Month: April 2016

(credit: The LAMP)

We all remember last year's hype surrounding the Ashley Madison dating site's data breach. Hackers exposed identifying information about millions of users of the site that has the tagline, "Life is short. Have an affair."

Then came the lawyers smelling blood in the water—filing proposed class-action suits targeting the cheating site's not-so-perfect "Full Delete" option that was supposed to, and didn't, remove all identifying information from the service for a $19 fee per user. Then it surfaced that the site perhaps made phony profiles of women to attract more men to the site.

The massive litigation has been co-mingled in Missouri, and there are some interesting elements at play. For starters, the judge presiding over the case says that if you want to be a named plaintiff in the litigation, you can't use a pseudonym like "John Doe," and instead you have to use your real name. The judge, in agreeing with Ashley Madison's owners, ruled that only in extraordinary circumstances may civil litigation proceed under fake names, like in cases such as sex crimes and suits about juveniles.

(credit: Fábio Goveia)

On Tuesday, credit card network Visa announced plans to offer an update to Point of Sale (POS) systems to make using an EMV chip-enabled card faster at the checkout line. (EMV stands for Europay, MasterCard, and Visa, the creators of the credit card specification.) Visa is calling the new specification “Quick Chip,” and it says it will bring the time it takes for a terminal to read the card’s chip down to two seconds.

Those seconds mean something. In 2014, Ars argued that the inconvenience of a few extra seconds caused by dipping a card in the terminal at a checkout stand would drive people to use mobile payments like Apple Pay and Android Pay more often. Those payment platforms rely on EMV’s Near Field Communication (NFC) standard, and transactions are much faster because of it. Although it's hard to say if such a shift in preference is occurring, especially with the uneven rollout of EMV-capable terminals, customers trying to use chip cards must dip them into a checkout terminal and leave them there while the transaction is being processed—a serious change of pace and potential source of frustration for Americans used to the speed of swiping a magnetic stripe card.

That time barrier, as well as the fear that customers might be confused as to how to use a chip card, caused merchants to postpone upgrading their terminals to support the EMV standard over the holidays, traditionally the most important time for businesses. But magnetic stripe cards are very fraud-prone, and EMV cards are less so (although not entirely fraud-proof), so card networks are insisting that it’s time to make the change.

The FBI's new "laser strikes" poster. (credit: FBI)

With yet another prison sentence, a federal prosecutor in Fresno, California, has continued her aggressive campaign against people who fire laser pointers at airplanes.

On Monday, Pablo Cesar Sahagun was sentenced to 18 months in prison after pleading guilty to firing a one-watt laser at a Kern County Sheriff’s helicopter, known as Air-1, on February 26, 2015. That laser claims to produce a beam approximately 2,000 times more powerful than what is legally allowed.

US District Judge Dale A. Drozd said during sentencing, “This is an egregious case of a laser strike…The circumstances are inexplicable.”