Apple Pay stung in transactions using data stolen from retailers -WSJ

Apple Inc's mobile payment system Apple Pay has been hit by a wave of fraudulent transactions using stolen credit-card data from a spate of breaches at retailers, the Wall Street Journal reported, citing people familiar with the matter.

The transactions stemmed from breaches at retail giants including Home Depot Inc and Target Corp, the Journal reported on Thursday.

The majority of unauthorized purchases have been for big-ticket items bought with smartphones at Apple's own stores, the Journal said.

Apple could not be reached immediately for comment.

U.S. says inaction on online piracy risks public safety

The U.S. trade office on Thursday called for a crackdown on website name registrars who fail to take action against sellers of illegal goods such as counterfeit medicines and warned that turning a blind eye puts public safety at risk.

The U.S. Trade Representative also said it is keeping an eye on China's Alibaba Group Holding Ltd's consumer shopping website for sales of fake and pirated goods, but refrained from reinstating the site on its piracy blacklist.

USTR named a domain name registrar, a company which manages the registration of internet names, for the first time in its annual "notorious markets" list as an example of concern about some registrars not taking action to block or suspend sites selling illegal goods.

The registrar, Canada's Tucows Inc, said it took down dozen of sites every day but unlike some competitors, it considered all complaints carefully to ensure they were justified.

"We want to make sure that our registrants are protected and respected as well as making sure there are not bad actors on our system, and that requires striking a balance on a daily basis," said Graeme Bunton, Tucows manager of public policy.

USTR cited an Interpol report which found some drugs sold online were adulterated with rat poison and said the public faced "substantial risk" in finding safe online pharmacies.

"Registrars can play a critical public safety role in the Internet ecosystem. Ignoring that role, or acting affirmatively to facilitate public harm, is of great concern," USTR said.

It urged trading partners and ICANN, a California-based organization which oversees the introduction of new internet addresses, to "investigate and address this very serious problem."

USTR named 25 online marketplaces and 19 physical markets in the report. It decided against reinstating Alibaba's consumer-to-consumer shopping website Taobao.com, which was removed in 2012, and said it would continue to monitor the site.

An Alibaba spokeswoman said the company was dedicated to the fight against counterfeits. "We work closely with our government partners, brands and industry associations to tackle this issue at its source," she said.

Alibaba says it spent more than 1 billion yuan ($160.7 million) combating fake goods and improving customer protection from the beginning of 2013 to the end of November.

But a Chinese regulator said in January many products sold on Alibaba sites infringed trademarks, were substandard or fake.

Weather-battered US consumers skip mall, order in and head south

U.S. consumers battered by the wretched winter weather still afflicting much of the eastern half of the country have responded by ordering in rather than eating out, flying more frequently to Florida and cutting out trips to the mall, according to a Reuters review of company data.

Cities ranging from Chicago to Bangor, Maine, set all time records for the lowest February temperatures. Boston got more than 100 inches of snow, crippling mass transit and prompting the system's head to quit. Lexington, Kentucky, is covered in more than 20 inches of snow, the result of the biggest snowstorm since 1943. In Miami, it was 83 under sunny skies on Thursday.

Still, it's not all misery, all the time. While the relentless weather has dented traffic and sales for restaurants and mall retailers and frustrated delivery firms like United Parcel Service Inc and FedEx Corp, it's increased sales of snow shovels and rock salt from local hardware stores as well as Home Depot Inc and Lowe's Cos .

"Cold is like gold," said Matthew Maloney, the chief executive of online meal delivery service GrubHub Inc , based in Chicago and New York and affiliated with about 30,000 restaurants. In the afternoon before winter storm Juno hit the Northeast at the end of January, GrubHub's orders rose 45 percent, with cheese pizza and hot chocolate orders more than doubling, according to company data provided to Reuters.

If and when the weather gets nicer, the home improvement stores will look forward to customers looking to fix damaged lawns, gardens and siding. Carmakers, who posted disappointing February sales, could rebound if consumers opt to replace less reliable or damaged vehicles. Clothing stores may languish further if temperatures don't rise soon enough to persuade shoppers it's time to buy spring apparel.

