Predictions indicate that a nanometer-sized wave-based computer could solve equations in a fraction of the time of their larger, electronic counterparts.  
Booting up your laptop may seem like an instantaneous process, but in reality, it’s an intricate dance of signals being converted from analog waveforms to digital bytes to photons that deliver information to our retinas. For most computer uses, this conversion time has no impact. But for supercomputers crunching reams of data, it can create a serious, energy-consuming slowdown. Researchers are looking to solve this problem using analog, wave-based computers, which operate solely using light waves and can perform calculations faster and with less energy. Now, Heedong Goh and Andrea Alù from the Advanced Science Research Center at the City University of New York present the design for a nano-sized wave-based computer that can solve mathematical problems, such as integro-differential equations, at the speed of light.
One route that researchers have taken to make wave-based analog computers is to design them into metamaterials, materials engineered to apply mathematical operations to incident light waves. Previous designs used large-area metamaterials—up to two square feet ( ∼0.2 m2)—limiting their scalability. Goh and Alù have been able to scale down these structures to the nanoscale, a length scale suited for integration and scalability.
The duo’s proposed computer is made from silicon and is crafted in a complex geometrical nanoshape that is optimized for a given problem. Light is shone onto the computer, encoding the input, and the computer then encodes the solution to the problem onto the light it scatters. For example, the duo finds that a warped-trefoil structure can provide solutions to an integral equation known as the Fredholm equation.
Goh and Alù’s calculations show that their nano-sized wave-based computers should be able to solve problems with near-zero processing delay and with negligible energy consumption.

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The BlackByte ransomware gang appears to have made a comeback after targeting at least three U.S. critical infrastructure sectors, according to an advisory from the FBI and the Secret Service.

BlackByte is a ransomware-as-a-service (RaaS) operation that leases out its ransomware infrastructure to others in return for a percentage of the ransom proceeds. The gang emerged in July 2021 when it began exploiting software vulnerabilities to target corporate victims worldwide. While BlackByte had some initial success—security researchers tracked attacks against manufacturing, healthcare, and construction industries in the U.S., Europe, and Australia—the gang hit a rough patch months later when cybersecurity firm Trustwave released a free decryption tool that allowed BlackByte victims to recover their files for free. The group’s simplistic encryption techniques led some to believe that the ransomware was the work of amateurs; the ransomware downloaded and executed the same key to encrypt files in AES, rather than unique keys for each session.

Despite this setback, it appears the BlackByte operation is back with a vengeance. In an alert posted in mid-February, the FBI and the Secret Service (USSS) warned that the ransomware gang had compromised multiple U.S. and foreign businesses, including “at least” three attacks against U.S. critical infrastructure, notably government facilities, financial services, the food industry, and agriculture.

The advisory, which provides indicators of compromise to help network defenders identify BlackByte intrusions, was released just days before the ransomware gang claimed to have encrypted the network belonging to the San Francisco 49ers. BlackByte disclosed the attack the day before the Super Bowl by leaking a few files it claims to have been stolen.

Brett Callow, a ransomware expert and threat analyst at Emsisoft, says that while BlackByte isn’t the most active RaaS operation, it’s been steadily racking up victims over the past few months. However, he adds that because of recent action by the U.S. government against ransomware actors, the gang might take a cautious approach.

“The FBI and Secret Service advisory states that BlackByte has been deployed in attacks on at least three U.S. critical infrastructure sectors, including government. Interestingly, no such organizations are listed on the gang’s leak site, which could indicate that those organizations paid, that no data was exfiltrated or that BlackByte chose not to release the exfiltrated data,” he said. “That final option is not unlikely: since the arrests of members of REvil, the gangs seem to have become more cautious about releasing data, and especially with U.S. organizations.”

