Hasta La Gadget!

Barely a week after it was first proposed, Hungary’s internet tax looks to be dead in the water. Tens of thousands of Hungarians took to the streets last weekend to protest the tax, which would have seen internet use charged per gigabyte transferred….

A report from a couple of days ago had suggested that the Samsung Galaxy A-series of smartphones would be launched in November. Well as it turns out the report was close enough as Samsung has officially announced the Samsung Galaxy A series, which for now consists of the Samsung Galaxy A3 and the Galaxy A5.

There was no mention of the alleged higher-end Samsung Galaxy A7, but presumably that will be coming at a later date, so for now we guess we will have these two devices to contend with. Moving along, Samsung claims that these new A-series of handsets have been designed for a younger and more trendy crowd in mind.

They will follow in the footsteps of the Galaxy Alpha and will feature a metal unibody exterior, thus resulting in some of the thinnest phones Samsung has produced to date, with the Galaxy A5 measuring 6.7mm thin and the Galaxy A3 measuring 6.9mm, making them just as thin if not thinner than the iPhone 6.

As far as specs are concerned, the Galaxy A5 and Galaxy A3 will share the same 1.2GHz quad-core processor, 16GB of storage with microSD expansion, with Android 4.4 KitKat running the show. However the Galaxy A5 will feature a 5-inch HD display while the Galaxy A3 will feature a 4.5-inch qHD display.

The Galaxy A5 will be accompanied by 2GB of RAM versus the 1GB of RAM on the Galaxy A3, and will come with a 13MP rear-facing camera. The Galaxy A3 will come with an 8MP rear-facing camera but both phones will sport a 5MP front-facing camera. Pricing and availability have yet to be confirmed, save for China, but we’ll keep our eyes peeled all the same.

Samsung Galaxy A3, Galaxy A5 Officially Announced

, original content from Ubergizmo. Read our Copyrights and terms of use.

WASHINGTON (AP) — Call it drugs for the departed: Medicare’s prescription program kept paying for costly medications even after patients were dead.

The problem was traced back to a head-scratching bureaucratic rule that’s now getting a second look.

A report coming out Friday from the Health and Human Services Department’s inspector general says the Medicare rule allows payment for prescriptions filled up to 32 days after a patient’s death — at odds with the program’s basic principles, not to mention common sense.

“Drugs for deceased beneficiaries are clearly not medically indicated, which is a requirement for (Medicare) coverage,” the IG report said. It urged immediate changes to eliminate or restrict the payment policy.

Medicare said it’s working on a fix.

Investigators examined claims from 2012 for a tiny sliver of Medicare drugs — medications to treat HIV, the virus that causes AIDS — and then cross-referenced them with death records. They found that the program paid for drugs for 158 beneficiaries after they were already dead. The cost to taxpayers: $292,381, an average of $1,850 for each beneficiary.

Medicare’s “current practices allowed most of these payments to occur,” the report said.

Of 348 prescriptions dispensed for the dead beneficiaries, nearly half were filled more than a week after the patient died. Sometimes multiple prescriptions were filled on behalf of a single dead person.

Investigators don’t know what happened to the medications obtained on behalf of dead people, but some may have been diverted to the underground market for prescription medicines. The report said HIV drugs can be targets for fraud since they can be very expensive; one common HIV drug costs about $1,700 for a month’s supply, it said.

Medicare is the government’s premier health insurance program, providing coverage to about 55 million seniors and disabled people. Prescription coverage delivered through private insurance plans began in 2006 as a major expansion of the program. But it’s also been a target for scams.

The report did not estimate the potential financial impact across the $85 billion-a-year Medicare prescription program known as Part D. But investigators believe the waste may add up to millions of dollars.

“The exposure for the entire Part D program could be significant,” said Miriam Anderson, team leader on the report. “The payment policy is the same for all drugs, whether they are $2,000 drugs to treat HIV or $4 generic drugs.”

In a formal response, Medicare agreed with the investigators’ recommendations.

“After reviewing this report, (Medicare) has had preliminary discussions with the industry to revisit the need for a 32-day window,” wrote Marilyn Tavenner, the Obama administration’s Medicare chief.

Medicare had originally maintained that the date of service listed in the billing records could instead reflect when a pharmacy submitted bills for payment. That billing date might have actually occurred after a prescription was filled, since some nursing home and institutional pharmacies submit their bills in monthly bundles.

