A library of snippets
xxx
“This episode should further strengthen the resolve for people who are fighting back against online ID schemes which are requiring countless providers to ask for drivers licenses in order to access services under the guise of protecting kids,”
From: FBI Probes Service Selling 153M+ Drivers Licenses – Krebs on Security.
xxx
xxx
n Monday, Aug. 31, a source alerted KrebsOnSecurity to a service advertised by a new user on the Russian cybercrime forum Exploit, offering access to digital scans of identity documents on more than 170 million people in North America. The source brought it to my attention because the proprietor of this identity theft service offered my Virginia drivers license as a free sample in their initial sales thread on Exploit.
The service, dubbed Nexus, claims to have more than 153 million drivers licenses for people in the United States and Canada, as well as more than 10 million identification cards; more than three million travel documents and/or international IDs; and at least 579,000 medical cards.
A quick look around Nexus finds they are likely not exaggerating about that 153 million number
From: FBI Probes Service Selling 153M+ Drivers Licenses – Krebs on Security.
xxx
xxx
USAFi is a permissionless ERC-20 digital security, a token standard that runs on the Ethereum blockchain, but it is not a cryptocurrency in the traditional sense.
Every USAFi token is backed by the Atlas America Fund, an actively managed ETF listed on Nasdaq under the ticker USAF and registered with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). The fund’s assets are held in custody at the Bank of New York.
xxx
Varun Datta of Truth Ventures says that the infrastructure behind the decentralised web of the future may ultimately matter more than the digital assets attracting today’s headlines. She suggests that industry participants are not going to remember which AI agent framework “won” and instead, it will be the payments and identity layers that count the most.
xxx
The Riksbank and the Ministry of Defence have identified digital-only banking as a potential threat to national security. In the event of power outages or communication failures, digital systems – including Swish and card networks – could become inoperable. As of 1 July, offline card payment capability has been made available (using a physical card and PIN) at participating retailers for the purchase of essential goods. New legislation also requires pharmacies and food shops to accept cash at staffed checkouts. A collaborative initiative has been launched to investigate the possibility of developing offline functionality for Swish.
xxx
Patrick Collison, who is a genius and a billionaire, so you should generally speaking be listening to him rather than me, recently questioned the lack of media coverage over the OpenAI/Hugging Face incident. Just to remind you, this incident or context, the Hugging Face incident involved AI agents from OpenAI gaining unauthorized internet access and exploiting vulnerabilities in Hugging Face’s infrastructure. He described the incident as “one of the most important things to happen” in 2026. I would certainly describe it as a signal for change. But surely it’s only a taster. Much worse is to come.
At approximately the same time that I was reading Mr. Collison’s remarks about the Hugging Face attack, I was reading about Anthropic’s introduction of the Model Hardware Standard (MHS) drivers designed to let AI interface with and control arbitrary devices. This is a signal for change because the world of agents has thus far been primarily limited to actions in the metaverse. Giving AIs a way to reach out and control things in the universe is a signicant step forward.
As to what they might control, Anthropic is talking about laboratory equipment and such like, but at approximately the same time that I was reading about their MHS, I was reading that Chinese companies are expected to sell 50,000 humanoid robots this year, which is triple last year’s figure. The Economist notes that the Chinese robot manufacturers have largely mastered the hardware behind the machines, but the software “is another matter”.
So… AI agents that can co-ordinate attacks, a standard protocol for those agents to control hardware and armies of humanoid robots with vibe-coded pea-brains? What could possibly go wrong.
If we take it as read that Chinese humanoid robots will either not implement Asimov’s three laws of robotiscs (I can’t remember what they are, but they should be that robots cannot kill people, robots cannot pretend to be people clicking on pictures of buses and robots cannot replace fintech thought leaders) or will implement Asimov’s three laws but using software with a swiss cheese security layer, then we are going to be looking back on the days of Hugging Face attacks as Eden.
We need real security in place to implement real guard rails.
Here, the Chinese have at least taken a first step by requirement humanoid robots to have identities. Every humanoid manufactured in the country will have a digital identity granted under the Humanoid Full Lifecycle Management Service Platform. The identities will be tracked throughout the robots lifecycle, from production through to recycling. The programme is led by the Humanoid Robotics and Embodied Intelligence Standardization (HEIS) committee, part of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology.
(Meanwhile, in the UK, the new Department for Business, Innovation, Science and Trade Secretary is Jonathan Reynolds, a trainee solicitor who has never work in business, innovation, science or trade.)
xxx
The Riksbank and the Ministry of Defence have identified digital-only banking as a potential threat to national security. In the event of power outages or communication failures, digital systems – including Swish and card networks – could become inoperable. As of 1 July, offline card payment capability has been made available (using a physical card and PIN) at participating retailers for the purchase of essential goods. New legislation also requires pharmacies and food shops to accept cash at staffed checkouts. A collaborative initiative has been launched to investigate the possibility of developing offline functionality for Swish.
xxx
xxx
There are $50 billion of $100 notes in circulation – almost 20 for every Australian. Given most people rarely see one, the suspicion is they are used and hoarded by criminals.
From: Why cash has made an unexpected comeback in Australia: new study – Cash Essentials.
xxx
xxx
A respected Oxford physicist has published, in a serious journal, a theory predicting that quantum computers hit a fundamental ceiling of at most 1,000 useful qubits which is comfortably below what breaking RSA requires.
From: Quantum Computers Will Never Break RSA, Says Oxford Physicist. But I Say Migrate Anyway.
xxx
xxx
There are $50 billion of $100 notes in circulation – almost 20 for every Australian. Given most people rarely see one, the suspicion is they are used and hoarded by criminals.
From: Why cash has made an unexpected comeback in Australia: new study – Cash Essentials.
xxx
Have a WordPress.com account? Log in now.