Callow said that while all signs suggest BlackByte is based in Russia, since the ransomware, like REvil, is coded not to encrypt the data of systems that use Russian or Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) languages. That “shouldn’t be taken to mean the attack was carried out by individuals based in Russia or the CIS.”
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“Affiliates may not be located in the same county as the individuals who run the RaaS,” he added. “They could be based anywhere—including the U.S.”

If you’ve noticed cryptic new icons popping up on your phone next to the 5G logo, you’re not alone. Carriers are expanding their 5G networks in a big way this year, and those little “UW” and “UC” logos you’re suddenly seeing represent the different varieties of 5G you’re encountering in the wild. Like Pokémon, but way more confusing.

Isn’t 5G just… 5G? Nope. There are low, mid, and high-band varieties of 5G spectrum. They all provide different levels of data speeds, and all major US carriers use all three. Naturally, they also have different names for them. Depending on your carrier, you may see abbreviations pop up next to the 5G symbol on your phone when you’re connected to the corresponding network. Here’s a quick guide to the different varieties of 5G in the US and the abbreviations carriers have assigned to them.

5G Spectrum Basics. Broadly speaking, low-band 5G has widespread signal reach, but speeds aren’t much faster than 4G LTE (if at all). High-band 5G is very fast—download a movie in seconds fast—but the signal is extremely limited. Then there’s mid-band 5G, which offers a kind of middle ground between the two: far-reaching signal and speeds that are noticeably faster than 4G, though not shockingly fast like high-band.

Verizon
5G UW: Verizon refers to both its high-band and mid-band 5G as Ultra Wideband (UW). Until recently, UW referred only to the high-band network, also called mmWave. Verizon put a lot of energy into building and promoting this network, but even in the limited areas where it exists, the signal can be difficult to find. Starting in 2022, Verizon started lighting up new mid-band 5G spectrum in major cities and classified it, too, as Ultra Wideband. Not confusing at all.

If you see the 5G UW icon on your phone, chances are you’re on the mid-band network. If you’re on mmWave, you’ll notice a big difference in data speeds. But if your data just seems noticeably fast, not ridiculously fast, then you’re probably on mid-band.

5G Nationwide: Verizon refers to its low-band 5G as 5G Nationwide. You’re connected to this network if you just see a 5G logo on your phone without “UW” next to it. And if your reaction to seeing that 5G icon pop up is something like “Huh, this doesn’t seem any faster than 4G,” you’re not imagining things. It’s generally not much faster than LTE. Certain Verizon plans, like its basic 5G Start unlimited plan, only include this low-band version of 5G. 

AT&T
5G Plus: A “5G+” logo on your screen means you’re connected to either AT&T’s high-band or mid-band spectrum. AT&T has put much less effort behind building out a high-band network outside of stadiums and airport terminals, so you’re not likely to encounter it just out-and-about. As of early 2022, mid-band AT&T spectrum is also sort of scarce since the carrier is taking a “kill two birds with one stone” approach to its mid-band expansion. A 5G logo without the “Plus” refers to the carrier’s low-band 5G network, which, it’s worth repeating, is not much faster than LTE.

T-Mobile
5G UC: T-Mobile’s “Ultra Capacity” network technically includes high-band 5G, but the bulk of the network—and T-Mobile’s advertising—is centered on the mid-band spectrum included in the name. While Verizon and AT&T are just getting their mid-band networks up and running, T-Mobile got a head start with the 2.5GHz mid-band spectrum it picked up when it acquired Sprint. If you see that “5G UC” logo on your phone, you can bet that’s the spectrum you’re connected to. 
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Extended Range: A 5G logo without “UC” indicates that you’re connected to low-band 5G, which T-Mobile calls “Extended Range.” Again, it’s not much faster than LTE, but coverage is more widespread than mid-band or high-band 5G. If you’ve seen a 5G logo on your T-Mobile phone and been unimpressed by the data speeds, that might be why.

Here are a few FinTech firms that are emblematic of how technology innovation is shaping the future of money across a variety of financial services.

