Articles by John P. Mello Jr

For decades, Geostationary Earth Orbit (GEO) operators were in the communications catbird's seat 22,000 miles above the Earth, but the arrival of Low Earth Orbit (LEO) networks, like Elon Musk's Starlink, is bringing the Old Guard in satellite com down to terra firma "The proprietary and specialized GEO infrastructure of the past is now weighing do...

AI may be ushering in a new breed of malicious threat actors who know even less about hacking than script kiddies but can produce professional-grade hacking tools In a report released Tuesday, Cato CTRL, the threat intelligence arm of cybersecurity company Cato Networks, explained how one of its researchers, who had no malware coding experience, tr...

Agentic AI's potential for improving customer satisfaction and streamlining workflows is bolstering its appeal in customer service circles and fueling what could be a US$47.1 billion market by 2030, according to Markets and Markets. Moreover, Gartner predicts that 80% of all common customer service issues will be solved by AI agents without human intervention by 2029...

A call for organizations to take quantum security seriously has been sounded in a new report by Forrester Research The report titled "Quantum Security Isn’t Hype -- Every Security Leader Needs It" acknowledged that the commercial availability of quantum computers that can crack traditional asymmetric cryptography is still five to 10 years away. H...

One knock against smartphones with built-in parental controls is that while they may give mom and dad a measure of comfort, they're just too uncool for kids. Human Mobile Devices (HMD), a Finland-based phone maker, believes it can address that problem with its new HMD X1 phone announced on Sunday "At HMD, we believe kids shouldn’t have to choose ...

Agentic AI — getting AI to perform tasks rather than just create content from prompts — is coming to the Opera browser On Monday, the Norwegian company announced that its agent, Browser Operator, works inside Opera and will perform tasks on the web for users....

An education technology company is taking Alphabet and Google to court over AI overviews displayed with search results The company, Chegg, of Santa Clara, Calif., announced Monday that it is filing the lawsuit in the U.S. District Court in the District of Columbia, alleging "Google unfairly exercises its monopoly power within search and other anti-...

As online markets become increasingly competitive, retailers are turning to "subscribe and save" services to sustain sales and build customer retention "For retailers, it's a great trade to sacrifice some margin to gain the retention of a subscription from a shopper," said Reilly Newman, founder and brand strategist at Motif Brands, a brand transfo...

A weeks-long brute force attack campaign by malicious actors has reached mammoth proportions, according to a non-profit security organization The Shadowserver Foundation reports that the campaign, which has been ongoing since January, involves as many as 2.8 million IP addresses daily, targeting VPN devices, firewalls, and gateways from vendors lik...

In an apparent attempt to keep pace with its rival Uber, ride-hailing service Lyft plans to launch a fleet of robotaxis in Dallas "as soon as 2026." According to a report Monday in TechCrunch, the new robocabs will be powered by Mobileye technology while Marubeni, a Japanese conglomerate, will perform fleet management. When operational, ride seeker...

Nearly half the traffic on the internet is generated by automated entities called bots, and a large portion of them pose threats to consumers and businesses on the web "[B]ots can help in creating phishing scams by gaining user’s trust and exploiting it for scammers. These scams can have serious implications for the victim, some of which include ...

The Chinese AI app DeepSeek has created a splash in the artificial intelligence world not seen since OpenAI introduced ChatGPT. All the attention garnered by the AI model, however, could pose a threat to its success in the United States, as other technology companies based in countries Uncle Sam considers "adversary states" have discovered Although...

A popular app from China sent the tech markets plummeting Monday, fueled by fear that the United States may be losing its primacy in artificial intelligence Nvidia shares dropped 16.9%, contributing to a 1.5% slide in the S&P 500, while tech titans contributed to the Nasdaq Composite Index falling 3.1%, its worst decline in over a month....

An emphasis on fiber optic broadband delivery blunts the effectiveness and reach of a federal program created to close the gap between internet haves and have-nots, according to a report released Tuesday by the Information Technology & Innovation Foundation (ITIF) The Washington, D.C. tech think tank maintained that the Broadband Equity, Access, an...

Cisco is taking a radical approach to AI security in its new AI Defense solution In an exclusive interview Sunday with Rowan Cheung of The Rundown AI, Cisco Executive Vice President and CPO Jeetu Patel said that AI Defense is "taking a radical approach to address the challenges that existing security solutions are not equipped to handle."

Shipments of personal computers grew in 2024, fueled by businesses replacing old hardware and Microsoft's looming end of support for its Windows 10 operating system According to market research firm Canalys, PC shipments climbed 3.8% in 2024 to 255.5 million units from 246.3 million in 2023. IDC, another research firm, pegged 2024 shipments higher ...

An eleventh-hour move by the Biden Administration to regulate how American AI technology is shared with the world is coming under fire from the nation's tech sector According to the White House, the Interim Final Rule on Artificial Intelligence Diffusion (IFR) streamlines licensing hurdles for both large and small chip orders, bolsters U.S. AI lead...

Fact-checkers are headed to the dustbin of history at Meta "We will end the current third-party fact-checking program in the United States and instead begin moving to a Community Notes program," Meta's Chief Global Affairs Officer Joel Kaplan announced in a company blog on Tuesday....

When it comes to cybersecurity in 2025, artificial intelligence is top of mind for many analysts and professionals Artificial intelligence will be deployed by both adversaries and defenders, but attackers will benefit more from it, maintained Willy Leichter, CMO of AppSOC, an application security and vulnerability management provider in San Jose, C...

Quantum computing made significant strides in 2024, but it's yet to demonstrate a practical advantage over classical digital computers, according to a recent trends report released by Forrester Research "Despite improvements in qubit count, coherence time, and gate fidelity, the technology remains experimental, with broad-scale applications likely ...