Technology expert Evan Schuman takes an authoritative look at the faults and foibles of enterprise IT.
Amazon is experimenting with a way to allow shoppers to use a palm-print biometric to authenticate payments and to do so in physical stores far beyond Amazon-owned brick-and-mortars. Amazon is reportedly looking at QSRs (quick-service restaurants), e....
Purdue University has an interesting mobile concept, a means to free up lots of space that is now housing apps and app data. Why not, the university asks, stream the apps themselves from the cloud?
The latest Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report eloquently argues that aside from wireless, the form factor of mobile in and of itself poses security risks.
Employees and consumers are being more careful about sharing information that goes beyond strict need-to-know. We ran into one company that seems to not get that.
A massive number of text messages were stored in plaintext, with no security at all.
And a very different bug, planted by cyberthieves, presents even more frightening camera-spying issues with Android.
The best security approaches — such as continuous authentication — are invisible to the user and therefore frictionless. That's good in practice, but it can be bad in terms of customer perception. If they don't see it, they assu....
Sometimes, a mobile glitch is indicative of a much more pervasive issue. Our columnist's recent iPhone 11 iTunes headache perfectly illustrates how Apple's heralded focus on customer experience falls apart when doing upgrades.
Although this decision should end the debate and make it clear to companies that sites must be coded to be fully compatible—and, no, throwing in a toolbar option doesn't do it—it's astounding that companies ever resisted it.
The internet of things brings with it a wide range of IT security headaches, along with compliance nightmares — and turf wars.
A new study questions the efficacy of car accident-avoidance systems, but it's possible that a simple smartwatch might be part of the solution.
In BYOD environments, users tend to supplement corporate security programs with free versions. That is a remarkably bad idea, and one analyst report suggests a way to stop it.
Would changing mobile warranty rules be a good or bad thing for enterprise IT?
Ready for the mobile security news that IT doesn't want to hear about but needs to? When security firm Positive Technologies started pen testing various mobile apps, security holes were rampant.
Google confirmed that cyberthieves had managed to pre-install malware into the Android framework backdoor. In short, the malware appeared to be blessed by Google at the deepest point within Android.
Mobile banking should be effortless, but Forrester Research says far too many banks offer frustrating apps and give little thought to how consumers should interact with their financial institutions.
The Apple Watch is still a wonderful device that has maddening flaws. But we have now found some unpublicized ways around some of those flaws. Watch life is now slightly better.
In a perfect world, the Apple Watch Series 4 could be great. With a few easy settings, a glance at the watch would deliver time, temperature, the dial-in details for your next appointment or many other things that would be helpful. But we don't ....
A new report from a well-regarded payments consulting firm has found a lengthy list of security insanity while examining several major fintech company mobile apps.
With its enterprise developer certificate program, Apple chose convenience over security. You can guess what happened.
A bunch of apps from some major players were recently tripped up by a security/privacy hole from a third-party analytics app. But everyone is focusing on the wrong lesson.
Making apps downgradable would give IT just a little of its environment controls back. Just a little bit, but it's a start.
In 2019, executives need to look anew at mobile and figure out what technology displacements make sense. For example, do companies need to buy expensive dedicated barcode scanners?
Although Apple is trying to position itself as the consumer-privacy-friendly company, some have complained that it is doing it in far too heavy-handed a way.
When eBay recently started giving customers the option to move away from paying with PayPal, something interesting happened.
Police are very persistent in trying to gain access to suspects' devices.
Users are jumping to the latest iOS version faster than ever before. That means many things from an Apple marketing perspective, but for IT, it means far greater security.
With iOS 12, Apple wants to share the ease-of-use magic of Apple Pay with the industry, via an SDK. Well, not quite, but it's starting along that path.
Apple's letter was designed to alleviate congressional fears about the company invading its customers' privacy. But a close reading of the letter does the opposite.
There are good and bad reasons to track someone's movements, but the best way to scream to users that you're spying on them is to lie about or not reveal what you're doing.
Gesturing in the air near a mobile device is going to become the preferred mode of interaction. Long term, ease of use will soar, but before we get there, expect a lot of user errors.
An Arizona security company is working on an interesting approach to mobile authentication, one that leverages the exact angle a user holds the phone as a means of making replay attacks a lot more difficult.
As the battle for cashier-less stores rages on, it's worth questioning whether an employee-less checkout system is something that retailers should truly want.
Sniffing smartphones won't merely replicate what a human nose can do. They will be able to detect aromas far more precisely. What is the enterprise IT potential here? Quite a bit.
Amazon has confirmed that one of its Echo devices recorded a family's conversation and then messaged it to a random person on the family's contact list. The implications are terrifying.
When BJ's Wholesale Club on Thursday (May 3) said that it would leverage machine learning in its mobile app, it joined the crowded club of companies boasting A.I. capabilities while remaining vague on the details.
One of the longest-running retail problems involves loyalty points and gift cards and the fact that shoppers tend to either forget about them or find them too much of a hassle to redeem.
In-aisle checkout gets a big push from the world’s largest retailer.
Texting confirmation numbers is a very weak link; texting them to my landline is just dumb.
Researchers from Purdue University and the University of Iowa have found quite a few new security holes in the popular 4G mobile networks.
With a smartphone and an RFID tag on the window, shoppers may be able to forgo using plastic at all gas stations and drive-through restaurants. But will they?
The PCI Council is allowing the most sensitive part of a payment card transaction to happen on a device that it acknowledges is highly dangerous and unstable.
Now comes yet another reason to respect the heck out of your privacy policy: The U.S. Supreme Court is considering making it a determining factor for whether your customers have an expectation of privacy.
Visa has learned this lesson, but Kroger is still resisting.
What Apple did not choose to say is far more illuminating than what it did say.
A U.K. firm is pushing mobile software that watches you while you fill out a form and tries to determine truthfulness and emotion. George Orwell would be proud.
AR is a nice retail mobile add-on, but what Williams-Sonoma needs more is to address retail fundamentals. W-S, look to Amazon for an example.
Instart Logic wants to help publishers get around ad blockers with its ad-blocker blocker and serve up ads though people don't want them. But is that wise?
Made with Apple’s ARKit, Amazon's new augmented reality (AR) mobile app shows you can do AR sizing without needing depth-sensing camera. Sorry, iPhone X.
Will forcing shoppers to use a different payment mechanism for every retailer be a good thing? Or will it just dampen mobile payment enthusiasm overall?
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