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But now, as part of its initiative to utilize open banking solutions – using advanced data analytics and machine learning tools – Mastercard today announced the introduction of two Smart Payment Decisioning tools under its Finicity open banking division, that will help facilitate payment transactions more seamlessly and securely: Payment Success Indicator and Payment Routing Optimizer. “It’s all about consumer convenience, providing consumer choice and really listening to consumers’ desires to have access to different security types and ease of use – that’s at the center of these news tools,” says Silvana Hernandez, senior vice president of Digital Payments for Mastercard in an interview with ZDNet....

That’ll surely be the mantra for so many businesses in 2022. It’s hard to hire employees, especially when they want to be paid more than a tiny fraction of what the bosses make. It’s inevitable, then, that fast-food emporiums such as McDonald’s and Chick-fil-A are burrowing deeply into automating their services – and their customer service. At the end of last year, however, McDonald’s quietly revealed a more progressive direction for its future....

Table of Contents What is a mechanical keyboard? The anatomy of a mechanical keyboardWhat you need to know about casesThe circuit boardWhat are ANSI and ISO?The mounting plateKey switchesKeycapsWhat are legends?Final thoughtsMy top 3 mechanical keyboard picks Keyboard reviews Also: The 5 best mechanical keyboards: From mini to macros While the industry long ago left behind the buckling spring switches used in the Model M, the modern equivalents provide the same quality and tactility, while also supporting expanded sound, resistance, and actuation depth options....

Medibank on Thursday said it was analysing the data, which was released overnight on the dark web, but added that the files appeared to comprise customer information compromised in the breach. First announced in October, the security incident affected 9.7 million current and former customers as well as some of their authorised representatives. Amongst those impacted were 1.8 million international customers. Before the latest data dump, hackers involved in the theft had released the files in batches along with demands for ransom....

As a result, millions of users have left Twitter, and some are looking for an alternative to the app that was once hailed as a digital town square. And competitors are looking to create their own digital town square and are capitalizing on the disarray at Twitter. Also: Why is Twitter turning millions of accounts into defenseless targets? Meta, the parent company of popular networking apps Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, is in the process of creating its own Twitter alternative, as first reported by the online publication, Moneycontrol....

The problems for the company began during the previous afternoon, when it released Q4 results that missed the $3.84 per share mark investors had set for its profits by $0.17, despite finishing the fourth quarter with revenues above expectations. This negative indicator was further compounded by Meta reporting its first-ever drop in daily active users. The decline was relatively slight, from 1.93 billion in Q3 to 1.929 billion in Q4, but it was enough to signify that Facebook’s seemingly perpetual upward user trajectory was no longer a sure thing....

That setting, released as an optional configuration in Excel Trust Center setting in July, is now the default when opening Excel 4.0 macros (XLM), Microsoft said in a blogpost. A macro is a series of commands that you can use to automate a repeated task, and can be run when you have to perform the task. But unexpected macros can pose a significant security risk. You don’t have to enable macros to see or edit the file; only if you want the functionality provided by the macro....

Microsoft’s pitch is Cloud PC will provide a secured place to store apps, files, and documents, which users will be able to access anytime on any internet-connected device. Information is stored in the cloud, not on the device. When moving between devices, users can boot up quickly and pick up exactly where they last left off, regardless of device type. Microsoft is planning to make Windows 365 and Cloud PC generally available starting August 2 and to announce per user, per month pricing for the service around that same time....

For the last 18 months, people have been Zooming while Microsoft would prefer them to be Teamsing. It’s not that Teams has done badly, of course. When it’s built into Microsoft products at work, many people feel obliged to use it. Some more reluctantly than others. Yet people refer to Zoom calls just as so many still refer to tablets as iPads. That’s annoying for a company with the size, heft and new-found love-needs of Microsoft....

Microsoft began rolling out security defaults to customers who created a new Azure AD tenant after October 2019, but didn’t enable the defaults for customers that created Azure AD tenants prior to October 2019. Today, Azure AD security defaults are used by about 30 million organizations, according to Microsoft, and over the next month Microsoft will roll out the defaults to many more organizations that will result in the defaults protecting 60 million more accounts....

