This year I set out with a goal of attempting to organize things in my life and at the top of that list was taking care of bills more appropriately. I switched everything over to online billing and thought the email reminders of when my bills were due might actually help but given the amount of email I get in the run of the day, they just ended up getting lost and forgotten about, especially utility bills such as power and water considering they only get sent out every two months where I live.

Not wanting to give up, I decided to look for some BlackBerry apps to help me out and recently came across Screaming Energy, which dubs itself as a Energy Bill Management Tool in Blackberry World. The app is fairly new, having only been released back in February, so I’ve yet to utilize it fully but the set up of it all was enough to impress me so it only seems fitting that I share it here on CrackBerry.

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Microsoft is launching a contest for members of its Windows Insider program that will give 10 of them a chance to visit the company’s headquarters in Redmond, Washington.

After 11 hours, the outage affecting several of Apple’s online services, including the iTunes Store and iOS and Mac App Stores, has ended.

The service disruption began just before 5 a.m. EDT Wednesday morning, and customers found themselves unable to purchase or download items from iTunes, the App Store, or the iBooks Store. The outage also disrupted iCloud sign in and Mail, though most iCloud services remained unaffected.

Apple apologized for the outage, saying that it was due to a DNS issue. Apple’s system status page now reads all-clear, with the issues apparently resolved a little after 4 p.m. EDT.

Source: Apple

Could you use an easier way of selecting colors to use in upcoming design projects? Download Skala Color 2.0 for the Mac. It’s free.

Skala Color 2.0 is the latest Mac software offering from Bjango, makers of iStat Menus. Among the changes in this release is improved support for OS X Yosemite.

Skala Color is a compact and feature-rich OS X color picker that works with a huge variety of formats, covering everything you’re likely to need for web, iOS, Android, and OS X development — Hex, CSS RGBA, CSS HSLA, UIColor, NSColor and more.

Skala Color automatically recognises colors copied to the clipboard, presenting them as a swatch that can be applied with a single click.

The new release sports a darker interface, fixes bugs and more.

• Free – Download now

After quite the delay, Nokia Lumia 1520 owners in Hong Kong are finally getting their first taste of the Lumia Denim software update.

The update was supposed to hit unlocked Lumia 1520 devices in Hong Kong last week, but was held up over deployment issues.

Here at Windows Central, we want to be your number one source for all news pertaining to the Microsoft ecosystem. This includes the Xbox One as it is Microsoft’s presence in your living room.

We have a few ideas of new content on the site, but we don’t want to throw it out there and to hope for the best. Instead, we decided to let you guys vote on what you want to see since in many ways this is your guys’ site.

It’s hard to avoid the Apple Watch news this week, but Microsoft Band owners also have something to be excited about. The Windows Phone app, Fanband, recently caught our attention. It lets you customize the theme of your Microsoft Band with your favorite sports team, video game, tv show, and more. Want to put the Windows Central colors in the Microsoft Band? You can do that with Fanband, too. Watch our hands-on video to see it in action.

There’s been a curious stream of articles in major publications recently that go out of their way to misattribute bank fraud to Apple Pay. Curious, and continuing.

The articles all follow the same pattern: They put Apple Pay in the headline and then describe old-fashioned social engineering attacks against banks in the bodies, conflating Apple Pay as much as possible, but pointing out specific flaws with Apple Pay not at all. The articles themselves thus become attacks — they spread fear, uncertainty, and doubt about enabling, accessible technology to people who deserve far better, more accurate, more empowering reporting. And it just won’t stop.

• Banks, retailers ‘stung’, Apple Pay still secure

Lost amid the media firestorm these past few weeks about fraudsters turning to Apple Pay is this stark and rather unsettling reality: Apple Pay makes it possible for cyber thieves to buy high-priced merchandise from brick-and-mortar stores using stolen credit and debit card numbers that were heretofore only useful for online fraud.

Lost amid that lede is the starker and more unsettling reality that any digital transaction system, when banks approve stolen credit card information for use, makes this possible. So do traditional forms of credit card fraud.

Enter Apple Pay, which potentially erases that limitation of CVVs because it allows users to sign up online for an in-store payment method using little more than a hacked iTunes account and CVVs. That’s because most banks that are enabling Apple Pay for their customers do little, if anything, to require that customers prove they have the physical card in their possession.

Which is a problem banks need to address, as it hurts customers, retailers, and Apple.

Interestingly, neither Apple nor the banks get any useful identity information out of the mobile carriers – at least that I know or heard of. And mobile carrier data could be particularly helpful with identity proofing. For example the banks could compare the mobile service’s billing address with the card account holder’s billing address.

Carrier participation would be, no doubt, most welcome. Apple does provide the last four digits of the iPhone’s telephone number, however, which — and I’m just spitballing here — banks could compare to their records, and see if it’s associated with the billing address?

The irony here is that while Apple Pay has been touted as a more secure alternative to paying with a credit card, the way Apple and the banks have implemented it actually makes card fraud cheaper and easier for fraudsters.

ApplePay doesn’t give retailers the actual card number but a one-time transaction number which, if the retailer is breached, is useless as a transport for future fraud. In other words, it prevents the very mechanism that leads to these attacks.

And what about Apple’s implementation is suspect here? ApplePay is, thus far, so secure criminals are left to target banks with ages-old social engineering attacks. That’s absolutely a problem that needs to be fixed, but it’s a problem that can only be fixed by accurately reporting it.

Even more deliciously ironic, as noted in Cherian Abraham’s insightful column at Droplabs, is how much of the fraud stemming from crooks signing up stolen credit cards with Apple Pay was tied to purchases of high-dollar Apple products at Apple’s own brick-and-mortar stores! That banks end up eating the fraud costs from this activity is just the cherry on top.

Apple Retail and banks being defrauded is “deliciously ironic”? That’s a curious choice of words for what’s framed as a serious security piece.

“One of the biggest gripes I have heard from issuers is the lack of transparency from Apple (what did they expect?) and the makeshift reporting provided to issuers that is proving to be woefully inadequate,” Abaraham wrote. “As long as issuers fall back on measures easily circumvented by freely available PII – this problem will continue to leech trust and large sums of cash. And alongside of the latter, there is much blame to go around as well.”

Yet here’s what the banks themselves admit is the source of the fraud:

The effects of those incidents are being felt for some time after the breaches in large part because financial institutions that issue cards typically don’t launch broad-scale replacements of the affected plastic after a merchant is hacked.

The card companies figure that the cost of potential fraud is often less than giving each customer a new card, according to payment experts and bank executives, and customers sometimes complain about the inconvenience of having to switch to new cards.

And here’s the kicker:

This problem is only going to get worse as Samsung/LoopPay and the MCX/CurrentC (supported by Walmart, BestBuy and many other major retailers) release their mobile payment systems, without the customer data advantages Apple has in their relatively closed environment.

One guess as to how many of the other mobile payment systems appear in the headline, or in the rest of the body of the article?

Spoiler: Zero.

With all the furor about the new MacBook, it’s nice see Apple loosening up a bit and letting their engineers speak freely about the super-thin laptop. It might not be the MacBook for you, or maybe you’re just waiting for an updated MacBook Pro, or maybe it’s exactly what you want. Regardless of where you sit, it’s always good to laugh.

Via: Daring Fireball

(no actual Apple engineers were harmed in the making of this video, we’ve been told)

Samsung’s Galaxy S6 may launch in a fifth color variant, according to the vendor’s UK website.