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There's a lot of hype around Apple Pay right now, but not everyone is on board with the new mobile payments system. In fact, a significant number of merchants, including heavyweights like Walmart, Kmart, 7-Eleven, and Best Buy, are in outright competition with Apple Pay. The retailers, through a joint venture formed in 2012, are building their own mobile payment app, called CurrentC. It's expected to launch next year. In the meantime, these retailers have no intention to support Apple Pay. Following Apple's announcement last month, both Wal-Mart and Best Buy confirmed to The Wall Street Journal that customers would...

Security experts prove it’s possible to infect USB sticks’ MCU Next time you find a foreign USB lying around, think twice before plugging it into your computer. A pair of security researchers named Karsten Nohl and Jakob Lell demonstrated before an audience at Black hat security conference in Las Vegas a fundamental flaw in USB firmware could be exploited to create an undetected malware that cannot be patched. Realizing the kind of power they were dealing with, the pair opted to keep the code secret – until fellow colleagues decided to post it publically on Github. Two other researchers –...

We took a hacker to a café and, in 20 minutes, he knew where everyone else was born, what schools they attended, and the last five things they googled. In his backpack, Wouter Slotboom, 34, carries around a small black device, slightly larger than a pack of cigarettes, with an antenna on it. I meet Wouter by chance at a random cafe in the center of Amsterdam. It is a sunny day and almost all the tables are occupied. Some people talk, others are working on their laptops or playing with their smartphones. Wouter removes his laptop from his backpack,...

Sears Holdings Corp. said Friday that its Kmart stores were hit with a data breach that compromised some shoppers' debit and credit card information. The company is working with federal authorities and security experts to investigate the matter. The Secret Service confirmed Friday evening that it is investigating the data breach. The investigation indicates that the breach occurred in early September and did not affect kmart.com customers, the statement said.

Unless you’re a real-life version of Sheldon Cooper, a computer security professional, or, like me, work in the online payment industry, you probably don’t keep up with the latest computer vulnerabilities.  A new one that’s hit the web news like a tsunami in the last 72 hours is simply called “the bash bug” (sometimes called “shellshock”).  Everyone from Time, to Vox*, to tech site C|Net has covered this story. I am not going to get technical here.  You can read any of the above-mentioned articles which provide plenty of detail on that.  To summarize the problem:  a 25-year-old program that’s...

A remotely exploitable vulnerability has been discovered by Stephane Chazelas in bash on Linux and it is unpleasant. The vulnerability has the CVE identifier CVE-2014-6271 and has been given the name Shellshock by some. This affects Debian as well as other Linux distributions. You will need to patch ASAP. Bash supports exporting shell variables as well as shell functions to other bash instances. This is accomplished through the process environment to a child process.  The major attack vectors that have been identified in this case are HTTP requests and CGI scripts.  From Akamai:  Akamai has validated the existence of the vulnerability...

Synology network attached storage (NAS) devices, capable of storing terabytes of data, have been targeted by ransomware that encrypts victims’ files. Owners of Synology's NAS devices might want to unplug their storage boxes now to avoid being affected by ransomware that uses strong encryption to lock files on the brand’s machines and demands US$350 for the decryption key. The new attack on Synology kit comes within a year of Synology NAS devices being struck by fraudulent Bitcoin mining operators, with several owners on Sunday reporting that they had found a message from the “SynoLocker Automated Decryption Service” — when accessing...

“[The company D-Wave] makes a new type of computer called a quantum computer that’s so radical and strange, people are still trying to figure out what it’s for and how to use it…. The supercooled niobium chip at the heart of the D-Wave Two has 512 qubits and therefore could in theory perform 2^512 operations simultaneously. That’s more calculations than there are atoms in the universe, by many orders of magnitude…. Naturally, a lot of people want one. This is the age of Big Data, and we’re burying ourselves in ­­information—search queries, genomes, credit-card purchases, phone records, retail transactions, social...

Video here. (Duration: 3 minutes, 52 seconds)

Douglas Engelbart, whose invention of the mouse transformed the way people interact with computers, has died. Engelbart died Tuesday night at his home in Atherton, California, SRI International -- the research institute where he once worked -- said in a statement. He was 88. "Doug's legacy is immense — anyone in the world who uses a mouse or enjoys the productive benefits of a personal computer is indebted to him," Curtis R. Carlson, SRI's president and CEO, said in a written statement. Decades ago, Engelbart came up with the idea we now know as a mouse. His first prototype, which...

