Google Wallet is one of the most useful apps for Android devices as it allows you to store and access identification (ID) cards or documents, payment cards, boarding passes, and event tickets among other things. Unfortunately, it isn’t available in the world’s most populous country, India. Fortunately, that’s going to change soon.
As spotted by TechCrunch, Google had listed the Google Wallet app on the Play Store in India and the listing had screenshots showing Indian brands, currency, and locations. While there was no download option available on the listing and the brand later de-listed the app, it suggested that the company is working on making Google Wallet available in India. In fact, if people sideload the app in the country, it works with local payment cards, boarding passes, and event tickets. Some users also reported that Google Wallet worked on WearOS smartwatches in the region.
All in all, it won’t be too long before Google releases the Google Wallet app officially in India. Currently, there’s only one digital wallet app available on Android in the country, which is Samsung Wallet. Unfortunately, it works only on Samsung devices. Once Google launches Google Wallet in India, non-Samsung Android users will finally have a digital wallet app that they can use, allowing them to access IDs, payment cards, boarding passes, and event tickets from a single place. It’s worth mentioning that it will co-exist with Google Pay, which offers UPI payments.
Google has been emailing Android users about an update to the Play Store allowing you to enable biometric verification for purchases. We got the message over the weekend buried in our inbox. It states users can set fingerprint or facial recognition on the digital storefront as long as they have a mobile device that supports the technology. Once set up, “you’ll be asked to verify it’s you with biometrics” every time you buy something on the platform.
We can confirm the update is live as it appeared on our phone. To turn it on, open the Play Store app then tap Settings near the bottom. Expand Purchase Verification and toggle the switch to activate Biometric Verification. The storefront will then ask you to type in your password to confirm the setting change.
It’s important to mention that the final step will change within the coming weeks. According to the email, Google will let users use biometrics instead of requiring them to enter their account password.
The purpose of this feature is to seemingly provide an extra layer of safety to protect yourself against unauthorized transactions in case your phone is ever compromised. You don’t have to use a password anymore, although you will always have the option.
(Image credit: Future)
Minor, yet important detrails
There are a few minor details you should know regarding the feature.
At a glance, it seems the biometric verification will primarily live on the Play Store. We attempted to purchase an ebook and were met with a fingerprint reader to authenticate our identity before checkout. Then we discovered the security feature will appear on third-party apps, but its presence on them varies.
We purchased items for the game Arknights on our Android phone to see if a biometric verification reader popped up. It didn’t. The checkout went through without any hindrance. However, when we signed up for a three-month trial on Amazon Music, a Play Store message showed up asking if we would like to enable biometrics for future purchases.
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This leads us to believe that some apps will support the new verification method while others won’t. It may depend on whether or not a developer decides to support the security fixture on their product.
Do note this has been our personal experience with the tool. It may operate differently for you. Google didn’t provide much information in their email or Play Store Help page. Of course, we reached out to the tech giant for clarification and will update the story if we learn anything new.
The system, says Hamilton, is designed to be “anti-fragile,” meaning it depends on no party’s good will to achieve its end. Nobody but the originator and recipient have access to the contents of the file, all other parties are financially incentivized to cooperate, and redundancies ensure the payload is always available. “Little strings of data control our lives,” says Hamilton. Because humans are “gooey”—that is, unreliable and prone to mistakes—the only sensible protection for those strings is cryptography, he adds.
There are various other ways, says Hamilton, that Sarcophagus might be applied outside of a crypto setting. A digital dead man’s switch could be used by a whistleblower to release incriminating material or by a dissident or journalist who suspects a threat to their life, as a kind of SOS. In a more mundane context, it could be used to pass account credentials from one generation of employees to the next.
ILLUSTRATION: ALBERTO MIRANDA
Sarcophagus has received $6 million in funding to date from investors including Placeholder, Blockchange, and Hinge Capital. The project is managed by a decentralized autonomous organization, or DAO—a collective that governs the Sarcophagus treasury and development process through a system of community voting. In its present state, Sarcophagus is best described as an “early beta,” says Hamilton. The service is operational but not widely used, and it does not generate significant revenue—only a small cut of every payment.
One barrier to broader adoption is that recipients must already have access to a crypto wallet, whose credentials are used to decrypt the data payload. There is an option to create a new wallet for someone, along with a PDF walking them through the process for accessing it, but a level of crypto literacy would certainly help.
