Kmart’s registers were hacked, credit and debit card numbers at risk

Get ready to call your credit card provider again – another major US retailer has reported that its payment system has been compromised. Kmart’s IT team quietly announced that malware has been found in its stores’ register systems, noting that both debit and credit card numbers have been stolen. The breach seems to have occurred in early September, meaning any purchase made at the chain in the last month and a half is potentially at risk. Security experts say attackers have enough information to possibly duplicate payment cards, but not necessarily steal your identity: personal information, pin numbers, addresses and social security data have not been compromised. Still, it’s a big enough breach that Kmart shoppers will want to call their financial providers. Ugh. Happy Friday news dump, everyone.

[Image credit: Shutterstock]

Filed under: Misc

Comments

Source: Kmart, Krebson Security

.CPlase_panel display:none;

Engadget Daily: Test-driving the Tesla D, alleged Snapchat breach and more!

Wish you could take Tesla’s new EV for a spin? Why not live vicariously through us — our own Nicole Lee rode shotgun, and yeah, she enjoyed it. That’s not all we have on deck for this weekend, though. Read on for our news highlights from the past 24 hours.

Filed under: Misc

Comments

.CPlase_panel display:none;

Square Order 2.0 update brings arrival prediction, updated interface, and more

From the makers of the popular mobile credit card reader comes an app that allows users to order/pay for food at their favorite restaurants on the go. Square Order has received a pretty decent update recently, making it even more convenient.

Before we begin, if you aren’t yet familiar with Square Order, it’s probably because it isn’t offered in your area. Only users in New York City and San Francisco can take advantage of this awesome ordering app. That being said, let’s take a look at some of the changes.

• Arrival prediction – Instead of ordering food and rushing to get to the restaurant to pick it up, users can now place orders 24 hours a day, and show up whenever they please. The restaurant will get a notification when the user is close by, and they can begin making the food right away. Also, upon leaving the shop, the customer will automatically be charged without having to lift a finger… very cool.
• Saved preferences – The app will begin to pick up on your favorite order, so you can place the order more easily. Users can actually order one of their favorite products in as little as two taps.
• UI enhancements – The new user interface is a bit more flat, simple, and modern. Check it out for yourself using the Play Store link below!

Square Order really makes me want to live in San Francisco or New York City.

The post Square Order 2.0 update brings arrival prediction, updated interface, and more appeared first on AndroidGuys.

.CPlase_panel display:none;

Research confirms minorities earn significantly less in skilled tech jobs

There’s no denying that wage inequality is a terrible thing, and it’s not just limited to blue-collar trades. The tech industry’s so-called high-skilled positions — like programmers and developers — pay minorities much less than their Caucasian colleagues. Sure, the issue is certainly nothing new, but a recent USA Today report details the finer points, with figures from the American Institute for Economic Research. According to that latter outfit’s findings, on average Hispanic males earn $16,353 less than white males per year, with Asian males making $8,146 less and black males netting $3,656 less, respectively, in those tech jobs. Of course, women face similar issues in terms of salary, on top of being massively outnumbered when it comes to positions in Silicon Valley. In fact, females in each ethnicity group researched earned less than their male counterparts. While companies are looking to combat the gender gap with mentor programs and more, the inconsistency in earnings is also a huge issue that needs to be tackled for both men and women across a range of ethnicities.

A big reason for the difference in salaries? Unconscious bias. “At every point in the hiring process hidden bias trickles in,” Freada Kapor Klein, co-chair of the Kapor Center for Social Impact, told USA Today. “A drop at the stage of reviewing names on résumés, a few more drops at the stage of different gender and race styles of presentation during interviews and a steadier stream when it comes to who is expected to negotiate their salary and who isn’t.”

The issue of unconscious bias is a key reason for the lack of diversity in the workplace, according to Google. In fact, the Mountain View company has already started to tackle the issue with internal workshops with the goal of making its employees “more aware.” Other companies say they’re examining the issues as well. Twitter’s VP of diversity and inclusion, Janet Van Huysse, explained that the social network “regularly” sifts through its metrics to determine where the issues lie, including the areas of recruiting, hiring and promotions. The efforts to attract more women to tech jobs won’t fix the issue of Silicon Valley being male-dominated — there has to be a change in mindset. And while companies strive to be more diverse, they’ll have to make sure the folks they hire to achieve that goal are compensated fairly, too.

Filed under: Misc

Comments

Source: USA Today

.CPlase_panel display:none;

Dev comedy jam: Cultivated Wit’s Hack Day chases laughs, not dollars

There aren’t too many hackathons where finalists include an app to improve cunnilingus, a service for high-fives from strangers and a wearable Furby. It’s also pretty rare for a hackathon to take top billing at a theater in San Francisco, draw a crowd of over 300 people and characterize itself as a comedy show.

Comedy? At a hackathon? You’ve got to be joking.

But that’s exactly what happened on the evening of September 28th at the fifth iteration of Cultivated Wit’s Comedy Hack Day. Held at the Brava, a small independent theater in the city’s Mission District, eight teams of developers took the stage to present their creations to a rapt audience and a panel of judges. The goal was not to get VC funding, build a sustainable business or sell out to Google. The goal was to make people laugh. And they did.

The idea came about a couple years ago when Craig Cannon, a former design editor for The Onion, decided to bring his two awkward friend groups together: comedians and developers. “I’d attended hackathons before and noticed that teams who presented in a funny way often did quite well,” he said. “I thought it’d be fun to plan a weekend around making funny apps and hoped that the communities would get along.”