Versapay—Accounts receivable
In its quest to rid companies of paper checks, Toronto-based Versapay has developed one of the first collaborative accounts receivable platforms, combining advanced invoicing, automation, and payments technology to deliver improvements and efficiencies for its 250,000 business clients. It has mushroomed during the pandemic, which fueled a demand for digital payments, including the digitizing of accounts receivable services. In a recent interview, Versapay CEO Craig O'Neill said a large majority of finance leaders will adopt digitized payments in the next few years. "Surveys show that 93% of finance leaders are saying they're going to digitize how they do business on both the accounts payable and accounts receivable side. There's going to be a sea change over the next couple of years, which will really change the face of business: paper goes away completely, including check stock, and will set people free to work wherever they want," he said.  

BestEgg—Personal lending and financial management resources
This Wilmington, Del.-based FinTech, is on a mission to help people feel more confident about their everyday finances by making money accessible through fast, simple, and easy personal loans. BestEgg has created a proprietary AI platform to deliver digital products including loans for debt consolidation, credit card refinancing, home improvement, moving, vacation and baby adoption. BestEgg recently introduced an online financial health platform to bolster confidence for consumers in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, which has had a debilitating effect on many peoples' finances. "The future of digital finance is human," says Sabrina DeVito, chief strategy officer for Marlette Holdings, which operates BestEgg. "Digital can come across as cold, but the winners are going to be those who not only use digital to create extraordinary experiences but also are human in how they come across," she said.

Kabbage—Small business financing
Small businesses took a beating during the coronavirus pandemic—large numbers shut down permanently, crippling local communities both economically and socially. Fortunately, more small businesses are forming in the shadow of the pandemic, and one FinTech is helping to make that possible. Kabbage, backed by American Express, is a one-stop FinTech resource for small businesses, providing access to cash flow solutions such as business checking, flexible funding, and payment processing services. It recently launched Kabbage Funding, which provides flexible lines of credit between $1,000 and $150,000, and Kabbage Checking for online business checking accounts.
"We saw a technology opportunity; a way to use an API to automate serving a business that couldn't have been served previously," said Kathryn Petralia, co-founder of Kabbage. Petralia says what she's seeing with small businesses is that there's more support by many other companies to serve these unserved small businesses. "They're a vital part of the economy—a vital part of job growth and so now we can do that using technology where we couldn't do it before because it was always hard to market to small business. But thanks to the data and these new technology platforms, we can do it," Petralia said.

UpTip—Cashless tipping
This new startup replaces cash tipping with an e-payment platform and enables users to provide ratings on service providers such as wait staff and limousine drivers. Companies are given a QR code after registering with UpTip. Customers scan the code on their smartphone to view the company's profile, give a star rating, leave feedback and, of course, provide a tip. Tips are deposited directly into a debit card or bank account of choice.
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The travel and hospitality industry is still struggling in the wake of COVID and so are the people whose lives and livelihoods have depended on tipping. Eric Plam, UpTip's founder, believes the pandemic has been a catalyst to help people figure out how much they value people who serve them and the services they provide. UpTip will help collect the data used to determine how much service staff are valued. "We really believe that personality, enthusiasm and merit should be rewarded and so this is one reason we enjoy tipping and that's one thing we do with our service and ratings platform—we try to raise people who are doing a great job because we want to help them advance in their careers", Plam said.

The Internet once held great promise to empower individuals, but it has become yet another path of control for bad actors. Today, authoritarian governments and companies around the world track and surveil individuals; data is not private and is sold for profit; some states algorithmically “score” their citizens; and propaganda and disinformation are rampant.

Thankfully, we are on the cusp of “Web3,” a next-generation Internet that could shift the balance back toward individuals. If the United States embraces Web3, it could also offer a pivotal advantage in its ongoing competition with authoritarian states, especially China.

What is Web3? To understand, it helps to go back to the beginning.

