Articles by John P. Mello Jr.

Recent low-key efforts by Adobe Systems to bolster its presence in the Linux community makes good business sense, according to one analyst who covers the company Adobe, which makes well-known software brands Acrobat, Illustrator and Photoshop, is keeping all its bases covered by expanding its Linux presence, maintained Martin Pyykkonen of Janco Par...

Expectations are high that Sun Microsystems will make some significant announcements this month about an open-source version of its Solaris operating system Reportedly, key pieces to the open-source project could be revealed as early as November 15 when the company has scheduled its quarterly SunNetwork Conference at the Tech Museum of Innovation i...

The world's largest distributor of Linux expects 50 percent of its revenuesto be coming from overseas sales within the next year -- a revelation oneanalyst sees as a bit of a capitulation "It's our goal that within the next 12 months, 50 percent of our revenues befrom sales outside the United States," explained Red Hat spokesperson LeighDay....

Less than a handful of zombie network operators are responsible for all thephishing attacks in the world, according to CipherTrust, an Atlanta-basedmessage security firm In an analysis of its global customers' e-mail traffic patterns during thefirst two weeks of this month, CipherTrust researchers found that less thanone percent of all e-mail conta...

Have you ever felt a burning desire while taking your dog for a walk to knowhow much money your neighbors have contributed to the Democratic andRepublican parties? Well, now you can whip your cell phone out and find out A New Jersey software tinkerer has written a Java-based program he'sdistributing free that can access Federal Election Commission ...

A court decision that civil libertarians argue could have a far-reachingeffect on the privacy of Internet communications in the United States willbe reviewed again by federal judges in Boston The ruling, handed down by a panel of three federal judges in June, foundthat e-mail service providers may divert and read their customers' messageswithout re...

When was the last time you updated your anti-virus software? Even if you update your AV software frequently, there's still a gap between the time a virus is released into the wild on "day zero" and when virus fighters can update their programs to squash the malware....

While consumers have been slow to move to digital TV, that hasn't deterred Congress from trying to goose the transition process That process includes snatching back spectrum currently used to broadcastover-the-air analog TV channels -- a process that, under current law, issupposed to occur by 2007 -- but only if 85 percent of the households inAmer...

Financial services companies might be unwitting contributors to the nation's identity theft problem, according to a report from Forrester Research in Cambridge, Massachusetts The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) estimates that identity theft costs American businesses US$50 billion to $60 billion a year. "Despite this clear threat to their business, f...

For companies burdened with legacy systems they can't seem to get rid of, this could be the jackpot they've been waiting for A Los Gatos, California, startup maintains it has perfected a program that allows software applications compiled for one processor and operating system to run on another processor and operating system without any source code ...

The techniques used to develop open-source software like Linux have proven to be so effective that they've been adopted by malware writers to improve their mischievous ways "There's a community of worm builders creating, almost in an open-source fashion, Trojan source code that can be downloaded, compiled and released into the wild," said Scott Cha...

A federal appeals court in Boston has been asked to take a second look at a decision that some say could have a far-reaching effect on the privacy of Internet communications in the United States The decision handed down by a panel of appeals court judges ruled that monitoring the content of people's incoming e-mail by a service provider does not vi...

Sender authentication might work as a club to beat down phishing attacks on Web denizens, but it does little to fight spam. That's the finding of a study released this week by CipherTrust, a messaging security firm in Atlanta On the basis of analyzing some two million messages received between May and August by more than 1,000 CipherTrust customers...

The words "copy protection" make Adam Gervin wince. Gervin is senior marketing director for the entertainment technologies group at Macrovision, in Santa Clara, California. Macrovision is a company best known for cooking up ways to thwart the copying of movies and music from tapes and discs He's also point man in Macrovision's quest -- through a ne...

A recent blog posting by a Microsoft project manager spawned ablizzard of discussion on one of the Internet's major tech forums andgenerated speculation that Microsoft may be ready to improve its relations with the open-source community Josh Ledgard, a program manager for Microsoft's Visual Studio communityteam, sparked a flurry of comment at Slash...

Despite a drop in its overall share of global spam, the United States remains the number one originator of unsolicited e-mail in the world Those are the findings of antivirus, antispam software maker Sophos in its latest "dirty dozen" report, which identifies the 12 top countries where spam originates....

It's as jarring as former First Lady Nancy Reagan saying yes to drugs The maker of the code hackers love to crack -- Macrovision -- is touting the sharing and copying features of the next version of its CDS-300 copy-protection scheme when it's released in this year's fourth quarter....

For the first time ever, the major providers of DSL broadband services garnered more new subscribers in a calendar quarter than their cable television competitors According to figures released by the Leichtman Research Group (LRG) in Durham, New Hampshire, the top DSL providers added 895,336 net new broadband subscribers to their rolls in this year...

The desire to learn won't be the only thing returning with students to their universities this fall College IT departments can expect a wave of viruses, worms and other computer nasties to accompany their charges as they connect their computers to their college's networks When many students return to school from summer vacation, they're returning w...

Microsoft has introduced a new version of Windows XP designed for computers sold in emerging markets -- and analysts contend that is a sign that the Redmond, Washington-based software giant is worried about threats to its leading market position by Linux as well as to its bottom line by pirates Popularly known as "XP Lite," the new stripped-down ed...