News roundup: 3 stories that caught our eye

Are effective fraud prevention solutions making credit card data less valuable to fraudsters?

We all know that credit card information can be priced shockingly cheap on the black market. But how cheap? A mere $0.22 for a bundle of credit card credentials, according to information compiled by security firm Trend Micro for an article on CNBC.

One of the reasons credit card details aren’t worth that much is that fraud detection technology has simply gotten better. Both financial institutions and merchants are leveraging big data technologies that predict fraud and make it harder for criminals to use the details they steal.

Meanwhile, Uber account information can command as much as $3.78 on the black market – a higher price than even PII (like social security numbers), which was going for $1.00-$3.30. A lot of this fraud is what’s known as “phantom rides,” where someone creates a fake profile as a driver and then falsifies rides using the stolen Uber account info.

Stolen Facebook account info is going for $3.02, Google Voice for $0.97, and Netflix for $0.76, according to Trend Micro data.

Huge breakthrough for machine learning and AI

We may be used to machines beating humans at games by now. After all, it was nearly two decades ago that IBM’s Deep Blue beat Gary Kasparov at chess. But the ecstatic reaction of the AI community to the news that a champion Go player was beat by an AI system from Google called AlphaGo makes it clear that this is a really big deal.

According to the Google Research Blog, “The most significant aspect of all this for us is that AlphaGo isn’t just an ‘expert system’ built with hand-crafted rules, but instead uses general machine learning techniques to allow it to improve itself, just by watching and playing games.”

More competitors for Apple Pay and other digital wallets

Another day, another way to pay. This time, Venmo – an app for peer-to-peer payments – is looking to partner with apps to allow users to pay each other within the apps.

At first, this option will just be available to a segment of iOS users, and can only be used within food delivery app Munchery and ticketing app Gametime. The idea is to make it even easier for Millennials – Venmo’s target audience – to do things like split the cost of a pizza or tickets to a hockey game.

Sure, two apps seems like a tiny toe in the water at this point. But since Venmo’s owned by payments giant PayPal, it still has some serious clout behind it.