MasterCard’s Gonna Let You Pay With Your Face

Do you like your face? Then you’re going to love MasterCard’s new ID Check security system. The experimental feature uses your camera’s front-facing camera and facial recognition technology so that you can pay with your face. MasterCard thinks millenials will love it.

The biometric identification system sounds kind of silly, but it’s definitely more secure than signing a slip of paper. MasterCard’s demo makes it look really easy, too. When paying for something in the store or online, you can choose whether to verify your identity with a fingerprint or an image of your face. If you choose face, you just hold up your phone and blink. (This is so thieves can’t use a picture of you to dupe the system.) That’s it!

“The new generation, which is into selfies… I think they’ll find it cool,” MasterCard security maestro Ajay Bhalla told CNN. “They’ll embrace it.”

So there’s the ugh. It seems glaringly obvious that MasterCard is trying to cash in on a new generation’s loathesome obsession with selfies for a silly marketing stunt. However, this pay-with-your-face technology has been kicking around for a few years, and biometric security is certainly a better path forward than crackable passwords. The fact that such a massive company is taking the idea seriously makes good sense. MasterCard will pilot the new facial recognition system with 500 cardholders but says it will inevitably offer it to everyone. The payments giant is even working on pay-with-your-voice technology, just like Google.

Just imagine the bright future when you can pay with any body part. You’ll literally be made of money.

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Ultrasonic Fingerprint Sensor For Smartphone Security

Fingerprint sensors are a nifty way to unlock smartphones. Unfortunately, they can also be tricked with a forged print, as was shown with the iPhone 5s and iPhone 6. But a new technology developed in California could change that.

A team led by David Horsley, professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at the University of California, Davis, has developed a new ultra-safe, ultrasonic sensor.
"Our ultrasonic fingerprint sensors have the ability to measure a three-dimensional, volumetric image of the finger surface and the tissues beneath the surface – making fingerprint sensors more robust and secure," says Horsley. 

The sensor uses similar technology to medical ultrasound imagers. Transducers on the tiny sensor’s surface send out ultrasound pulses, which bounce off the fingerprint’s ridges and valleys before returning to the transducers. Using ultrasound means that the sensor can penetrate a thin layer of tissue near the finger’s surface, making the technology much more difficult to trick.

The chip itself is made from two wafers bonded together: a ‘complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor’ (CMOS) wafer and a microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) wafer. The CMOS wafer contains the circuitry for processing the signals, while the MEMS wafer contains the transducers.

Besides the security advantages, the researchers say that these chips will be extremely cheap to make.

“We were able to use low-cost, high-volume manufacturing processes that produce hundreds of millions of MEMS sensors for consumer electronics each year,” says Horsley.

So look out for these sensors on a smartphone near you…

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Intel Compute Stick now available with Ubuntu price $110

Computer software company Canonical has announced that the Intel Compute Stick will now come in Ubuntu version and will be available globally priced at around $110.
It will go on sale next week.
The Intel Compute Stick with Ubuntu version will be priced at around USD 110, via online and brick-and-mortar stockists.
The Intel Compute Stick is an HDMI dongle that the users can plug into a TV or monitor to get a PC-like experience.
The stick will have 64-bit version of Ubuntu 14.04 LTS pre-installed and an Intel Atom 1.3Ghz quad-core processor besides 1 GB RAM and 8 GB of on-board storage. There is also a microSD slot for additional storage.
The Ubuntu version will be available from retailers such as Amazon, Best Buy and Newegg.com, but Canonical did not reveal the exact date when they would go on sale.

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Apple Pay Reportedly Coming to the UK on July 14th

Apple appears to be planning to enable its Apple Pay iPhone mobile payments service in the United Kingdom on July 14th, according to sources at multiple retailers. Apple has informed some Apple Retail employees in the U.K. that Apple Pay support will go live on that Tuesday, while an internal memos for supermarket Waitrose plus an additional retail partner indicate the same date…Apple will also begin training its U.K staff on supporting Apple Pay on July 12th. Apple has begun enabling its mobile point of sale systems in England-based stores to take NFC payments and has been preparing materials to promote the Apple Pay launch in stores. It is plausible that different stores will have different launch dates, but the presence of the same, at least tentative, date makes July 14th a very possible widespread start date.

