Articles by John P. Mello Jr.

The past year was a good year for bad guys on the Web. Fraud complaints surged 60 percent to 120,000 from 75,000 a year ago, according to the Internet Crime Complaint Center in Fairmont, West Virginia The Center, which changed its name last week from the Internet Fraud Complaint Center, maintains a database on Internet crime and acts as a clearingh...

Distributing software for sharing files on the Internet is legal even if the application is being used for illegal activity, the Supreme Court of The Netherlands ruled last Friday In upholding a lower court ruling, the high court found that Sharman Networks, maker of the Kazaa file-sharing application, did not infringe on the rights of music and mo...

Within six months, Philips Electronics expects to release a new interoperable digital rights management (DRM) system. That will be good news for music consumers currently befuddled by a hodgepodge of schemes promoted by the likes of Apple, Microsoft, Napster and RealNetworks "It is Philips' opinion that DRM solutions will be necessary to enable the...

Customers of big banks, beware. You might be surfing the Web with a bull's-eye on your browser. That's because Internet scam artists have targeted the customers of large financial institutions for their nefarious efforts The technique used by the grifters is a cyberspace version of the old bait-and-switch tactic that in the Internet age could be ca...

A scheme to counter the Balkanization of digital rights management (DRM) on the Internet was unveiled Wednesday by a standards group whose members include ARM, ContentGuard, Macrovision, Microsoft, Nippon Telegraph and Telephone (NTT), Universal Music Group and VeriSign The group -- called the Content Reference Forum (CRF) -- has posted specificati...

Smut distributed through peer-to-peer networks isn't inherently more dangerous than titillating matter found elsewhere on the Internet That was one of several findings by the research arm of the U.S. Congress, the General Accounting Office (GAO), in a letter responding to written inquiries by the Senate Judiciary Committee following the panel's hea...

Some folks find flattery in imitation, but spam fighters are finding it in denial-of-service attacks. The attacks are being generated by a nasty but undistinguished virus called Mimail-L, which, as part of its mischief, is commandeering its victims' computers to deluge with e-mail eight prominent antispam sites. The targeted sites include Spamhaus.org, SpamCop.net and SPEWS.org (Spam Prevention Early Warning System) as well as others, such as Disney's Go Web site...

An industry group has approved a standard for the next generation of DVD players, but the move could be just the first skirmish in a future format war The Tokyo-based DVD Forum has given its nod to a design for "blue laser" DVD players proposed by Toshiba and NEC. Blue-laser players use DVDs that store five times the data of current DVD discs. That...

Apple Computer lured millions of PC users into its online music store when it released a version of its popular iTunes software for Windows, but it also attracted a less savory element -- hackers Just 10 days after the release of "WinTunes," a crafty codesman at Trinity College began distributing MyTunes, a program that turns the Apple software int...

A bill to take the "spy" out of spyware got a public hearing before a Congressional subcommittee Wednesday The legislation filed by Rep. Mary Bono (R-California) would require spyware purveyors to inform computer users of the presence, nature and function of their applications, as well as seek permission from users before downloading intrusive good...

In a classic duel between wetware and software this afternoon, the world's number one chess player will battle a computer program in the last of a four-game set in virtual reality. After three contests, the opponents -- Grandmaster Garry Kasparov, 40, and X3D Fritz -- are deadlocked at one win each with one draw "It's really been fascinating," X3D ...

A patent that critics say will vitiate the Web will be reexamined in a rare move by the U.S. Patent Office The patent, No. 5,838,906 -- or 906 for short -- governs the embedding of components into Web pages, a practice that, among other things, enables use of such popular applications as RealAudio, Apple QuickTime, Macromedia Flash, Adobe Acrobat a...

While some PC makers talk a good consumer electronics strategy, Gateway is turning talk into products That's what Gateway executive vice president Scott Edwards told TechNewsWorld in an exclusive interview following a New York City press conference at which the computer maker with the bovine brand introduced 14 new business and consumer products....

An outfit that has exploited a networking feature in Microsoft Windows to send pop-up ads to consumers' computers as frequently as one every 10 minutes has been slapped with a temporary restraining order to halt the practice, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) announced at a press conference in Washington, D.C The order also bars the spammers from ...

MTV, which sat on the sidelines while Apple, Napster and MusicMatch rushed into the online music market, has finally decided to get off the bench and enter the game. The Viacom-owned company said it will launch its own online music download service to compete with a list of players that seems to grow almost daily....

A request to federal regulators by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) to invalidate a controversial patent rests on shaky ground, according to an attorney representing the patent holder That patent for embedding components into Web pages must be revoked to "prevent substantial economic and technical damage to the operation of the World Wide Web," ...

Linux received a boost from Oracle today when the Redwood City, California-based company certified its database product on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3. In addition, Oracle announced it will provide support for this product running on the Linux platform "This is another indicator that our partnership with Oracle is very strong and we are working clos...

Palm lost its leadership position in the West European handheld computer market last quarter, but analysts expect the Santa Clara, California-based company's sales to rebound in the final frame of the year "We fully expect that Palm will regain the leadership position in Europe in Q4," Andrew Brown, program manager for European mobile devices at ID...

Microsoft said it is making progress complying with its settlement of the antitrust case against it, but not everyone is buying the company's soft sell on the subject In an interim status report filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia by the company, the U.S. Justice Department and 17 states attorney generals, Microsoft said t...

Action by a committee probing a controversial Internet redirection service operated by VeriSign could be taken as soon as two weeks from now, according to the chairman of the panel "There's a major ICANN meeting the week after next in Tunisia, and I hope we can get our stuff done before that," said Steve Crocker, who chairs a panel of the Security ...