Think of Web1 as the original one-way Web pages of the 1990s—static sites coupled with the dawn of widespread email. Web2 came to life as the Internet became interactive, allowing users to log in and create their own content. At the same time, Google, Facebook and other massive tech platforms hosted “free” services in exchange for our data. Over subsequent decades, of course, the Internet has continued to advance and grow more sophisticated, but we mostly still operate in a Web2 world.

Now, we are closing in on a new version of the Internet—Web3—built on the blockchain, a technology that makes it possible to transact data securely, and smart contracts, which allow users to make agreements without relying on intermediaries, it’s what permits you to pay a vendor directly using cryptocurrency, no bank required. Web3 is still being developed and defined, but it’s clear that, fundamentally, it will offer a more decentralized version of the Internet.

Web3 is in its heady early days. New companies are forming daily to remove central platforms and bring decentralized, more secure services to users globally. Some focus on video-sharing services with no central repository—in contrast with YouTube or TikTok. Others are creating decentralized shared-storage options, unlike centralized cloud services.

These new services address many of the biggest problems of today’s Internet. Security is improved because there is no central database to hack. Privacy is protected because users directly control their data. Resiliency is built into Web3 through decentralization.

And this decentralization makes control by authoritarian governments much more difficult.

In 1999, it would have been hard to believe that one day teenagers would become millionaires by making videos of themselves playing video games or that political revolutions would be fomented on a website designed to share photos of college students.

Web3 could be equally revolutionary by shifting power back to individual users—which would be good for democracy and for the United States, for two reasons:

First, authoritarian states cannot abide private life because that’s where anti-governmental activities can percolate. China and Russia have already set up mechanisms to spy on and control the existing Web2 infrastructure through firewalls, censorship and coercion of technology platforms. Web3 would make such authoritarian controls much more difficult.

Second, although the United States still dominates Web2 in many ways, the Web’s current framework allows China to sweep up swaths of data to power its political and military artificial intelligence systems. The decentralization and personal data control of Web3 would make it much harder for China to maintain data dominance.

Web3 will, of course, be disruptive for good actors as well. Law enforcement will confront websites for which there are no “take down” notices and no corporate CEOs to enforce regulations. Intelligence agencies will need to find new ways to monitor terrorists. Seemingly invincible technology companies could go the way of Blockbuster. Nonetheless, the United States should not fear the rise of Web3—it should adapt to, invest in, and promote it.
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Geopolitics is about relative power and relative gains. Conceptually, Web3 is innately more beneficial to Western liberal democracies, which value democracy and personal privacy. This would return the advantage to the West and force China and other authoritarian states to confront their weaknesses, change them or fall behind.

SeaTable is software for combined information management. The software allows data of different types to be collected, prearranged, and analyzed. It uses an in-built spreadsheet web interface with customizable web forms for its data entry. 

SeaTable offers over 20 different column types, sorting, filtering, and grouping for its data organization. Besides the charts and pivot tables as traditional evaluation tools, it also offers application-oriented visualizations, including map views, gallery, Gantt charts, and Kanban.

The SeaTable software is available in 3 different versions, including on-premises, dedicated, and cloud variants. The on-premises variant is designed for large and medium-sized companies that don't want to outsource their data but prefer to store their own data center. Besides this, it offers a spreadsheet solution for teams that want flexible ways of working on projects, tasks, and ideas.

The spreadsheet solution doesn't limit users to texts and numbers; it also captures all information and stores documents, emails, URLs, check boxes, images, drop-down lists, etc. According to the CEO & Founder, Christoph Dyllick-Brenzinger, "SeaTable generates enormous added value for teams that want to work together on ideas, tasks or projects. With SeaTable, you have all your data in one place and can access it flexibly from anywhere. Since our launch in July 2020, we have developed rapidly. We generate many new customers every day who have the goal of working in a structured and, above all, more efficient way."

