Category Archives: Uncategorized

xxx Start-up bank Monzo said its phone lines are regularly inundated with calls from suspected scammers complaining that their accounts have been frozen. The bank will shut down accounts it suspects of being fraudulent but, not wishing to tip off a potential criminal, will not inform its owner why. Oblivious criminals often then ring upContinue reading “Why your fraudster could be getting better customer service at the bank than you are”

A generation back, in the July 2000 edition of Harper’s Magazine, Dennis Cass wrote (in an article on Silicon Valley) about “the kinds of things you’ve heard bores like Nicholas Negroponte drone on about in Wired magazine, like shoes that can send e–mail to other shoes”. I wrote this down at the time, because I hadContinue reading “POST It’s worse than you think”

xxx The Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) took over policy responsibility for the digital identity market in June and is working on a plan to stimulate an ecosystem of providers based on government-backed standards for interoperability of digital identities, and opening up application programming interfaces (APIs) to public sector databases such asContinue reading “Government to end investment in Gov.uk Verify digital identity system”

xxx Which?’s survey found that over 75% of low-income households rely on cash, as well as over 80% of elderly households. From Move to Cashless Society Will Disproportionately Affect Pensioners & the Poorest in UK. xxx

xxx Britain’s Royal Mint has frozen plans to launch a digital gold token after a partnership with U.S. exchange group CME failed and the government vetoed a plan to have the tokens trade on a cryptocurrency exchange, three sources told Reuters. From Wary of crypto, UK government blocks Royal Mint’s digital gold | Euronews. xxx

xxx Victoria Police earlier this month warned against falling for a scam that saw four people lose a total of AU$50,000 after depositing funds into a bitcoin ATM. The Maribyrnong Crime Investigation Unit said the four victims from the eastern suburbs were told that they owed a tax debt and that if they did notContinue reading “Australian woman arrested over AU$450,000 Ripple theft | ZDNet”

xxx Fraudsters are now using ‘contactless skimming’ machines to read credit card information right out of your pocket, then use a merchant account to make contactless payments. In a 2013 study published by the University of Surrey, a team managed to ‘successfully receive contactless transmission from distances of 18 to 31 inches’ using a skimmingContinue reading “Contactless payments hit record levels as contactless fraud follows | The Paypers”

According to a number of press report, the Abu Dhabi police are warning local residents that money may be stolen from their bank balances through “electronic magnetisation” and “exploitation of contactless payment technology”. I’m pretty sure that I would be concerned about electronic magnetisation too (if I knew what it was) so I will takeContinue reading “Losing contact (with reality)”

xxx “This isn’t anonymity in the sense of real names versus fake names. The names we use are irrelevant. This is about a mental detachment from physical reality. The design of our devices acts to transport us into an alternate universe.” From “A Unified Theory of Everything Wrong with the Internet”. xxx

xxx “Digital forms of identity systems, when fully developed and deployed, are expected to be more powerful and efficient tools of identification than legacy paper systems. The power and efficiency proffered by such tools, both pose and mount a great urgency to identify, and to mitigate modern risks associated with system breach and the compromiseContinue reading “A Failure to “Do No Harm” – India’s Aadhaar biometric ID program and its inability to protect privacy in relation to measures in Europe and the U.S. – Technology Science”