Microsoft took the wraps off its Azure-powered Mesh mixed-reality collaboration platform at Build in May 2021. Later, at Ignite in the fall, officials said they planned to bring Mesh to Teams and would make available a preview of Mesh for Teams in 2022 that would feature a set of pre-build immersive spaces for meetings and mixers and later, tools for customers to create their own custom spaces. During Microsoft’s most recent earnings call, Nadella claimed that Microsoft is “leading innovation in the new industrial metaverse....

Thirteen of the patches involved a remote code execution vulnerability, while another eight revolved around information disclosure. The affected tools included .NET Core & Visual Studio, ASP.NET Core & Visual Studio, Azure, Windows Update, Windows Print Spooler Components, Windows Media, Windows Defender, Remote Desktop Client, Microsoft Dynamics, Microsoft Edge (Chromium-based), Microsoft Office, Microsoft Office Word, Microsoft Office SharePoint and more. One of the most prominent patches released in the latest batch covers the Windows Print Spooler Remote Code Execution vulnerability, which has been a major topic of discussion since it was discovered in June....

Microsoft is planning to add support for third-party accounts and multiple accounts “in the future,” officials said. Outlook Lite does not support Android Work Profile and Mobile Application Management (MAM) for work accounts. As a result, Microsoft is recommending business users who need these features continue using the existing mobile Outlook client for Android instead of the Lite version. As of August 1, the app is available only in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, India, Mexico, Peru, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, Taiwan, Thailand, Turkey, and Venezuela....

Teams for the web includes custom background effects, Communication Access Real-time Translation (CART) captioning, and Live Captions and Live Transcript, Microsoft announced in a blogpost. These updates follow Microsoft adding Firefox to its list of supported browsers in Teams last month, in addition to Chrome and Edge. SEE: Six ways to stay productive when working remote Microsoft added custom backgrounds to the Teams desktop app for Mac and Windows in June 2020: prior to that Teams had only blurred backgrounds to give users a bit more privacy while conducting online meetings from the home....

Kyle Vikstrom, Director of Microsoft Investor Relations, shared the new Teams usage number with me ahead of the Q4 FY21 analyst call. The new metric Microsoft now is using is monthly, not daily, active users. On Microsoft’s earnings call, officials said that Microsoft has nearly 80 million monthly active Teams Phone users. They added that 124 organizations now have more than 100,000 users of Teams and nearly 3,000 have more than 10,000 users....

Also: How to get Microsoft Office for free Scheduler allows users to use natural-language queries, such as, “Find a time for Paul and me to meet for breakfast next week,” to schedule their meetings. The backend service looks up attendee availability and goes back and forth over email before sending calendar invitations. Scheduler can also reschedule and cancel meetings. Scheduler has been available as an add-on to many Microsoft 365 licenses with a Microsoft Exchange Online plan....

Sound familiar? Hopefully, technology investment decisions in your company are not made this way. But as technology is evolving faster than ever, it’s hard to keep up with all the terminology. Unfortunately, some people see terminology as an obfuscation layer meant to glorify the ones who come up with it, hype products, and make people who throw terms around appear smart. There may be some truth in this, but that does not mean terminology is useless....

The Pillars of Creation were originally made famous in 1995 by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope. As seen by the image taken by Webb’s Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam), imaging and telescope technology has come a long way. Also: NASA: This is the weird sound of a meteoroid hitting Mars The new view of the Pillars will help researchers learn more about star formation with far more precise counts of newly formed stars and quantities of gas and dust....

The flat-price option would see the loathed connectivity virtual circuit (CVC) capacity charge removed from all plans, with access pricing increasing as a result. NBN is also putting forward a reworked option of its current pricing structure, with the CVC charge dropping by AU$2 to AU$6, and a melded option that removes the CVC on plans of 100Mbps down and quicker, while keeping the current AU$8 CVC charge on lower speeds....

One bill, the Ending Platform Monopolies Act, would prohibit dominant platforms from owning different lines of business that create a conflict of interest. In other words, a company couldn’t control multiple lines of business that give them an unfair advantage over competitors. In a summary of the legislation, the subcommittee gives an example that makes a clear reference to Google and YouTube. A search engine, the summary says, could not own a video service that it has incentives to favor in search results....