"If people look outside and see walls of snow, they're not going to buy a t-shirt," said Simeon Siegel, an analyst at Nomura.

February shopper traffic in the U.S. fell 12.5 percent compared with same month last year, and sales overall fell 10.4 percent, according to RetailNext, a research firm.

The decline could have been worse if more of the storms occurred on the weekends because that's when shoppers restock groceries and visit the malls, analysts said.

At Amazon.com, the top sellers on Thursday included humidifiers, snow melt products and a $19.99 device called the Paw Plunger, used to clean Fido's paws, the company said.

Some restaurants will make up for lost sales through deliveries, but not everyone offers those services, and employees working from home because of the weather won't eat out either, said Chris G. Christopher, a global economist at IHS Consumer Markets in Boston.

"People are also skipping dates and family dining at restaurants," he said.

Some Americans sought warmer surroundings. While online travel bookings rose 3 percent in January compared with last year, reservations for travel to the U.S. southeast, including Florida, soared 24 percent, according to internal data provided by the U.S. Travel Association. Did we mention, it's 83 in Miami?

Japan Display says to build new LCD plant

Japan Display Inc said on Friday that it would build a new generation-6 liquid crystal display (LCD) manufacturing plant in Japan, as it targets future growth in demand for them.

The total cost of the plant in Ishikawa, central Japan, is estimated at 170 billion yen ($1.4 billion), Japan Display said in a statement.

Japan Display said it aims to start operations at the plant in 2016 and expects the move to increase its LCD capacity by 20 percent.

Last month, a person familiar with the situation told Reuters that Japan Display was considering building a plant to supply smartphone screens for Apple Inc and was negotiating with the U.S. company for investment in the project. ($1 = 120.0300 yen)

Apple lets companies fine-tune apps before watch debut -Bloomberg

Apple Inc has allowed some companies to test their apps on its yet-to-be-launched Apple Watch and adjust the tools to the watch's design, Bloomberg reported.

Facebook Inc, United Continental Holdings Inc , BMW AG and others have spent weeks at Apple's headquarters, working with the smartwatch to test and fine-tune apps that will debut alongside the device, Bloomberg reported, citing people familiar with the process.

The watch, which will let consumers check their email, pay for goods at retail stores and monitor personal health information, will be Apple's first major product launch since the iPad in 2010.

The company has scheduled a special event in San Fransisco on March 9 where it is expected to showcase Apple Watch, which will be launched in April.

Apple uses extreme measures to keep its work secret - Internet access is blocked inside the rooms and no outside materials can be brought in, Bloomberg reported, citing a person who attended the tests.

Apple spokeswoman Trudy Muller and Facebook spokeswoman Johanna Peace declined to comment. Reuters could not immediately reach United Continental and BMW for comment outside regular business hours.

German carmaker BMW said on Thursday its talks with Apple did not involve developing or building a car, denying a German magazine report.

Samsung Electronics says in talks with Indian state govts on new factory

South Korean technology giant Samsung Electronics Co Ltd said on Friday that it was in talks with Indian state administrations about building a third manufacturing plant in the country.

"While we are in talks with the state governments, nothing has been decided," Samsung said in a statement. It didn't say how much it might invest, nor what products any new plant might make.

The Economic Times, an Indian business newspaper, reported earlier on Friday that Samsung was considering building a new plant to make smartphones and other electronic goods. The paper, citing an unnamed source, said Samsung may invest between $500 million and $1 billion in the new plant.

U.S. FDA knew devices spread fatal 'superbug' but does not order fix

U.S. health regulators have known since at least 2009 that the medical devices at the center of the "superbug" outbreak at UCLA can transmit lethal infections but have not recommended any new safety requirements, a lapse that threatens patient safety, experts in hospital-acquired infections said.

The latest outbreak involving the reusable devices called duodenoscopes, which are inserted down the throat, may have exposed 179 patients at UCLA's Ronald Reagan Medical Center in Los Angeles and contributed to two deaths.