As the generation of people comfortable with crypto grows older and begins to reckon more seriously with their mortality, Hamilton thinks a larger subset will begin to understand the need for a service like Sarcophagus. “Millennials are just starting to think about this problem,” he says. Hamilton imagines that more accessible services will be built atop Sarcophagus technology, too. These “boomer products,” as Hamilton calls them, one of which his own team is developing, will abstract away some of the technical complexity, such that people won’t realize they are using crypto infrastructure. (Although there is an inevitable trade-off between security and convenience.)
In any case, says Hamilton, the present system—whereby credentials to high-value crypto wallets might be stored in bank vaults protected by armed guards—approaches the absurd. The “billion-dollar file cabinet” has to go, says Hamilton. “We are still relying on heavy metal doors and guys with guns when cryptography itself can act as a steel wall of incredible thickness.”
This article originally appeared in the May/June 2024 issue of WIRED UK.
Google Wallet is among the most used digital wallet apps in Western markets. It has now started supporting Apple Wallet passes, which is excellent, as many services offer passes for Apple Wallet. It has also received support for linked passes, which sometimes improve the user experience.
These Google Wallet features work on Galaxy phones, too.
Google Wallet now supports Apple Wallet passes, but it doesn’t work every time
Last month, Google Wallet started testing support for Apple Wallet passes (with .pkpass file extension), and it seems to have started rolling out that feature more widely in the US. It has been released through the latest Wallet and Play Services updates. It can now read data inside .pkpass files, which means you can add things like movie and travel tickets in the Google Wallet app.
The folks over at 9To5Google were able to add parking passes by clicking the ‘Add to Apple Wallet’ button, which allowed them to download the pass and import it into the Google Wallet app. However, they couldn’t add a baseball game ticket to Google Wallet, as the website asked them to download the pass using the Safari web browser.
An alternative method requires an iPhone. You can add the pass via Apple Wallet on an iPhone, email the pass file to yourself, open it on an Android phone, and import it into Google Wallet. However, this is too cumbersome, and most people don’t have two phones, let alone an Android phone and an iPhone.
Google Wallet also supports linked passes
Google Wallet has received a feature (via 9To5Google) that allows it to ‘Automatically Add Linked Passes.’ The new feature is enabled by default in the Passes section of the app. Pass providers can use this feature to automatically add passes or tickets related to an event, offer, or promotion.
For example, passes can be added for offers linked to an existing loyalty card. A meal voucher pass can be added along with a flight boarding pass or an event ticket. It also allows a parking pass alongside an event ticket. All these are pretty convincing use cases.
Samsung is running a promotional offer for students who use Samsung Wallet to make payments in South Korea. Starting today, Samsung Wallet users aged from 7 to 19 can get various benefits when they use Samsung Wallet to buy things at stores.
Samsung Wallet promotion for students in South Korea comes with discounts and other benefits
The South Korean tech giant has partnered with several retail store chains and food outlets for this promotion. From April 1 to June 30, users aged from 14 years to 19 years who get a Samsung Pay Recharge Card from Samsung Wallet will get an instant recharge of KRW 5,000 ($4). Students aged 7 to 16 years who use Toss Youth Card will receive Toss Money of KRW 2,000 ($1.5) once during April.
Shopping at CU convenience stores across Korea can get these users a 20% discount on Baskin Robbins Pint Ice Cream. This offer is valid for the first 10,000 customers through Samsung Wallet’s ‘Gift’ section. Samsung hopes that it will see increased adoption of Samsung Wallet among young users.
A Samsung Electronics official said, “We have prepared this promotion so that more customers can experience the differentiated advantages of Samsung Wallet for the 1020 generation. We will continue to expand various benefits and services for the 1020 generation who are accustomed to mobile life.”
Samsung Wallet is available on all Galaxy phones featuring NFC or MST. The Galaxy S24 series is the latest high-end phone to feature Samsung Wallet, and you can watch its review in our video below.
Google Wallet looks set to become much more useful by supporting Apple Wallet files, it’ll finally be able to open and use tickets and passes created/saved in Apple’s proprietary .pkpass file format.
Android tipster Mishaal Rahman reported that the feature has been rolling out to some of his followers with several replies confirming they have access right now. However, the feature doesn’t seem to be available to everyone yet, which could mean the rollout is limited to certain regions.
In the past, some tickets and passes have only included an Apple Wallet link, which will only work with iPhones, leaving Android users out in the cold.
The improved compatibility would save Google Wallet users from needing to go through the difficulty of finding trustworthy third-party apps to convert the Apple passes. It could also prevent users from completely giving up on using digital passes altogether and having to dig through emails to find ticket confirmation or go back to the hassle of printing paper tickets.
