Bytes: What’s new in tech

Payment giants beef up security

MasterCard and Visa are teaming up on one important matter, said Larry Dignan in ZDNet.com. The two companies “have formed a working group to enhance payment security,” with a particular focus on chip and PIN technology. The credit card giants also said they hope to “prioritize the migration” to chip-based credit cards, which are already standard overseas but have been slow to catch on in the U.S. “The talk, as well as actual movement on enhancing the payment system in the U.S., was sparked by the data breach at Target that affected 110 million accounts.”

Forging an unforgettable password

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Learn to make strong passwords that you won’t forget, said Doug Aamoth in Time.com. Everyone knows that the best passwords these days are long and complex, featuring a mixture of uppercase and lowercase letters, numbers, and symbols. But “gobbledygook like that is hard for humans to remember.” One trick is to come up with a phrase that is easy to recall and then “use the first instance of each letter, number, and symbol from each word in the phrase, keeping punctuation intact as well.” For example, take “Hi! I’m Doug, and I’m a 35-year-old. Do you want to dance?” By keeping the first letter of each word and the punctuation, you get “H!ID,aIa35-y-o.Dywtd?” a “strong, long password that’ll be hard to crack and (hopefully) easy for you to remember.”

Looking for Bitcoin’s founder

Will the real Bitcoin founder please stand up? asked Nathaniel Popper and Rachel Abrams in The New York Times. Until now, information about the virtual currency’s inventor has been enticingly scarce. “Its developer went by the name Satoshi Nakamoto, but that is all that Bitcoin’s adopters seemed to know—or wanted to know.” But last week the revived Newsweek published a controversial cover story, claiming to identify a 64-year-old California man with a similar name—Dorian Satoshi Nakamoto—as the crypto-currency’s mysterious inventor. Dorian, quickly besieged by other reporters, has since denied his involvement, but Newsweek stands by its story. Adding to the confusion, an online account that is believed to belong to the “real” Bitcoin founder ended years of dormancy last week with a laconic posting: “I am not Dorian Nakamoto.”