So he and a few friends set up the first Comedy Hack Day in 2012 in New York City. Somehow, they cobbled together $7,000 in sponsorship money and got around 60 participants. It was “very bootleg,” said Baratunde Thurston, a fellow editor from The Onion. Thurston eventually became one of the founding members of Cultivated Wit, a creative consulting company that was formed around “colliding comedy, design and technology.” Comedy Hack Day was essentially Cultivated Wit’s first project.

Though the first Comedy Hack Day was “a total shit show” according to Cannon, it was also a validation. “These are two cultures that are based on working with each other, like riffing,” said Cannon. “Comedians joke back and forth, while developers talk to each other about building stuff.” Through the next three Comedy Hack Days — two more in 2013 and another earlier this year — they learned a few tricks, like hiring real event planners and implementing a vetting process to make sure the finalists were actually funny.

For the fifth Comedy Hack Day, the process started two days prior at a coworking space in San Francisco’s South of Market neighborhood. After sponsors showed off their APIs, around 70 participants queued up to pitch their ideas and form teams around them. Some of the earliest included a “Shazam for cars” to figure out what a vehicle’s sounds might mean and a site that translates your angry rants into something more passive-aggressive. They stayed up all night Friday and through Saturday to work on their projects. Then, Cannon and his team sat through the demos and selected projects to make it to Sunday’s show. From there, the finalists prepped for the last day by finessing their projects, but more importantly, sharpening their presentation skills, which Cannon said is undervalued in the tech industry.

“We coach the finalists on Saturday night to help them prep for Sunday,” he said. “Ultimately the demos on Sunday are a show.”

And what a show. It was packed with demos of apps and sites that would never pass at a normal hackathon. There was an alarm clock app that wakes you through blackmail (like texting your ex, for example), a Chrome plugin that populates your Amazon search history with questionable products to scare off account squatters, a service that lets someone else take the fall for your mistakes and a Twitter leaderboard for pun-makers (which our own Conrad Muan, a front-end developer, helped build). Meanwhile, the app “I’m a Huge Fan” was like a CliffsNotes for cocktail party conversations.

Comedy Hack Day wasn’t just a group of people showing off PowerPoint slides, either. During a demo for a “Lyft for high-fives” — aptly titled High Fyves — a man barreled down from the theater exit, rolled onto the stage and gave the presenter a monster of a high-five after she requested it on the app. The cunnilingus skills site, dubbed Duolingus, was also very popular with the crowd. Originally the idea of Nicole Calasich, a local comedian, Duolingus offers a series of tests that evaluates your rhythm and precision to supposedly improve your oral sex skills. Her fellow presenter went through a demo called, ahem, “Finger Jazz,” where he tried to accurately click on a spot on the screen. At the end, you get a score that you could potentially post on your dating profile. “We’re addressing the wider pool of online dating candidates and bridging the egregious pleasure gap,” Calasich said to the giggling audience.

The winner of the fifth Comedy Hack Day, though, was a wearable Furby. The team called itself Awwcog and its API was dubbed “the Wearable Augmented Cognition Open Furby platform” or WACOF for short (pun intended). Indeed, the team actually built an open Furby Python API for the electronic toy. “It can listen to particular keywords,” said Conor Doherty, one of the team members. “You can send messages to the Furby using this audio protocol.” In essence, they transformed an ordinary Furby into sort of a weird Furby-Siri hybrid that you can strap to your shoulder. On stage, they demonstrated a few functions for commands, including looking up restaurant recommendations on Yelp and giving directions on how to get to Starbucks. It even showed a tiny bit of sass by suggesting Philz, a local coffee shop franchise, as an alternative.

“Comedians are often blown away by this thing,” said Thurston, because not only do they get to joke around, but they also get to build something. Developers, on the other hand, get to use their talents for something expressive and creative, which Thurston said could be a breath of fresh air if they’re in a well-paying job with little meaning.

“It’s unlike any other hackathon that most of these people have ever been to,” said Thurston. “It’s certainly unlike any other comedy show or improv troupe that these people have been a part of. So that mix, and the relationships that come out of it, that’s ultimately what this is about.”

“It’s also about the money,” joked Thurston, poking fun at startup culture. “It’s definitely also about the money.”

[Original image credit: Craig Cannon]

Filed under: Misc

Comments

.CPlase_panel display:none;

In vitro cookbook helps you decide if you’re into lab-grown meat

There’s no denying that as the world’s population continues to grow, we’ll need to examine the ways we keep the masses fed. Meat for 9 billion people doesn’t seem within the realm of possibility, so Next Nature is looking into sustainable ways to get that protein fix — including lab-grown proteins. To help you decide whether or not you’d be down to eat in vitro foods on the regular, the outfit has created a cookbook full of possibilities. The In Vitro Meat Cookbook serves up 45 lab-grown recipes that range from the Dodo Nuggets pictured above to Magic Meatballs and See-Through Sashimi. Of course, these aren’t real concoctions just yet, but rather food for thought about our culinary future. While the options may look (and sound) kind of gross on the surface, the book itself is quite beautiful and well-designed. For the curious, a copy can be pre-ordered for €24.00 ($30 converted) right here.

Filed under: Household, Science

Comments

Via: Slate

Source: Next Nature (1), (2)

.CPlase_panel display:none;