Hasta La Gadget!

It does not matter where you are right now, but basically all companies should always do their utmost best to make sure that they do not end up as a victim of a credit card data breach. I suppose one can chalk up the California Department of Motor Vehicles as the latest victim in an ever growing list, where this wide-ranging security breach could have affected up to thousands of citizens, at least according to some sources. It was earlier in the week that MasterCard issued an alert that noted that credit cards which were used online in transactions that had California’s DMV could have resulted in the theft of data and personal information, where among them included credit card numbers, expiration dates, and three-digit security codes.

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California Department Of Motor Vehicles Suffers Credit Card Data Breach original content from Ubergizmo.

An Illinois man named Howard Leventhal persuaded a company to help finance “Heltheo’s McCoy Home Health Tablet”. Yes it sounds as bad as it is. This is a fake health device that’s based loosely on the medical Tricorder that McCoy used on Star Trek. Leventhal was arrested for fraud on Oct. 22, not surprisingly he did not have the tech to beam himself out of dodge.

Last year, Leventhal told executives at Paragon Financial Group, Inc. that Health Canada was backing his “home health tablet” and that it was based on the Star Trek tricorder. The company gave him $800,000 in funding. Apparently no one bothered to check this guy or his story out. So then Leventhal forged contracts between his fake company Neovision USA and the Canadian government to secure even more funding. He even forged Deputy Health Minister Glenda Yeates’ signature. The contract was made to look like it promised him $8.2 million in funding directly from Canadian government.

This guy had big brass cojones, I’ll give him that. However, this whole thing was very stupid. He had to know he would get caught. And he did. After he tried to get $2.5 million more in funding, he gave the fake contracts to an undercover agent. Right now, he is out on a $100,000 bond, with a hearing on Oct.30. What a maroon. Seriously, they need to study this guy and see what makes him tick. Maybe they can learn some things and head off this sort of thing in the future.

On the other hand, I suppose the investors deserve what they got if they were that bad at their due diligence. All they had to do was investigate his story in the first place before coughing up their dough.

[via Gizmodo via Nerd Approved]

PayPal employees at the company’s UK headquarters are tired of having to use traditional payment methods when buying their rocket and crayfish sarnies. It’s almost an affront, in fact, so they’re pushing local retailers in Richmond Upon Thames to trial an updated, entirely PayPal-based system that uses photo authentication to make things faster. If you want to try it, go to the “Local” section of your PayPal app (on iOS, Android or WP), which should show nearby participating shops, and simply select the one you’re visiting — this will then cause your name and profile picture to come up on the seller’s app so they can verify you’re the account holder and process the transaction. Having given it a quick armchair run-through, the system looks similar to what PayPal already offers in some Australian stores, and it’s apparently PIN-free at the point of purchase — although you’ll obviously have had to authenticate your app when you installed it, as well as have uploaded a reasonably realistic (and preferably static) profile picture.

Filed under: Cellphones, Misc, Tablets, Internet, Software, Mobile

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Source: Sky News

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