Here’s some more fun out of Vegas, this time involving Jack Dorsey’s Square and somewhat thing we love to name bank card fraud. Researchers from Aperture Labs (seriously) held two demonstrations on the Black Hat Conference . The primary used a script, written by Adam Laurie, to transform stolen mastercard data right into a series of audio tones that were then fed to the Square app via the headphone jack on a phone — removing the necessity to have a physical card. A second avenue of fraud, also using code authored by Laurie, turned the Square dongle right into a skimmer. It intercepted incoming data, that is unencrypted, and spit out human readable numbers which could easily be used to clone a card. New hardware that encrypts information pulled from the magnetic strip is within the pipeline but, until then, it kind of feels everyone’s favorite smartphone-based payment service has some troublesome holes to fill.
Lumus’ OE-31 optical engine turns motorcycle helmets, other eyewear into wearable displays
OMAP 5′s dual A15 cores wipe the ground with four A9s in browsing benchmark
