Articles by John P. Mello Jr.

Comments by a powerful U.S. senator sent a shudder through the cable andsatellite television communities this week Ted Stevens, the Alaskan Republican who heads the SenateCommerce Committee, reportedly told a group of broadcasters what must have sounded likesweet music to some of their ears: He wants to extend the rules forindecency that apply to t...

Supporters of file-sharing programs Grokster and StreamCast scourgedthe entertainment industry yesterday following the filing of briefs with theU.S. Supreme Court in a case that could be Armageddon for the peer-to-peersoftware industry The High Court is scheduled to hear oral arguments in the dispute on March29. Entertainment industry groups are at...

Has Nanosolar found the Holy Grail of solar energy? For years, the price of solar energy has been so high that, without some form of subsidy, it has beenunable to compete with power from the electrical grid. Now Nanosolar, a Palo Alto,California, start-up claims it has developed a "commercial-scale technology"that cuts the cost of delivering solar ...

As a judicial panel heard arguments this week on a scheme to fight thepiracy of digital television broadcasts, a civil libertarian group in SanFrancisco launched a guerrilla program to undermine the plan The scheme is the so-called "broadcast flag," a digital rights management(DRM) system for controlling what consumers can do with digital televisio...

Caution: Click-through agreements may be hazardous to your rights of privacyand free speech Those are the sentiments expressed in a white paper released by theElectronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) as part of a campaign to raise consumerawareness of some of the dangerous terms found in End User LicensingAgreements (EULAs), commonly found on the Inter...

The University of Calgary is at it again The Canadian school gained some notoriety two years agowhen its computer science department launched a course on computer viruses,which included, as part of the coursework, writing a virus....

Congressman Mike Thompson is hoping three times is the charm for hislegislation to create a national recycling program for electronic waste The California Democrat has twice before filed bills to establish nationalstandards for handling e-waste only to see them whither and die in aparliamentary backwater....

Federal regulators launched a two-prong attack this week on the US$200 million diploma mill industry, an industry populated with online enterprises where students can purchase a degree with minimal or no course work The first prong was spearheaded by the U.S. Department of Education (DOE), which keyed up a searchable, online database of educational...

A free software program to help parents police illegal movie and music files on their household computers is garnering mixed reviews The application, called Parent File Scan, was unveiled last week by the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) -- alongside an announcement of the organization's intent to file more lawsuits against people who i...

Anyone who sells, advertises or distributes peer-to-peer (P2P) softwarewithout taking "reasonable care" that the software won't be used for anunlawful act would be slapped with a fine up to US$2,500, a year in county jailor both under a bill filed in the California Senate last week Although the measure, filed by Sen. Kevin Murray, D-Los Angeles, is...

A group that defends civil liberties on the Internet has filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request with the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) to determine if the government is secretly gathering information on the surfing habits of citizens In a copy of the FOIA obtained by TechNewsWorld, the San Francisco-based Electronic Frontier Foundatio...

A developer of security software for Linux had some harsh words yesterday for what he sees as a lax attitude toward security in the operating system's community "Linux is being presented by commercial vendors as a professional, enterprise-ready product," Brad Spengler, of grsecurity, said. "When it comes to security, I don't see it as either profes...

A call for financial support by the operator of a BitTorrent server that'sbeen targeted by the motion picture industry as a hub for pirated films hasachieved initial success Edward Webber, operator of Loki Torrent, posted a plea for money at his Website last week to fight a lawsuit slapped on his outfit by the MotionPicture Association of America (...

A popular online community for selling goods and finding jobs and housing isdiverting US$50 million to $65 million annually in classified advertising fromnewspapers in the San Francisco Bay area, according to ClassifiedIntelligence, a consulting firm in Altamonte Springs, Florida The firm released a report this week, a copy of which has been obtain...

A group dedicated to preserving civil liberties on the Internet announced this week that it's throwing its weight behind the development of a technology to foster anonymity in cyberspace The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) of San Francisco said in a statement that it is sponsoring the Tor Project, which has created an open-source application t...

Spam and its evil offshoot, phishing, have become growing problems on the Internet. Not only has spam become a nuisance with its frequently offensive subject matter, but it is consuming increasing amounts of bandwidth. According to a report released by the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, an estimated 50 percent of all e-mail in 2003 was spam, which may have chewed up US$20.5 billion in technical resources...

A company that makes a tool for finding bugs in software code disclosed this week that the Linux kernel is far less flawed than many programs people pay money for According to San Francisco-based Coverity, its source-code auditing tool found the Linux 2.6 kernel had 985 bugs in its 5.7 million lines of code. The typical commercial software program ...

Industry analysts say the fastest growing operating system in the world -- Linux -- could be experiencing growing pains as growth outpaces the supply of IT professionals with expertise in this area "Linux is increasing its market share so rapidly that, in consequence, some companies find it difficult to secure the resources to handle Linux developm...

Universities have begun thwarting the operation of software that promises to accelerate Internet performance and protect its users from malware infections because they feel the program is actually spyware A number of schools, including Columbia University, Cornell, Indiana State and Penn State, have advised their students to avoid using, or have bl...

Landing a contract with a major record label can be nirvana for an artist,but it's a heaven out of reach for many musicians. That's because backingan act is risky business. While record companies can make millions from an artist's success, they can also lose millions, if the artist fails tocatch on with the public Now the world's largest music comp...