Snippings

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Those assurances have not quieted broader concerns about the glasses. Privacy and civil liberties organizations have challenged Meta’s reported work to add facial recognition, warning that the technology could allow wearers to identify strangers without their knowledge or consent.
The proposed feature, known internally as “NameTag,” could allow wearers to identify people and receive information about them through Meta AI.

From: AI glasses reveal widening gap between Meta’s privacy safeguards and AI ambitions | Biometric Update.

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AI and the work of finance. Financial services companies thrive on customer inattention. Could AI agents, with their infinite attention spans, be their downfall?

From: Follow the Money – by Marc Rubinstein – Net Interest.

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There is another possibility for where all the unaccounted-for cash is hiding out.

A forensic look at the data behind the RBA’s estimates opens up the possibility that far more of it is being used in criminal enterprises.

From: The mystery of Australia’s missing cash – ABC News.

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Detailed analysis of on-chain transfers with identified sending and receiving countries in August 2026 showed domestic transfers were around two-thirds of all identifiable transactions and three-quarters were regional. As the time of writing, cross-border remittances are far from the dominant driver of stablecoin demand.

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Cloudflare’s Monetization Gateway will allow eligible Cloudflare customers to sell their resources (such as content or APIs) headlessly to agentic buyers. But for that market to truly develop, agents need more tools to buy from merchants in a machine-native way. Wallets will add another tool to Cloudflare’s Agents SDK, enabling AI agents to easily purchase necessary APIs and content using micropayments.

There will be two types of Cloudflare Wallets: Account Wallets and Virtual Wallets.

Account Wallets are designed for humans who are owners and users of Cloudflare accounts. They will be able to add funds, delegate spend to virtual wallets managed by agents, and remove funds as needed.

Virtual Wallets, by contrast, are designed for agents and operate via API keys. Within a Virtual Wallet, an agent will be able to spend funds according to its permissions. Its maximum spend will be capped by the limit set by the owner of the Account Wallet. This framework gives agents freedom to act on behalf of users without constant manual approval while limiting an agent’s ability to overspend.

From: Announcing Cloudflare Wallets: The programmable wallet for the agentic Internet | Cloudflare Blog.

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At the core, it’s all about the control of the layer that translates commercial intent into calls across catalog, customer, inventory, pricing, campaign, order, and payment systems – better chat on a store is incidental. If Anthropic can make Claude the default reasoning engine and Managed Agents the default runtime for that layer, commerce becomes a high-frequency, measurable source of model demand. But if open protocols (i.e., GLM-5.3 Flash or Qwen3.8-27B) and model routing make intelligence interchangeable, most of the value will stay with Shopify, Salesforce, payment networks, payment service providers (PSPs), marketplaces, and the merchants that own demand, identity, transaction data, and systems of record.

From: Claude Commerce Agents: Anthropic’s Bet on Agentic Commerce.

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Digital Currencies are ideal for securities settlement. They are near real-time and irrevocable — with no Reg E constraints. They simultaneously swap ownership of fiat for ownership of a tokenized financial asset. Wall Street has big plans to tokenize many asset classes. Even domestically, this is a real opportunity for digital currencies.

From: Digital Currency utilities compete for Wholesale.

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The Financial Times reported that Meta’s super sensing prototype would continuously collect audio and take photographs at frequent intervals. The resulting information could allow a wearer to ask the AI what happened during the day, where an object was left or what was said during an earlier encounter.

From: AI glasses reveal widening gap between Meta’s privacy safeguards and AI ambitions | Biometric Update.

This will turn into VAR for real life and I’m nor sure whether to embrace it or to shun it all costs. Just as I want to throw things at the television and rant about the end of the beautiful game when a VAR hold up runs over 30 seconds (seriosuly, if you can’t overrule an onfield decision within 30 seconds how can it be a “clear and obvious” error) so I may end up regretting getting some smart glasses. I can picture home life in the new era…

“Did you run the dishwasher?” /  “No, you didn’t ask me to run it” / “Let’s go to VAR… Meta please replay the conversation in the hallway at approximatelt 8.50am today”

Ruh roh, as they say.

The furore over smart glasses is in many ways odd. Why are people so upset about smart glasses taking pictures of them when everyone is taking pictures of everyone using smartphones all the time? If people are worried about their off hand banter being played back in court then surely they should be campaigning againt pocket recorders. And if the issue is covert video recording then surely we should be banning pens with camera in them.

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Those assurances have not quieted broader concerns about the glasses. Privacy and civil liberties organizations have challenged Meta’s reported work to add facial recognition, warning that the technology could allow wearers to identify strangers without their knowledge or consent.
The proposed feature, known internally as “NameTag,” could allow wearers to identify people and receive information about them through Meta AI.

From: AI glasses reveal widening gap between Meta’s privacy safeguards and AI ambitions | Biometric Update.

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There are legitimate privacy concerns, of course. People are rightly concerned about the combination of automatic face recognition (AFR) and smart glasses — which, incidentally, is the main reason why I would buy them — and the invasion of privacy that might follow, but there must be ways to develop a new etiquette for the new technology.

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Twenty-one banks and asset managers said Tuesday that they will form a company to issue a dollar stablecoin, aiming to bring it to market in the first half of 2027. The institutions committed to setting the company up in the second half of this year, subject to closing conditions, and have not yet named it.

Citi, Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, Capital One, PNC Financial Services, Scotiabank and TD Bank Group make up the North American contingent, alongside asset managers Fidelity Investments and WisdomTree. Europe brings Deutsche Bank, UBS, Banco Santander, BBVA, Commerzbank, Crédit Agricole, Lloyds Banking Group and Rabobank. MUFG Bank, Sirius International Holding and Standard Bank complete the roster, listed by the group under East Asia, the Middle East and Africa respectively. Boston Consulting Group and Brunswick Group are advising.

From: Citi, Goldman and 19 Other Financial Firms Commit to Issuing a Dollar Stablecoin – Unchained.

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Here’s the first thing most developers get wrong: ISO 20022 is not a message. It’s a catalog of around 800 messages, grouped by business domain.
Three families carry the vast majority of retail and wholesale payment traffic:
PAIN — Payment Initiation. Messages between a customer and their bank. “Please send this money.”
PACS — Payment Clearing and Settlement. Messages between banks, via a clearing system. “Bank-to-bank instruction to move funds.”
CAMT — Cash Management. Messages from a bank to a customer. “Here’s your statement. Here’s a notification. Here’s the status of that investigation.”
Other families exist — ACMT for account management, REDA for reference data, ADMI for system-level admin — but PAIN, PACS, and CAMT are where a .NET developer spends 90% of their time.

From: ISO 20022 Explained : A Visual Guide to PACS, PAIN, and CAMT | by Saifullah Hakro | Readers Club | Medium.

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