SeaTable Offers Unique Use Cases
SeaTable has different use cases. It can work as a bug, survey software, tracking system, project management tool, archiving solution, and a collaboration platform. Therefore, everyone, including agencies, developers, content creators, project managers, and market researchers, can use SeaTable to consolidate their project details.

The software can work as a collaborative database application. It offers advanced functions beyond what traditional spreadsheets can do. As a web application, it doesn't require any program installation, download, or configuration. All users require is to register on the platform and get their data organized.

"Over 100,000 downloads via Dockerhub and high customer satisfaction speak for our first-class and innovative software. With the development of SeaTable, it is always important to us to offer our spreadsheet solution across as many areas and industries as possible. Our spreadsheet & database hybrid supports many businesses around the world every day, either in the cloud or in their own data center," said Philipp Braun, CMO at SeaTable GmbH.
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As a collaborative tool, it allows the exchange of data with third parties in several ways. Through efficient management and organization, the collaboration between customers and the team is well facilitated and optimized. It allows users to switch to five languages, including English, Russian, Chinese, German, and French. Versions are available from free to €148 per year.

1Password, a leader in enterprise password management, recently launched Secrets Automation, an easy-to-use way to secure, manage and orchestrate the rapidly expanding infrastructure secrets required in a modern enterprise. Secrets such as corporate credentials, API tokens, keys and certificates can number in the hundreds for midsize businesses and many thousands for enterprises. This scale and complexity lead to huge security risks. Besides the new product launch, 1Password also completed the acquisition of SecretHub, a secrets management company that protects nearly 5 million enterprise secrets a month. The SecretHub team and CEO Marc Mackenbach will join 1Password immediately, adding expertise and engineers to speed up the 1Password Secrets Automation roadmap. 1Password Secrets Automation launches with a host of partnerships and integrations that will make it easy for developers and DevOps teams to integrate with the mission-critical tools and libraries they already use.  

1Password is the first line of defense for over 80,000 businesses worldwide protecting their employees, customers and intellectual property by securing passwords, financial details and other sensitive information. Today's launch and SecretHub acquisition signal a major expansion of 1Password, helping enterprises secure their infrastructure and machine-to-machine secrets alongside their human passwords. 

"Companies need to protect their infrastructure secrets as much as their employees' passwords," said Jeff Shiner, CEO of 1Password. "With 1Password and Secrets Automation, there is a single source of truth to secure, manage, and orchestrate all of your business secrets. We are the first company to bring both human and machine secrets together in a significant and easy-to-use way." 

Secrets Security Not Keeping Pace. With the massive expansion of Software as a Service (SaaS) applications, infrastructure secrets are multiplying as never before, scattered across multiple services and cloud providers. Companies often try to protect these secrets through a combination of home-grown solutions and awkward hacks. Human error within IT and developer organizations happens all the time and is compounded by risky shortcuts taken in the name of speed and productivity. 

Leaked secrets can have widespread ramifications; when an engineer accidentally placed a secret key into source code at Uber, the names, driver's licenses, and other private information of 57 million users were stolen. A recent GitGuardian report detected over 2 million infrastructure secrets exposed on code sharing platforms, growing 20% over the previous year. This underscores the massive and growing issue of properly managing secrets and protecting sensitive customer data. 

1Password Secrets Automation was developed to address directly these challenges. Key features include:

• The security of 1Password--store credentials, tokens and other secrets fully encrypted, using the same security that made 1Password the No. 1 enterprise password manager. 
• A single source of truth for all your secrets--gain complete visibility and auditability in a way that you can't when secrets are spread across multiple services. 
• Granular access control--define which people and services have access and what level of access they are granted. 
• Ease of use--built on 1Password's intuitive user interface, Secrets Automation delivers administrative simplicity, providing for good secrets hygiene. 
• Integration with your existing tools--Secrets Automation integrates with HashiCorp Vault, Terraform, Kubernetes and Ansible, with more integrations on the way. You'll also find ready-to-use client libraries in Go, Node and Python.

