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Heartland Payment Systems looks to mobile

Heartland Payment Systems, which processes payments across the country, is the latest company to jump on the mobile-payment bandwagon.

The Princeton, N.J.-based company said today that it was launching a system to allow merchants to accept payments through smartphones and tablets, similar to Square or Verifone. The system, called Mobuyle, includes an Android application and an encrypting reader that plugs into the device's audio hack, allowing stores to expand the number of point-of-sale terminals on the fly.

Heartland is one of many to be lured in by the opportunities that are emerging from the mobile-payments area. While … Read more

NFC system to let you pay for dinner via cell phone

You may soon be able to pay for dinner at your favorite restaurant directly through your cell phone courtesy of a new NFC system slated to become available later this year.

Announced today by electronic payment company VeriFone and software developer Micros Systems, the new system would tap into the growing technology of near field communication (NFC) to let customers pay for dinner bills through a digital wallet stored on their mobile devices.

By storing credit card and bank account information, cell phones equipped with the necessary NFC technology can exchange information with other equipped phones as well NFC-based registers … Read more

Report: Retail systems still vulnerable

In a paper released today (click for PDF), Neal Krawetz of Hacker Factor Solutions looks at the probable causes behind recent large-scale data thefts at TJX, OfficeMax and other retail stores. He concludes that "point-of-sale terminals and branch servers store credit card information in ways that are no longer secure enough."

Although Krawetz's paper doesn't reveal any new exploits against point-of-sale (POS) systems, he does fault practices still being used by various vendors. In an e-mail to CNET News.com, Krawetz wrote: "I believe that the vulnerabilities behind the January 2006 compromise of a Fujitsu … Read more