Author: Megan Geuss

Earlier this week, a February blog post by mobile payments consultant Cherian Abraham captured the attention of the media and set off a flurry of articles about rampant fraud on Apple Pay. But despite headlines declaring that Apple Pay sees 60 times more fraud than magnetic stripe credit cards, the details are a bit more nuanced. It turns out that Apple Pay as a platform appears quite secure—it hasn’t yet seen any man-in-the-middle or other hacking attacks (that we know of) that could result in the loss of thousands of credit card numbers, like the Target breach did. But Apple Pay as a service, offered to customers in conjunction with bank issuers, might be struggling to keep up with the persistence of identity thieves.

Abraham, who works as an adviser to SimplyTapp, a company that builds Host Card Emulation technology for devices using Android, says identity thieves are buying iPhones with stolen credit card information and then loading them with that stolen credit card information. Because the fraudster’s iPhone is so new, Abraham argues, there’s very little detail that Apple can send to the banks to help them verify who the user is and if that card information is fraudulent.

Abraham writes (emphasis his):

On Monday, the US Federal Trade Commission announced that it reached settlements with two companies that marketed apps claiming the ability to diagnose melanoma. Two marketers of MelApp and Mole Detective were charged with “deceptively claiming their mobile apps could detect symptoms of melanoma, even in its early stages,” the FTC wrote in a press release. Two additional marketers of Mole Detective did not settle, and the FTC is still pursuing charges against them.

These melanoma apps and others like them work by asking the user to take a picture of the problematic skin area and then analyzing the picture to see if the risk for melanoma is low, medium, or high. “The FTC alleged that the marketers deceptively claimed the apps accurately analyzed melanoma risk and could assess such risk in early stages,” the FTC wrote.

Applications such as these could pose a serious risk to consumers. In 2013, Ars wrote about a study of the results of these kinds of apps, published in JAMA Dermatology, which found that the four apps that the researchers tested at the time misdiagnosed 30 percent of malignant melanoma as being benign. That kind of result could give someone an excuse to put off a visit to their doctor until it’s too late.

In the wake of last week’s Lenovo’s Superfish debacle, at least one person has filed a lawsuit against the computer manufacturer and its notorious software partner, and one class-action investigation has begun.

San Diego blogger Jessica Bennett filed a lawsuit in federal court last week, charging Lenovo and Superfish with violating state and federal wiretap laws, trespassing on personal property, and violating California’s unfair competition law. In addition to this, a Pennsylvania law firm put out a press release on Friday that asked Lenovo customers to participate in a class action lawsuit investigation regarding the presence of Superfish on their computers.

Lenovo found itself in hot water last week when researchers discovered that pre-installed adware from a company called Superfish was making users vulnerable to man-in-the-middle attacks. The adware installed self-signed root HTTPS certificates that made it easy for Superfish (as well as low-skilled hackers) to intercept users’ encrypted Web traffic.

This week, the tech world will be watching a jury trial between reddit’s interim CEO Ellen Pao and her former employer, the illustrious venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield Byers (KPCB). Back in 2012, Ellen Pao, then a junior partner at KPCB, filed a lawsuit (PDF) against the firm, alleging systematic gender discrimination against her and other female staff.

It’s surprising that Pao vs. Kleiner Perkins wasn’t settled long ago. Parties often avoid high-profile trials because they can damage company and personal reputations alike, sometimes irreparably. For KPCB, involvement in the case could tarnish its stellar reputation as the firm that helped build Amazon, Netscape, Genentech, and Google. For Pao, a jury trial will mean putting the details of her private life under a microscope for the world to see. Of course, the two parties could settle at the last minute, but recent reports suggest that the fighting has become so bitter that a last-minute accord seems unlikely.

In a broader sense, this means that lawyers in a San Francisco courtroom will spend the next month fleshing out what could become the most notorious data point in the long-standing contention that overt and not-so-overt discrimination hobbles women in tech and finance. It’s no secret that venture capital firms are overwhelmingly male-dominated and that tech firms often exhibit behavior that would be unwelcome in all but the worst fraternities. In her complaint against Kleiner, Pao suggests that she has evidence to prove a litany of awkward sexual overtures made toward her by colleagues, as well as proof of a deafening silence when she brought the issues up to management. KPCB, for its part, says it champions women (PDF) and that Pao created her own drama wherever she went. Whatever the jury decides, the trial with undoubtedly cast light on a complex and difficult issue.

Since 2011, AdBlock Plus, a popular browser plugin that blocks online ads, has kept a “whitelist” of websites that are allowed to serve ads despite the presence of the AdBlock Plus plugin. In an e-mail to Ars, AdBlock Plus Communications Manager Ben Williams wrote that currently, the browser extension has granted a pass to “over 300 sites/entities” out of “over 1,500 applicants” to the company’s whitelist. That’s up from October 2013, when AdBlock Plus allowed the ads of 78 sites or entities out of 777 applicants.

To be placed on AdBlock Plus’ whitelist, advertisements must be transparent about being ads, must be appropriate to the site they’re being served on, and must not distort or disrupt the page content, among other criteria. AdBlock Plus goes into more detail about the whitelisting process here.

But one important facet of the business plan is that if a company is big enough, AdBlock Plus’ parent company, German start-up Eyeo, asks for a fee in addition to adhering to the “Acceptable Ads” criteria before it allows a company to be whitelisted.