Android Pay to improve in-app experience

While digital wallet adoption may be slow, the major players are still pushing to make their particular offering the consumers’ choice. At the 2016 I/O developer conference, Google announced that it’s expanding the Android Pay APIs with the goal of making it faster and easier for people to check out online – both in-app and in browsers. That includes working with payment processors like Stripe and Braintree, so that merchants using these platforms only need to insert a few lines of code to integrate Android Pay.

 

Essentially, Google is offering merchants a toolkit to create a more consistent payment experience via perks like auto-filled checkout fields. Anyone who’s ever had to fill out their shipping and billing addresses on mobile should be cheering right now. Another cool update for users is that you can now use Android Pay at Bank of America ATMs (with more banks expected to follow shortly). Goodbye card dip, hello phone tap.

 

a girl with a pc

Australian watchdog blocks plans for mandatory 3D Secure

Consumers’ feelings about having to enter a password or security code to make a purchase can be…not so positive, to put it lightly. So, today’s announcement that the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) will deny a plan to make 3D Secure mandatory for e-commerce stores could come as a relief to Australian shoppers.

However, the ACC told news.com.au that implementing the Australian Payments Clearing Association’s (APCA) request would make online shopping “both more annoying and more expensive.” They also said they wanted to leave the choice about both whether to use anti-fraud technology – and exactly which anti-fraud technology to use – to each individual merchant.

Ransomware authors to world: “We are sorry!”

It’s rare for “ransomware” and “good news” to belong in the same sentence, but here you go. The developers behind TeslaCrypt ransomware – which encrypts a user’s files until they pay a Bitcoin ransom – have apparently had a change of heart about their activities. BleepingComputer reports that a researcher recently used TeslaCrypt’s chat function (yes, they offered customer support for cybercriminals) to ask for the master decryption key. And, much to everyone’s surprise, TeslaCrypt actually posted it. They also posted a simple apology: “we are sorry!”

Is this an end to ransomware? Of course not – criminals will just move over to the next version. But it does mean that the victims of TeslaCrypt can finally unlock their files, from family photos to half-finished novels. Happy Friday!

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