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United Wholesale Mortgage to Accept Bitcoin Payments by End of 2021

Andrew Orr ·

United Wholesale Mortgage is the second-largest mortgage lender in the U.S., and it will begin to accept cryptocurrency payments by the end of this year.

“I think we’re starting with Bitcoin, but we’re looking at Ethereum and others. We’re going to walk before we run, but at the same time, we are definitely a leader in technology and innovation and we are always trying to be the best and the leader in everything we do.

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Behind The Scenes: How Boston Dynamics Builds Robots

Andrew Orr ·

Boston Dynamics has released a video of its Atlas robot, as well as a behind-the-scenes glimpse of it jumping through an obstacle course.

Unlike the previous two videos, which showed one-off tricks, the new video shows Atlas doing an entire obstacle course in one go, which the company says helps with reliability and repeatability. Trying to get through a whole obstacle course leads to a lot of failures and helps the hardware and software teams track down what “strategic upgrades” need to be made to help the robot get through the course.

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OnlyFans Launches Streaming App Without Nudity

Andrew Orr ·

OnlyFans is a platform that lets people subscribe to their favorite creators, similar to other services like Patreon. It launched a streaming app and it won’t feature the NSFW content the platform has become known for.

OFTV provides a super convenient way for fans to watch content from favorite creators. There’s no adult content on OFTV. Because it’s not being monetized and there’s no direct impact on creators’ earnings, we are able to be in the app store.

App Store: OFTV

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Apple Pay Support Comes to Qatar

Jeff Butts ·

Believe it or not, some countries still don’t have Apple Pay support. We can now count Qatar as one of the countries that does offer support for Cupertino’s digital wallet, after a recent announcement by Qatar bank QNB.

QNB is one of the largest financial institutions in the region and operates a number of subsidiaries in 31 countries, including many neighboring states. While the company announced Apple Pay availability for all customers, it appears the service is currently limited to people living in Qatar.

“We are proud for taking the initiative of bringing Apple Pay to the Qatari market. QNB has a reputation of providing its customers with state-of-the-art technologies,” said Heba Al-Tamimi, general manager at QNB Group’s Retail Banking arm.

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Smart Home Cameras, Baby Monitors Affected by Software Bug

Andrew Orr ·

A flaw in the ThroughTek “Kalay” network affects millions of IoT devices including smart baby monitors, DVRs, smart cameras, and other products.

this latest vulnerability allows attackers to communicate with devices remotely. As a result, further attacks could include actions that would allow an adversary to remotely control affected devices and could potentially lead to remote code execution.

Due to how the Kalay protocol is integrated by original equipment manufacturers (“OEMs”) and resellers before devices reach consumers, Mandiant is unable to determine a complete list of products and companies affected by the discovered vulnerability.

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Mastercard Moves to Phase Out Use of Magnetic Stripe by 2024

Andrew Orr ·

Mastercard announced on Monday a plan to phase out usage of magnetic stripes on its cards, and says it is the first payments network to do so.

Based on the decline in payments powered by magnetic stripes after chip-based payments took hold, newly-issued Mastercard credit and debit cards will not be required to have a stripe starting in 2024 in most markets. By 2033, no Mastercard credit and debit cards will have magnetic stripes, which leaves a long runway for the remaining partners who still rely on the technology to phase in chip card processing.