The White House announced the opening of a new government supercomputing center in northern Maryland this week. Patricia Falcone of the White House Office of Science & Technology Policy (OSTP) attended a ceremony to mark the occasion along with Maryland Senator Ben Cardin and various army officials: OSTP’s Associate Director for National Security and International Affairs Dr. Patricia Falcone provided keynote remarks yesterday at a ribbon-cutting ceremony celebrating the opening of the US Army Research Laboratory’s (ARL) new supercomputing center at Aberdeen Proving Ground in northern Maryland... The new ARL Supercomputing Center—containing two new IBM iDataPlex computers with the capacity...

Anonymous Members Arrested for Hacking Vatican Site Law enforcement officials in Italy have reportedly arrested four members of Anonymous. The suspects allegedly carried out attacks on a number of prominent Italian websites and online services. The suspects are all aged between 20 and 34 and were placed under arrest in the Italian cities of Turin, Venice, and Bologna. One suspect was arrested in the southern community of Lecce. According to police, the suspects were part of Anonymous Italy, which carried out hacks of prominent commercial and government websites. Some of those sites were owned by the Vatican, Italy's prime minister's...

The old man turned back at his coffee, took a sip, and then looked back at me.... “In fact, I’ve done lots of things ....Oh really? Like what types of things?, ...All the while, half-thinking he was going to make up something fairly non-impressive....I invented the first computer.....Um, Excuse me? ..... I created the world’s first internally programmable computer.... It used to take up a space about as big as this whole room and my wife and I used to walk into it to program it.... What’s your name?”. I asked, thinking that this guy is either another crazy homeless...

                 

Spectroscopy, a key method of identifying atoms and molecules with light, has been taken to its most fundamental level - a single photon absorbed by a single molecule. In addition to paving the way toward new experiments that observe the interaction between light and matter at its most basic level, the researchers that accomplished the feat suggest that their technique could also work with other photon-emitters, including those under study for quantum communication.Spectroscopy works by finding the frequencies of light that will put an atom or molecule into an excited state - these comprise the chemical's unique absorption and emission...

General-purpose computers are astounding. They're so astounding that our society still struggles to come to grips with them, what they're for, how to accommodate them, and how to cope with them. This brings us back to something you might be sick of reading about: copyright. But bear with me, because this is about something more important. The shape of the copyright wars clues us into an upcoming fight over the destiny of the general-purpose computer itself. In the beginning, we had packaged software and we had sneakernet. We had floppy disks in ziplock bags, in cardboard boxes, hung on pegs...

Artist’s impression of the quantum photonic chip, showing the waveguide circuit (in white), and the voltage-controlled phase shifters (metal contacts on the surface). Photon pairs become entangled as they pass through the circuit. The fundamental resource that drives a quantum computer is entanglement—the connection between two distant particles which Einstein famously called 'spooky action at a distance'. The Bristol researchers have, for the first time, shown that this remarkable phenomenon can be generated, manipulated and measured entirely on a tiny silica chip. They have also used the same chip to measure mixture—an often unwanted effect from the environment, but...

Vol. 330 no. 6011 pp. 1612-1613 DOI: 10.1126/science.330.6011.1612 News IntroductionTen years ago, Karl Deisseroth was stuck. A psychiatrist and neuroscientist, he wanted to learn how different brain circuits affect behavior—and what went awry in the brains of his patients with schizophrenia and depression. But the tools of his trade were too crude: Electrodes inserted into the brain would stimulate too many cells in their vicinity. So in 2004, Deisseroth and his students invented a new tool. They inserted a gene for a light-activated algal protein into mice brains, where it entered nerve cells. By stimulating those cells with a laser,...

A new photonic chip that works on light rather than electricity has been built by an international research team, paving the way for the production of ultra-fast quantum computers with capabilities far beyond today’s devices. Future quantum computers will, for example, be able to pull important information out of the biggest databases almost instantaneously. As the amount of electronic data stored worldwide grows exponentially, the technology will make it easier for people to search with precision for what they want. EDITOR’S CHOICE Making sense of a ‘nonsensical world’ - Sep-16 Fears over computers’ impact on lives - Sep-14 Brain scan...

Help wanted: business application archaeologists… Teaching mainframe skills is out of vogue at many universities with the advent of newer approaches to solving the biggest computing challenges. At the same time, many of the engineers capable of tinkering with the refrigerator-sized machines are nearing retirement. The average age of mainframe workers is 55 to 60, according to Dayton Semerjian, a senior vice-president at CA Technologies (CA), the second-largest maker of software for mainframe computers after IBM. "The big challenge with the mainframe is that the group that has worked on it—the Baby Boomers—is retiring," Semerjian says. "The demographics are inescapable....