Snippings

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An FBI counterintelligence agent is accused of taking about $1 million worth of cryptocurrency from the digital accounts of an overseas suspect in a U.S. criminal investigation, according to court documents.

From: FBI Agent Charged Over Alleged $1 Million Cryptocurrency Theft – WSJ.

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At Uber, AI agents are often deployed as workloads, often managed by Kubernetes®. The Michelangelo platform associates an AI agent to a workload. The Agent Registry serves as the source of truth, storing this registration. This is later used by the Security Token Service to verify the agent.

From: Solving the Identity Crisis for AI Agents.

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Six chartered US banks are now collaborating on a shared tokenized deposit network. Fireblocks powers the institutional infrastructure layer underneath it. That network is the Cari Network, and together with its Design Partner Banks, it provides another proof point that the inter-bank problem in transaction banking is solvable when banks build together, rather than waiting for a single institution or regulatory standard to define the market.

From: A New Inter-Bank Tokenized Deposits Model for US Banks: The Cari Network x Fireblocks | Fireblocks Inter-Bank Tokenized Deposits: Cari Network & Fireblocks.

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“AI is going to increasingly determine what brands show up and is presented back to the customer for their consideration, and so it’s an opportunity for businesses to think about making sure that they’re discoverable.” — Margaret Ryan, SVP, Head of Product, Amex Digital Labs.

From: How agentic commerce is changing the customer experience | American Banker.

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Assistive technologies for PVIs are increasingly leveraging advances in computer vision and machine learning to provide access to information that is already available to sighted people, including facial expressions [4, 9], gaze [108, 109], and activity [2, 9]. However, the intention to provide ‘equal’ access to information raises the question of fairness in the context of assistive technologies.

From: Shared Privacy Concerns of the Visually Impaired and Sighted Bystanders with Camera-Based Assistive Technologies | ACM Transactions on Accessible Computing.

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Having identified these numerous ethical and social challenges, we anticipate that asymmetry and the lack of informed consent will be the most crucial. We would boldly argue that a Kantian implementation of pervasive face recognition systems will be considerably more acceptable than a role-based implementation (cf. Perera et al. [63]). In a broader sense, the quality and quantity of information a pervasive face recognition user is willing to disclose would determine the quality and quantity of information that user can receive from others. This would also implement a mechanism of implicit consent. Such an implementation, grounded in Kantian principles of universalisability—that a moral judgment or rule must be applicable to everyone and in every relevantly similar situation—would ensure that all individuals have access to the same level of information rather than being led by socioeconomic standings.

From: Why Do You Know That About Me?— Ethical Implications of Pervasive AR And Face Recognition | Proceedings of the 2026 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems.

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Mastercard will enforce new technical requirements across Europe starting in early 2027 to ensure payments can proceed during telecommunications or electricity outages.
The measure follows an April 2025 blackout across Spain and Portugal, which left an estimated 55 million people unable to process digital transactions.
Beginning in February 2027, every newly issued Mastercard card in the region must carry offline functionality.

From: Mastercard to introduce offline payment rules across Europe.

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The mechanism operates by “securely storing” designated transaction caps directly on the card’s microchip.
If a terminal loses network access, it can approve purchases locally up to a ceiling of €200 ($224.64) per transaction, determined beforehand by the cardholder’s bank.
The transaction records are subsequently forwarded for clearing once terminal connectivity is restored.

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Japan’s financial services regulator has warned banks not to accept driving licences as proof of identity to open new accounts as the country reels from a series of cyber attacks that have hit rail operators, car manufacturers, karaoke chains and even the police.

From: Japan declares cyber space emergency as attacks soar.

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As participants became more cognitively fatigued, they were much less likely to choose the more demanding option, even though it could pay more. This decision let us understand how cognitive fatigue can make people value possible rewards versus greater effort.

From: How mental exhaustion changes the choices you make | Scientific American.

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I had an interesting back-to-the-future moment while leafing through The Economist recently. This concerns location services in the absence of GPS (because GPS can be, and in fact is, jammed).

The idea is to take advantage of the Doppler shift in signals being bounced off of satellites, which currently works with errors of 100m up to more than 1km. One way to obtain greater accuracy is to place a master receiver at a known location to compare the Doppler shifts expected from a satellite’s forecast trajectory with those it actually observes, and broadcast corrections to receivers at unknown locations.

Many, many years ago I worked on a similar system that was used to obtain greater accuracy on GPS location services in the days when the signal used to be degraded for non-military users. In those days, a satellite channel was used to broadcast corrections from a GPS receiver in a known location (I think it was in Aberdeen, if memory serves) out to ships and oil rigs in the North Sea.