1Password and GitHub are also announcing a partnership: "We're partnering with 1Password because their cross-platform solution will make life easier for developers and security teams alike," said Dana Lawson, VP of partner engineering and development at GitHub, the largest and most advanced development platform in the world. "With the upcoming GitHub and 1Password Secrets Automation integration, teams can automate fully all of their infrastructure secrets, with full peace of mind that they are safe and secure."

A Roadmap Driven by Customer Demand. Kira Systems, an AI-based contract review and analysis software company, was one of many customers that requested 1Password expand its offering to solve their secrets management problems. 
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"We've been a 1Password customer for six years and have long wanted to centralize our secrets management," said Joey Coleman, Kira Fellow and director, systems with Kira Systems. "We store terabytes of sensitive data across many deployments, so it is critical for us to have a secure and efficient way of managing the credentials that give access to that data. Secrets Automation delivers an extra level of security while also removing the manual labor required to manage the volume of passwords and credentials."

Besides being one of the most powerful computers in the world and currently ranked 105 on the Top500 list, France's Jean Zay supercomputer is now the first HPC to have a photonic coprocessor.

Unlike traditional processors which use electric current, LightOn’s photonic coprocessor transmits and processes information using light. The company's photonics coprocessor was added to the Jean Zay supercomputer under a pilot program and represents not only a technological breakthrough but also a first for the industry.

So far, LightOn’s technology has successfully been used by a community of researchers since 2018. 

Now though, its photonic coprocessor will be available to select users of the Jean Zay research community over the next few months who will use the device to conduct research on machine learning foundations, differential privacy, satellite imaging analysis and natural language processing (NLP) tasks.

LightOn Photonic Co-processor. LightOn's Optical Processing Unit (OPU) uses photonics to speed up randomized algorithms at a very large scale. However, it also works in tandem with standard silicon CPUs and Nvidia's A100 GPU technology.

The company's Aurora 2 OPU powers its Appliance integrated computing unit which is built i so that it can be quickly and easily integrated in data centers or in this case, a supercomputer. According to LightOn, its Appliance can reach a peak performance of 1.5 PetaOPS or 1.5 X 1,000,000,000,000,000 operations per second and can deliver performance that is 8 to 40 times higher than GPU-only acceleration, like normal mainframes.

CEO and co-founder of LightOn, Igor Carror provided further insight into the pilot program that saw its Appliance integrated into the Jean Zay supercomputer in a press release, saying:

“This pilot program integrating a new computing technology within one of the world’s Supercomputer would not have been possible without the particular commitment of visionary agencies such as GENCI and IDRIS/CNRS. Together with the emergence of Quantum Computing, this world premiere strengthens our view that the next step after exascale super-computing will be about hybrid computing.”

At Amazon’s AWS re: Invent conference earlier this month, the company announced a new platform for mainframe migration and modernization called simply “AWS Mainframe Modernization,” which aims to help AWS customers get off their mainframes “as fast as they can” to take better advantage of the cloud.

Today, customers may take a couple of different paths to get off their mainframes—either they take a “lift and shift” approach and bring their application pretty much as is, or they may refactor and break the application down as microservices in the cloud. But neither path is all that easy, and the process can take months or even years to complete as customers must evaluate the complexity of the application’s source code, understand the dependencies on other systems, convert or re-compile the code, and then everything must be tested to make sure it all works.

“It can be a messy business and involves a lot of moving pieces. And it isn’t something that people really want to do on their own,” said Adam Selipsky, CEO of AWS, speaking at the press event. “And while AWS Partners can help with the transition, it can still take a long time,” he added.

The new solution, AWS Mainframe Modernization, instead will make it faster to migrate, modernize and run mainframe applications on AWS. The company claims that it can cut the time to move mainframe workloads to the cloud by as much as two-thirds, using its set of development, test, and deployment tools and a mainframe-compatible runtime environment. The solution will also help customers assess and analyze their mainframe applications for readiness, then help them choose which path they want to take—re-platforming or refactoring—and then come up with a plan.