However, the inspector general’s investigators found that about 80 percent of the prescriptions for dead beneficiaries were filled at neighborhood pharmacies, undercutting Medicare’s first explanation. As for the remainder, the investigators said they didn’t see any reason pharmacies can’t report an accurate date of service.

Investigators said they stumbled on the problem during an examination of coverage for AIDS drugs dispensed to Medicare beneficiaries. Sexually transmitted diseases are an increasingly recognized problem among older people.

That earlier investigation raised questions about expensive medications billed on behalf of nearly 1,600 Medicare recipients.

Some had no HIV diagnosis in their records, but they were prescribed the drugs anyway. Others were receiving excessively large supplies of medications. Several were getting prescriptions filled from an unusually large number of pharmacies.

Prescription drug fraud has many angles. When the high price of a drug puts it out of reach for certain patients, it can create an underground market. And some medications, like painkillers and anti-anxiety pills, are constantly sought after by people with substance-abuse issues.

___

Online:

HHS Inspector General: http://oig.hhs.gov/oei/reports/oei-02-11-00172.pdf

A recent Gallup survey found that 69% of Americans worry “frequently” or “occasionally” about having a credit card compromised by computer hackers. It’s not shocking. Consumers are becoming more educated on the topic, and financial institutions are beginning to do more to combat fraud, including introducing new types of credit cards. One example of the latter is chip-and-PIN technology, which everyone from consumers to the president has hailed for its ability to help prevent fraud. But is it the panacea that it’s been made out to be?

Let’s take a closer look at exactly what this technology entails. Unlike cards that use a magnetic stripe containing a user’s account information, chip cards implement an embedded microprocessor that contains the cardholder’s information in a way that renders it invisible even if hackers grab payment data while it is in transit between merchants and banks. The technology also generates unique information that is difficult, but not impossible, to fake. There is a cryptogram that allows banks to see if the data flow has been modified and a counter that registers each sequential time the card is used (sort of like the numbers on a check), so that a would-be fraudster would have to guess the exact historical and dynamic transaction number for the charge to be approved.

Already used in every other G20 country as a more secure payment method, chip-and-PIN cards can be found on the consumer side of a global payment system known as EMV (short for Europay, MasterCard and Visa). The system will be rolled out in the U.S. in 2015, and many of us in the banking and data-security industries believe that it will stanch the flow of money lost to hackers while simultaneously cutting down on credit and debit card fraud.

MasterCard, Visa and American Express have already begun sending out chip cards to their American cardholders. While the technology is expensive–the rollout of chip cards in the U.S. will cost an estimated $8 billion–it’s crucial to point out that this cost may balloon exponentially if the implementation of the new technology is done incorrectly, as a recent spate of fraudulent charges using chip-and-PIN-based technology shows.

This recent trend is one early sign that chip-and-PIN may not be the cure-all many consumers were hoping for, at least during the rollout phase. According to Brian Krebs, during the past week, “at least three U.S. financial institutions reported receiving tens of thousands of dollars in fraudulent credit and debit card transactions coming from Brazil and hitting card accounts stolen in recent retail heists, principally cards compromised as part of the breach at Home Depot.”

The curious part about this spate of credit and debit card fraud is that fraudsters used account information pilfered from old-school magnetic stripe cards skimmed in that attack and ran them as EMV purchases in what’s called a “replay” attack. “After capturing traffic from a real EMV-based chip card transaction, the thieves could insert stolen card data into the transaction stream, while modifying the merchant and acquirer bank account on the fly,” Krebs reported. It sounds confusing but the bottom line is money was stolen.

As with many scams, this particular evolution in the world of hacking for dollars cannot succeed without human error, which is probably the biggest liability in the coming chip card rollout. Krebs spoke with Avivah Litan, a fraud analyst with Gartner Inc. who said, “It appears with these attacks that the crooks aren’t breaking the EMV protocol, but taking advantage of bad implementations of it.” In a similar attack on Canadian banks a few months ago, one bank suffered a large loss because it was not checking the cryptogram and counter data, essential parts of the protocol.

As with all solutions in the realm of data-security, there is no such thing as a sure thing. Whether the hackers banked a false sense of security at the institutional level, knowing that the protocols might be deemed an unnecessary expense, or the recent attacks are merely part of the chip card learning curve, this latest technology is only as good as its implementation.

There are many ways to protect your smartphone: password, pin, pattern, and more recently, a fingerprint. While legally you can’t be compelled as part of an investigation to reveal any of the first three, a judge has ruled that you can be forced to relinquish your fingerprint to investigators seeking access to your device. The reason, says the judge, is … Continue reading