It is far from the first time medical investigators traced the sometimes-fatal spread of pathogens to the devices, which are manufactured by the medical units of Japanese companies Olympus Corp, Pentax and Fujifilm Holdings Corp . UCLA uses an Olympus model.

In 2013 and 2014, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration received a total of 75 reports of adverse events associated with the devices, resulting in harm to 135 patients, the agency said. Because healthcare providers do not always submit such reports, the FDA said, that is likely an underestimate.

After outbreaks, hospitals that began sterilizing the devices more rigorously than the FDA and manufacturers recommend did so have not had any further transmissions of dangerous microbes from the devices, the hospitals said.

In light of that success, "I would be in favor of the FDA putting out more stringent rules," said Dr. John Greene, an infectious disease specialist at Moffitt Cancer Center in Tampa, Florida, where four patients were treated for antibiotic-resistant infections after undergoing duodenoscope procedures at Tampa General Hospital in 2012.

Instead, the FDA on Thursday issued a "safety communication" warning healthcare providers that duodenoscopes' "complex design" may impede effective sterilization.

For the first time, the FDA said that even when hospitals adhered to the manufacturers' instructions for sterilization, patients have contracted multidrug-resistant bacterial infections from the devices. The agency did not, however, require more stringent safety procedures.

"The FDA punted," said Lawrence Muscarella, a healthcare consultant in Pennsylvania and author of a 2014 paper on superbug transmission via duodenoscopes.

FDA spokeswoman Leslie Wooldridge said the agency is continuing to determine what more can be done to reduce duodenoscope-related outbreaks and is also exploring "additional potential strategies to reduce the risk of infections."

MULTIPLE OUTBREAKS

Duodenoscopes, flexible tubes outfitted with tiny lights and advanced cameras, are used to diagnose or treat disorders of the gastrointestinal tract in about 500,000 procedures a year in the United States alone.

In 2009, soon after 16 patients in France were infected with a pathogen after undergoing the procedure, the FDA issued its first notice about the devices, warning the medical community they could transmit dangerous germs from one patient to another.

In 2013, physicians led by the Moffitt Center's Greene reported that endoscopes had transmitted an antibiotic-resistant pathogen to patients at two Tampa hospitals. That year also saw an outbreak from duodenoscopes at Advocate Lutheran General Hospital near Chicago, where 44 patients were infected with virulent, antibiotic-resistant bacteria called CRE, the strain in the UCLA outbreak.

The University of Pittsburgh Medical Center had a duodenoscope-related outbreak in 2012. Last month, Virginia Mason Medical Center in Seattle said a bacteria spread through contaminated scopes had infected 32 people over two years; 11 died.

Infectious disease experts in academia and government who have investigated ways to prevent outbreaks have identified three options, including sterilizing the devices with ethylene oxide gas after each use.

The Pittsburgh medical center "determined that the normal process" of disinfecting recommended by the manufacturer "failed to eliminate all bacteria," said spokeswoman Allison Hydzik. The hospital switched to ethylene-oxide sterilization.

Alternatively, hospitals could swab duodenoscopes after each use to collect any lurking pathogens and quarantine the devices until it is clear they are sterile. Virginia Mason took this approach.

Neither Virginia Mason nor Pittsburgh has had another case of duodenoscope-transmitted superbug infection.

But such steps are expensive.

Duodenoscopes cost about $40,000 and as much as $80,000, and when they are taken out of service for gassing or quarantining a hospital may need to spend an additional $1 million to have enough available, said Muscarella.

A third option would be for the FDA to require manufacturers to redesign the devices. The agency and researchers agree that the most problematic part is a movable "elevator" mechanism at the tip of the duodenoscope: Its moving parts have microscopic crevices where bodily fluids can lurk after standard cleaning.

Fujifilm spokeswoman Diane Rainey said the company is reviewing the FDA safety alert and is "working in cooperation with the FDA to evaluate and respond to concerns" about disease transmission.

Olympus spokesman Mark Miller said the company is "aware of reports of patient infections following procedures involving duodenoscopes," and is "monitoring this issue closely."

Pentax did not immediately respond to questions.