offering in this category illustrates, once again, that it's capable to delivering excellent value without skimping on performance Some impressive features have been incorporated into this offering, the M680 notebook, most...

Emerging technologies could lead to a quantum leap in PC security, but the realization of that advance is still years away, industry experts say "The next quantum leap in security won't occur until there is better operating system and better hardware support for it," John Bedrick, a director of eTrust Security Management at Computer Associates, tol...

Most companies depend exclusively on perimeter defenses to protect their computer networks from intruders, a practice that appears to be more sieve than stone wall, according to a survey released yesterday by Vernier Networks, a network access management firm in Mountain View, Calif Surveyors found that 51 percent of those sampled said they relied ...

Online marketers are in a quandary. Their customers prefer e-mail as a vehicle of communication, but spammers have poisoned that well, making it very difficult for legitimate advertisers to deliver their messages to their loyal customers However, Think360, a marketing firm in Austin, Texas, thinks it has a solution to this problem: screensavers. Th...

Almost since its inception, Monster.com has been the biggest job board on the Internet and number one stop for job seekers in Cyberspace. Yesterday, the Web site, which is the flagship of Monster Worldwide, announced two moves designed to maintain its stature as the leading career site on the Internet First, Monster pulled the wraps off improvement...

If you're looking for a laptop, you couldn't have picked a better time. New models seem to be appearing on a weekly basis, each with its own mix of features to entice buyers Gateway, for instance, has introduced its M680 series, which packs power into a thin, yet full-sized package. Sharp, with its Actius AL3D, takes display technology to a new fro...

An international standards group has approved a new DSL standard that it says will increase the technology's upstream and downstream speeds to as much as 100 megabits per second -- 10 times faster than the fastest DSL now offered by carriers The Geneva, Switzerland-based International Telecommunications Union (ITU) approved the standard for Very-Hi...

Ask any box office expert to name the holy trinity of movie attendance and they'll tell you: big screen, big sound and immediacy -- getting to see a movie when it's released With improving home entertainment systems rapidly undermining the first two tenets of attendance, how long will it be before the third leg of the triangle falls? No one knows.

The Federal Trade Commission today launched "Operation Spam Zombies," a campaign to encourage Internet service providers (ISPs) to crack down on compromised computers within their networks that are being used to spew spam onto the Internet These "zombie" computers -- so-called because they're remotely controlled by malicious parties who plant malwa...

Microsoft was awarded a patent this week for a "system and process for allowing a user to treat e-mail addresses as objects" -- a patent called "obvious and trivial" by one critic of the filing "The technique of applying object properties and methods to various data fields in a software product has been standard practice for several decades," softw...

Digital voice recorders don't have the flashy visibility of their music-playing brethren, but their utility can't be denied Granted, some digital music players include recording in their repertoire and others can accommodate it with optional add-ons, but for the most part, recording plays second fiddle to playing tunes....

Everyone has heard the expression, "You get what you pay for." It suggests that the functionality of something is directly proportional to its price. But that rule of thumb is being turned on its head by open-source software Open-source software is free, but it differs from "freeware" in some major respects....