Google Wallet may soon be able to import digital passes saved in Apple’s .pkpass format!One user on Telegram tells me that Google Wallet is now able to import .pkpass files. This doesn’t work for me yet, though. Let me know if this works for you!(Thanks to Cob on Telegram for… https://t.co/jjAL3o2mbA pic.twitter.com/O69NHNRs6LMarch 15, 2024
See more
The post features a recording from a user credited as Cob that shows the process of adding a work ID .pkpass file to Google Wallet. Using a file manager app the user opens the .pkpass file and is presented with several app options to use to open the file.
After selecting Google Wallet the user is prompted for permission with a screen explaining that Google may keep a record of passes for reference, while a continue button appears at the bottom of the screen.
Once the user proceeds, another permission request about Google’s use of data appears. After this is agreed to, the pass is added to the digital wallet and we can see a QR code and that all the data has been copied over correctly including job titles, staff number contact details, and an expiry date.
Digital Wallets have become a more integral part of our lives due to our move away from physical currency and how ubiquitous phones, smartwatches, and NFC payments have become. However, due to the popularity of Apple’s iPhone Apple Wallet seems to be slightly widely accepted with Google catching up.
This is the second recent big change to Google Wallet, which is replacing the previous app Google Pay that’s due to be discontinued on June 4, 2024 in the U.S. It appears Google is streamlining its payment apps which could allow it to better compete with Apple.
Both Google and Apple Wallet apps have advantages and disadvantages but are considered the best payment apps with Google Pay being released back in 2011, which later became Google Wallet. And Apple Passbook was announced in 2012 and became Apple Wallet.
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Be careful when downloading Python packages from PyPI – researchers have found some are malicious and looking to steal your cryptocurrency haul.
Cybersecurity researchers from ReversingLabs recently discovered seven such packages, whose goal is to steal BIP39 mnemonic phrases from its victims.
A cryptocurrency wallet is secured in two ways: with a password, and with a mnemonic phrase (a set of either 12 or 24 seemingly random words). When a user sets up a wallet, they generate a mnemonic phrase and a password. A password is used to log into the wallet, while the mnemonic phrase is used to restore the wallet, in case it needed to be installed on a different device or hardware wallet.
BIPClip has been in operation for over a year
By stealing the phrases, hackers would be able to load other people’s wallets onto their own devices, essentially getting unrestricted access to the funds.
Cumulatively, the packages were downloaded almost 7,500 times, before the researchers notified PyPI and the malware was removed. These are their names, so make sure you haven’t downloaded them:
ReversingLabs dubbed the campaign BIPClip, and claim it kicked off in early December 2022.
“This is just the latest software supply chain campaign to target crypto assets,” security researcher Karlo Zanki said in a report shared with TheHackerNews. “It confirms that cryptocurrency continues to be one of the most popular targets for supply chain threat actors.”
PyPI, being one of the largest and most popular Python package repositories on the internet, is often the target of supply chain attacks. Hackers frequently impersonate legitimate packages, trying to trick developers into downloading malicious versions which exfiltrate their sensitive data and deploy malware and ransomware. At one point last year, PyPl was forced to suspend new projects and user sign-ups following a flood of malware.
If you are searching for a quick way to access your credit cards you might be interested in the Shuffle Wallet. Specifically designed offer you swift access to your necessities, ensuring that your personal information is safeguarded at all times. The standout feature of the Shuffle Wallet is its unique deck-of-cards opening mechanism. This clever design allows you to spread out your cards with ease, so you can quickly find the one you need. It’s a simple solution to the common problem of d”igging through a pile of cards, which can be both time-consuming and irritating.
Early bird pledge levels are now available for the groundbreaking project from roughly $79 or £63 (depending on current exchange rates). In today’s digital era, protecting your sensitive information is more important than ever. The Shuffle is equipped with RFID blocking technology, which is essential for keeping your credit and debit card data safe from skimmers. This feature offers you the confidence to carry your wallet without worrying about digital theft.
Shuffle Wallet
For those who embrace technology, the wallet’s NFC capabilities are a standout addition. You can share your digital business card with just a tap, reducing paper use and ensuring that your contacts receive your details in a handy, digital form. This environmentally friendly option is ideal for the tech-savvy networker.
Ease of access is a crucial aspect of any wallet, and the Shuffle delivers with a quick-draw slot for your most frequently used card. This means no more fumbling for your primary credit card or ID; you can grab it instantly, making your day-to-day transactions smoother.
