The Retail Force Awakens

The Retail Force Awakens
Number	2649
Broadcast Date	DECEMBER 18, 2015
Episode Length	42:13
Hosts	Tom Merritt
Guests	Patrick Norton, Len Peralta

Apple and Samsung get agreements to start mobile payments in China and Target is reportedly investigating their own. Patrick Norton and Tom Merritt discuss why mobile payments is such a mess.

Guest

• Patrick Norton
  • TekThing
  • Threatwire's Patreon
• Len Peralta
  • All DTNS drawings
  • This episode's drawing

Headlines

• Apple Pay, Samsung Pay to duel in China next year

Samsung Pay and Apple Pay have both reached agreements with China’s UnionPay along with support from partner banks. UnionPay is the only bank in China that conducts interbank payments. Samsung Pay and Apple Pay still need testing and certification before they can launch. Oh, and Reuters has three people familiar with the matter who say Target is in the early stages of building their own mobile payments system. 'Cause their breach getting Patrick his third CC in 12 months wasn't enough.

• Evernote Kills Off Skitch For Windows, Android And iOS — But Retains Mac App

Evernote is ending distribution, updates and support for several standalone apps including Skitch for Windows, iOS and Android (the Mac version will stick around), the Evernote Clearly reading extension and the Evernote Pebble app. The company said features from the apps are integrated into Evernote’s main app and Pebble users can use the Powernoter app. The apps will not be available after Jan. 22.

• Juniper Patches Firewall Backdoor Risk

Networking vendor Juniper announced Thursday it had discovered unauthorized code in its ScreenOS that “could allow a knowledgable attacker who can monitor VPN traffic to decrypt the traffic.” Juniper has released a patch that fixes that backdoor and an SSH bug. The issues do not affect newer SRX firewalls running the Junos OS. Eweek points out Juniper was named as making devices that could be infiltrated by the US NSA in a December 2013 story in Der Spiegel covering documents leaked by Edward Snowden.

• Powerful VLC media player lands on Chromebooks

VLC is now available for Chrome OS. VideoLAN’s president Jean-Baptiste Kempf wrote that the VLC team ported the Android version of VLC using App Runtime for Chrome letting them reuse 95% of the code instead of re-writing the app in JavaScript which would have taken more time. You can get VLC for Chrome OS on the Chrome Web Store.

Submitted by TVsTravis

• Comcast, AT&T, and T-Mobile must explain data cap exemptions to FCC

Ars Technica reports the US FCC has asked Comcast, AT&T and T-Mobile USA to answer questions about their programs that exempt certain types of data from counting against customer limits. Relevant technical and business personnel are asked to be made available for discussions by January 15. AT&T allows advertisers to pay for data not to count, T-Mobile exempts video and audio services at no charge and Comcast exempts its own Stream TV service.

Submitted by tm204

• Nielsen: Facebook Remains The Top App Of 2015, But Messenger Was The Fastest-Growing

Facebook holds the title for Top smartphone app in the US according a new Nielsen report. Facebook is estimated to have 126 million users per month with YouTube at number 2 with 97 million. Facebook messenger came in at number 3 with 96.4 million users. A 31% increase over 2014. Google search, Google Play, Google Maps and Gmail followed in that order. Apple Music landed at number 9 with 54.5 million users. Tech Crunch writes the ranking was based on the averaged number unique users based on a monthly survey of 30,000+ US mobile subscribers aged 13 and up.

• Congress passes controversial cybersecurity bill attached to omnibus budget

Friday morning the US Congress passed its omnibus budget bill within which was the entire text of the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act of 2015, without any previously added privacy protections. If signed by the President, the law would allow companies to share data with government agencies without liability if needed to combat a cybersecurity threat. It also eases restrictions on the government sharing information among its own agencies for the same purpose.

• Here's Why BlackBerry Saw Its First Revenue Gain In 9 Quarters

BlackBerry reported its first revenue rise in 9 quarters at $548 million up 12% over the previous quarter. It’s still a drop over last year’s $793 million. The company lost 3 cents a share beating expectations of a loss of 14 cents a share. Software reevnue rose from $78 million last quarter to $154 million and 70% of that is recurring.

• Amazon in talks to lease Boeing jets to launch its own air-cargo business

The Seattle Times reports that unnamed cargo-industry executives say Amazon has been inquiring about the possibility of leasing around 20 Boeing 767 jets. The hope would be to put them in operation by the end of January.

Discussion

• Apple Pay, Samsung Pay to duel in China next year
• Exclusive: Target in initial development of own mobile wallet - sources
• Walmart Introduces Walmart Pay
• Android Pay Now Available for In-App Purchases
• How Apple Pay and Google Wallet actually work

Pick of the Day

• Seene: Everyone can capture reality in 3D

Have you heard of an app called Seene? It's super neat. Basically, kind of like a 3D Instagram... you snap and pan horizontally for about a second and it works out the parallax.

Not only are they embeddable but it lets you export it as an animated gif or mp4 too. It's free on iOS and Android app stores. You can see their popular posts here http://seene.co/a/popular/ or my user gallery http://seene.co/u/alan_f/ to get an idea of what it's like. (Uses WebGL to present it on the browser I think.)

Sadly their fancy 3D scanning app demoed in the main site is not public, only their instagram'ish one, but it's still cool.

Submitted by Alan

Links

• This episode on dailytechnewsshow.com
• Support DTNS on Patreon
• DTNS subreddit

Preceded by: "WhatsApp Judge?"

The Retail Force Awakens

Followed by: "Legally Binding Mug"