​Apple teams with top credit cards for iPhone 6 payments, reports say

Even the Samsung Galaxy S3 allowed for mobile payments -- this one done at a McDonald's in the UK. Rich Trenholm/CNET

It's Labor Day weekend in the US, a time for barbecues, back-to-school shopping -- and iPhone rumors of course.

Recode on Sunday reported that American Express has agreed to "work together" with Apple on its new iPhone payment system, which is widely expected to be introduced with an iPhone 6 at Apple's September 9 event.

Citing unnamed sources familiar with the talks, Recode added that American Express is just one of several partners the iPhone maker needs to sign up before it launches the new mobile payments system. Sources told Recode that Apple has held discussion "with multiple credit card networks" about the new payment system. The Information previously reported that Visa had agreed to work with Apple, Recode noted.

Bloomberg followed with a report, also citing unnamed sources, that Apple is also partnering with Visa and MasterCard on the payment system, which would be enabled on the iPhone 6 by a short-distance wireless technology called near-field communication, or NFC. NFC, along with the Touch ID fingerprint recognition reader found on the most recent iPhone, will enable you to pay for items in a store with the touch of a finger.

Mobile payments, or the notion that you can pay for goods and services at the checkout with your smartphone, are poised to break into the mainstream if Apple and the iPhone 6 get it right.

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Apple spokeswoman Trudy Muller declined to comment on the reports. We also contacted the credit card companies for confirmation. MasterCard declined to comment. We'll update this report if we hear back from the other two.

Wired was just the latest to report recently that the next iPhone would include mobile-payment capabilities powered by NFC. The technology and capability to pay with a tap of your mobile device has been around for years -- you can tap an NFC-enabled Samsung Galaxy S5 or NFC-enabled credit card at point-of-sale terminals found at many Walgreen drugstores in the US, for example -- but awareness and usage remain low.

Apple's visibility and massive user base - it already holds credit card data for about 800 million iTunes account holders -- could change that.

CNET's Roger Cheng contributed to this report.

Updated at 2:08 p.m. PT with Bloomberg's report about Visa and MasterCard also partnering with Apple. Also updated at 2:43 p.m. PT with Apple declining comment.

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​As security breach reports mount, experts fear alert fatigue

CNET

It's been a busy week for security specialists.

First came word that supermarket chain Supervalu had been hacked. That was followed in short order by news of security breaches at a large American medical group, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the UPS Store.

As large-scale security breaches carried out by individual hackers and sponsored by nation-states turn into the new normal, cybersecurity experts are also alarmed that people may throw up their hands and stop caring as news of even more breaches get reported.

But while four breaches in a week may seem like a lot, let's also keep perspective. What's actually happening is more complicated than a simple spike in the number of reported breaches.

"I'm not sure that we're seeing more activity, or more attention on the activity," said Andy Serwin, a partner in the privacy and data protection practice at analyst firm Morrison and Foerster.

Indeed, companies are getting better at reporting security breaches, which also feeds into the perception that the increase in the number of breaches may even be larger than it really is.

"Back during Operation Aurora

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Facebook reports enormous uptick in use of snoop-proof email

This Facebook chart shows how the number of emails protected by encryption by both the sender and the receiver has flipped in only a few short months. Facebook

Keeping email safe from prying eyes is a joint effort, with both the sender and receiver needing to implement encryption technology. And Facebook -- which sends its user base billions of notification emails every day -- says things have gotten significantly more secure because of changes made by popular webmail providers such as Microsoft and Yahoo.

The percentage of emails sent from Facebook that are received by webmail providers which support encryption has jumped from less than 30 percent in May to 95 percent by mid-July, according to a Facebook blog post published Tuesday.

The change comes amid a growing effort by webmail providers to better support encrypted email. That's a reaction to National Security Agency snooping revealed by whistle-blower Edward Snowden, and it's a necessity at Facebook, where notification emails about posts and comments made by users' friends often contain snippets of private or semi-private content from the site.

The kind of basic webmail encryption Facebook refers to in its blog post is provided by a technology called STARTTLS, which uses Transport Layer Security encryption to make it harder to spy on email. The challenge with keeping email secure is that it requires both the sender and the receiver to support the same encryption technology -- otherwise messages remain unprotected. Though Facebook has supported STARTTLS for several years, of the three biggest webmail providers, only Google's Gmail had adopted it.

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