Assuming that the Shuffle Wallet funding campaign successfully raises its required pledge goal and production progresses smoothly, worldwide shipping is expected to take place sometime around April 2024. To learn more about the Shuffle Wallet NFC, RFID blocking wallet project analyze the promotional video below.
RFID Blocking credit card wallet
Despite the move towards a cashless society, many people still prefer to carry bills. The Shuffle Wallet’s compact money clip is designed to hold your cash in an orderly fashion without adding extra bulk, maintaining the wallet’s slim profile and ensuring your bills are always within reach.
Gadget lovers will be drawn to the optional feature that caters to Apple AirTag users. With this addition, losing your wallet can become a thing of the past. You can track your wallet’s location using your smartphone, which not only adds a layer of security but also a touch of convenience to your daily routine.
The wallet also comes with a non-RFID silicone pouch, perfect for items like subway passes or gym cards that you might need to scan without RFID interference. This thoughtful inclusion confirms that the Shuffle Wallet is designed to adapt to the varied needs of your lifestyle.
The Shuffle is more than a mere storage accessory for your cards and cash. It is an elegant tool that merges ease of use, security, and style into one. With its innovative card-fanning mechanism, RFID protection, NFC functionality, quick-access card slot, money clip, AirTag compatibility, and versatile non-RFID pouch, the Shuffle Wallet caters to the needs of the modern, security-aware individual. Embrace this sophisticated approach to wallet design with the Shuffle Wallet, where practicality is as important as aesthetics.
For a complete list of all available early bird specials, stretch goals, extra media and product specifications for the NFC, RFID blocking wallet, jump over to the official Shuffle Wallet crowd funding campaign page by checking out the link below.
Source : Kickstarter
Disclaimer: Participating in crowdfunding campaigns on sites like Kickstarter and Indiegogo involves inherent risks. While many projects successfully meet their goals, others may fail to deliver due to numerous challenges. Always conduct thorough research and exercise caution when pledging your hard-earned money as you might lose it all if the project fails.
Filed Under: Gadgets News, Top News
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Samsung has announced that it has teamed up with Mastercard for Wallet Express, which is a new program for Mastercard and it is designed to help banks offer digital wallets to their customers.
By incorporating Wallet Express, issuers can provide their customers with Samsung Wallet. In turn, consumers have a wide range of ways to pay, including with their Galaxy wearable devices. Paying with a Galaxy Watch brings greater speed and convenience to the in-store shopping experience.
Teg Dosanjh, Vice President, Samsung Electronics Europe, commented: “We are excited to be joining Mastercard´s Wallet Express to give consumers more flexibility to make payments almost anywhere they need to. Millions of people already choose Samsung Wallet, and this partnership will give more people the opportunity to use the safe and secure Samsung Pay service on their Galaxy device”.
Valerie Nowak, Executive Vice President, Product & Innovation, Mastercard Europe, commented: “We´re proud that Samsung are joining our Wallet Express programme, which provides consumers with a broad range of choice. It seamlessly integrates Samsung Wallet into their banking experience, allowing flexibility to decide how consumers make payments using their favorite Galaxy mobile and wearable devices”.
You can find out more details about Samsung’s partnership with Mastercard on Wallet Express in the UK over at Samsung’s website at the link below.
Source Samsung
Filed Under: Android News, Technology News
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Samsung has announced that Samsung Wallet in the USA will be getting mobile driving licenses it also intends to bring State IDs to the Wallet app as well, the first states to get this will be Arizona and Iowa in the USA.
“Mobile driver’s licenses are the new frontier of digital identity,”said Jeanie Han, EVP and Head of the Digital Wallet Team, Mobile eXperience Business at Samsung Electronics. “The addition of mobile driver’s licenses to Samsung Wallet is a perfect example of our commitment to creating technology for our consumers that truly makes life easier. By combining the best of Galaxy continuity and security, we are helping our users simplify their daily routines.”
In partnership with IDEMIA, the global leader in identity technologies and issuer of 55 million identity documents in the United States annually, including their digital equivalents in six states, Samsung will utilize the ISO/IEC 18013-5 standard to implement mobile driver’s licenses that are secure, accurate, and private. These are certified Digital IDs verified against and issued by state DMVs. Mobile driver’s license information is securely stored on a Samsung device, while being completely controlled by the license holder. By offering outstanding software and best-in-class security, Samsung looks forward to broadening the availability, usage, and acceptance of digital IDs across industries.
You can find out more details about Samsung Wallet on mobile driving licenses at the link below, Samsung is expected to make the feature available to more states in the future.
Source Samsung
Filed Under: Android News, Technology News
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