Announced for July at the June Worldwide Developers Conference, the U.K.’s Apple Pay launch will mark Apple’s first expansion of the service outside of the United States. Like in the U.S., a PIN won’t be required for usage, but the launch will include a £20 cap per transaction, as also noted on the above memo sent to us and posted across the web. However, a source tells us that U.K. systems will be updated in the fall to process higher values. Apple is also currently working on bringing the service to Canada later this year in addition to China and South Korea in the future.

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Xiaomi Mi 5 to Come with 4GB RAM

Xiaomi, the Chinese handset maker, will incorporate a 4 GB RAM in its next release - the Mi5, sources said on Saturday.

Website Mobipicker quoted sources saying that the latest handset release by the Chinese firm is codenamed Libra, adding the device would come with 4 GB of RAM and the Snapdragon 820 chipset.

The phone will come with either 16 or a 64 GB internal storage, a 5.3 inch display with a resolution of 1440 x 2560 pixels and a 3,030 mAh battery.

According to the site, the Mi5 will carry a 16-megapixel flip side camera and a 6-megapixel front snapper for selfie lovers. The handset will run Android 5.1.1 out of the box and will come with fingerprint scanner.
The exact date of release is not known but may be release November 2015.

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Indian-Origin Researcher Use Wi-Fi Signals to Power Camera without Battery

Washington Researchers have demonstrated that Wi-Fi signals can be used to broadcast power to remote devices , including one of Indian-origin, have used Wi-Fi signals to power a battery-free camera five metres away, an advance that brings the idea of Internet of things closer to reality.

Internet of things is the concept that almost every object could be fitted with a chip that broadcasts data such as its location or whether some other parameter such as temperature or pressure is dangerously high or low. However, for the Internet of things to become a reality engineers have to solve one potential problem: how to power these numerous tiny machines.

Vamsi Talla and colleagues at the University of Washington in Seattle may have found a solution.

The researchers have demonstrated that Wi-Fi signals can be used to broadcast power to remote devices. They call their new approach power over Wi-Fi or PoWi-Fi. Wi-Fi radio broadcasts are a form of energy that an antenna can pick up. Wi-Fi receivers have been designed to harvest the information that these broadcasts carry.

Talla and colleagues pointed out that there is no reason why the energy should not be harvested as well. The team’s approach is to simply connect an antenna to a temperature sensor, place it close to a Wi-Fi router and measure the resulting voltages in the device and for how long it can operate on this remote power source alone.

Wi-Fi broadcasts are not continuous. Routers tend to broadcast on a single channel in bursts. This provides enough power for the sensor but as soon as the broadcast stops, the voltages drop.

Talla and colleagues programmed the router to broadcast noise when it is not broadcasting information and employ adjacent Wi-Fi channels to carry it so that it does not interfere with data rates, ‘MIT Technology Review’ reported.

The researchers used three Atheros AR9580 chipsets, standard electronics for Wi-Fi routers, and programmed these devices to broadcast in a way that can provide continuous power to an energy harvesting sensor.

Then they measured the resulting voltages in their temperature sensor and determined how long it can work at various distances from the modified router. They found that the temperature sensor can operate at distances of up around six metres from the router and by adding a rechargeable battery to the mix, it can be increased to about nine metres.

They also connected a camera to their antenna. To store energy, they attached a low leakage capacitor to the camera. In the subsequent tests, the camera performed remarkably well.

“The battery-free camera can operate up to [about five metres] from the router, with an image capture every 35 minutes,” researchers said.

The router could even power the camera through a brick wall, demonstrating that it would be possible to attach the device outside while keeping the power supply inside.

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