If the customer wants to re-platform, the Mainframe Modernization solution will offer compilers to convert code and testing services to make sure no functionality is lost during the translation. If the customer wants to refactor or decompose the application—if the components could be run in Amazon’s EC2 service, in containers, or in the Lambda service, for instance—then they can use the Mainframe Modernization solution to convert the COBOL code automatically over to Java. A Migration Hub lets customers track their migration progress across multiple AWS Partners and solutions from a single location.
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Amazon touts the system as being an agile and cost-efficient (with on-demand, pay-as-you-go resources) managed service that offers security and high availability, scalability, and elasticity.

If you're among the millions of people who use payment apps like PayPal, Venmo, Square, and other third-party electronic payment networks, you could be affected by a tax reporting change that goes into effect in January. 

Payment app providers will have to start reporting to the IRS a user's business transactions if, in aggregate, they total $600 or more for the year. A business transaction is defined as payment for a good or service.

Prior to this change, app providers only had to send the IRS a Form 1099-K if an individual account had at least 200 business transactions in a year and if those transactions combined resulted in gross payments of at least $20,000.

The expansion of the reporting rule results from a provision in the American Rescue Plan, which was signed into law earlier this year. The aim of the provision is to clamp down on unreported, taxable income. 

Keep in mind, the new reporting threshold does not change your basic tax responsibilities. Income you receive for a good or service—including tips—has always been reportable and, most times, taxable. 

And you've always been responsible for reporting it on your tax return, regardless of whether a third party sends the information to the IRS.

The rule change also does not make other transactions suddenly taxable. For instance, your friend sending you money on Venmo to reimburse you for their half of last night's dinner tab will not become taxable.

The biggest change is the increased visibility the IRS will have into business income transactions, both those that have always been reported by the income recipient and those that haven't been. 

In theory, the only people who should be worried about the rule change are those who weren't reporting all their business income. "Those who are tax evaders, who violated the self-reporting rules and used the old thresholds to avoid paying taxes," said Scott Talbott, spokesperson for the Electronic Transaction Association.
But, tax experts say, the threshold change could mean some administrative hassles for many tax filers who use payment apps, whether or not they're engaged in business transactions.

"These third-party settlement entities may not know for sure if they are dealing with a business or an individual or if they are dealing with a payment for goods or services, or a non-taxable transaction. It is going to be up to the taxpayer, if they receive a 1099 in any form for a nontaxable event, such as splitting rent among roommates, splitting a dinner bill, or even selling something on eBay for less than you paid for it, to explain to the IRS that the 1099 was received for a non-taxable transaction," said Mark Luscombe, principal analyst for tax publisher Wolters Kluwer Tax & Accounting.

Also, Luscombe noted, there's a fair chance your business transactions may be reported in duplicate—for instance, if you're a freelancer or independent contractor, you might get a 1099-K from your payment app provider, as well as a 1099-NEC or 1099-MISC from your client for the same transaction.

"Again, the taxpayer will have to explain to the IRS that the two 1099s are for the same transaction," he said.

Each app provider must decide which procedures it will use to accommodate the rule change and will need to alert their customers about what will be required of them to better identify the nature of their transactions.

For instance, PayPal, which now owns Venmo, recently put out an initial Q&A for users of both apps. It noted that "In the coming months, we may ask you to provide tax information like your Employer Identification Number (EIN), Individual Tax ID Number (ITIN) or Social Security Number (SSN), if you haven't provided it to us already."
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The net effect of the new reporting requirements for users of payment apps may be that some will ask customers to pay them in cash—at least for smaller amounts, like tips. Or, as Luscombe noted, they may decide to only use an app for taxable business transactions and keep their other, non-taxable transactions separate.