Big changes could be afoot in the way Americans pay for stuff. Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, and Wells Fargo are introducing a new service that will let customers easily transfer money from their checking account to someone else’s, the Wall Street Journal reports. The banks are hoping the service competes with eBay’s popular PayPal service, which now handles a lot of the transactions people used to use checks for. The payments could even be made on the go from a smart phone.
Business Week today reported that Google was considering building a payment and advertising service that would let you use your cell phones just as a credit card. Consumers will be able to pay for everyday goods and groceries by simply tapping or waving their mobile phones against a register at checkout.
Infact the service might be launched this year itself. The whole technology is based on the near-field communications (NFC) which can beam and receive information wirelessly from about 4 inches away. Google is not the first to be wanting to work on this technology and introduce it as a product. Many companies are working on tapping into this $1.13 trillion global mobile-payment market. Last November, Verizon, At&T and T-Mobile USA formed a venture called Isis to offer NFC based services in 2012.
Visa has already taken a note of this and is launching mobile payments in mid-2011. Google will also be competing against online payment giant Paypal which is launching its commercial NFC service in the second half of 2011. The Paypal NFC system would also have a peer-to-peer option where a restaurant bill can be split or shared between two people.
NFC is powerful. A single NFC chip on a smartphone can hold a consumer’s financial account information, gift cards, store loyalty cards, and coupon subscriptions. Google’s NFC service will also allow users to buy stuff online, for instance, by scanning a movie poster, users can read reviews and use Google service to buy tickets.
All in all, this looks like an exciting service and Google is rumored to launch this this year. It will be interesting to see the decline of Visa and MasterCard monopoly on the credit card market.
During a December 16 raid, agents seized a server at Tailor Made Services, a Dallas-based co-location, or server-hosting, facility, and copied two of its hard drives, according to The Smoking Gun Web site, which said it has obtained the FBI affidavit in support of a search warrant for the seizure.
It’s not clear what was found on the drives, The Smoking Gun reported, saying that search warrant records showed agents were authorized to seize material related to the attacks or to other illegal activities involving the groups Anonymous or 4chan.
Anonymous has claimed responsibility for deluging the Web sites of PayPal and others with data in order to bring the sites down. The attacks, the group says, were a response to actions taken by the site holders against WikiLeaks, after WikiLeaks publicly released a slew of confidential U.S. diplomatic cables. PayPal, MasterCard, and Visa all decided to prevent WikiLeaks from collecting donations via their financial networks. 4Chan has said it was behind an attack to shut down the sites for Swiss bank PostFinance and lawyers in Sweden prosecuting sex allegations against WikiLeaks front man Julian Assange. http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-20026908-38.html#ixzz19qN3SBhP
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VANCOUVER — A global network accused of Internet attacks against perceived WikiLeaks opponents has a link to British Columbia.
One of the eight Internet protocol addresses — the unique identifiers assigned to computers — hosting a website used to dispense instructions on how to electronically attack the perceived opponents has been traced back to FranTech Solutions, based in the Victoria area, according to five pages of an FBI affidavit obtained by the Smoking Gun website.
Following WikiLeaks’ highly publicized release of diplomatic cables in November, U.S. companies including PayPal, Visa and MasterCard decided to suspend the whistle-blowing website’s accounts, citing the ongoing investigation against the organization.
In response, groups of WikiLeaks avengers — collectively going under the name “Anonymous” — organized distributed denial of service attacks against the companies.
DDoS attacks typically involve bombarding a server with external requests, therefore overwhelming it and making it unable to respond to legitimate requests.
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