Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes: “Reuters reports that Wal-Mart has sued Visa for $5 billion, accusing the credit and debit card network of excessively high card swipe fees. Wal-mart is seeking damages from price fixing and other antitrust violations that it claims took place between January 1, 2004 and November 27, 2012. In its lawsuit, Wal-Mart contends that Visa, in concert with banks, sought to prevent retailers from protecting themselves against those swipe fees, eventually hurting sales. ‘The anticompetitive conduct of Visa and the banks forced Wal-Mart to raise retail prices paid by its customers and/or reduce retail services provided to its customers as a means of offsetting some of the artificially inflated interchange fees, ‘ says Wal-Mart in court documents. ‘As a result, Wal-Mart’s retail sales were below what they would have been otherwise.’ Interchange fees, the industry term for card-swipe fees, have been a major point of contention between retailers and banks. The fees are set by Visa and other card networks and collected by card-issuing banks like J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. Retailers have argued that the fees had been set too high due to a lack of competition with the two payment industry giants. Wal-Mart also took a shot against Visa over payment card security. Data breaches last year at Target Corp., Neiman Marcus and others have drawn attention to the country’s slow adoption of card technology that uses computer chips and PIN numbers and is seen as less susceptible to fraud than the current system of magnetic stripes. ‘Wal-Mart was further harmed by anti-innovation conduct on the part of Visa and the banks, ‘ says the lawsuit, ‘such as perpetuating the use of fraud-prone magnetic stripe system in the U.S. and the continued use of signature authentication despite knowledge that PIN authentication is more secure, a fact Visa has acknowledged repeatedly.'” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
See the original article here:
Wal-Mart Sues Visa For $5 Billion For Rigging Card Swipe Fees
mpicpp points out an article detailing the case of French blogger Olivier Laurelli, who had the misfortune to click links from search results. Laurelli stumbled upon a public link leading to documents from the French National Agency for Food Safety, Environment, and Labor. He downloaded them — over 7 Gb worth — and looked through them, eventually publishing a few slides to his website. When one of France’s intelligence agencies found out, they took Laurelli into custody and indicted him, referring to him as a ‘hacker.’ In their own investigation, they said, “we then found that it was sufficient to have the full URL to access to the resource on the extranet in order to bypass the authentication rules on this server.” The first court acquitted Laurelli of the charges against him. An appeals court affirmed part of the decision, but convicted him of “theft of documents and fraudulent retention of information.” He was fined €3, 000 (about $4, 000). Read more of this story at Slashdot. 
An anonymous reader writes “Bitcoin transactions are confirmed by performing complex calculations, also known as ‘mining.’ If a single mining pool gains 51% of the overall computational power in the network, various forms of transaction manipulation become possible. Only a few years into Bitcoin’s existence, this existential threat appears to be at hand, with Bitcoin mining pool ghash.io approaching 51% of mining power. ghash.io has now assured the Bitcoin community in a press release (PDF): ‘GHash.IO does not have any intentions to execute a 51% attack, as it will do serious damage to the Bitcoin community, of which we are a part.’ But can a network relying on such assurances survive in the long run?” Read more of this story at Slashdot. 
Lucas123 writes “Even though production of 75W and 100W incandescent lamps were phased out earlier this year, many U.S. consumers remain blissfully unaware of The Energy Independence and Security Act (EISA) of 2007, an energy efficiency standard that requires an initial 30% reduction in energy use for screw-in bulbs. By 2020, the federal standard requires bulbs to use 65% less energy. According to a new survey, only 40% of Americans are aware that incandescent bulbs are being phased out. However, the federal regulations are about to impact the most popular bulbs of all — 40W and 60W lamps. As of Jan. 1, 2014, the bulbs will no longer be produced. A significant portion of those who are aware of the phase out have been hoarding the bulbs in anticipation of the ban.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.