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‘Bank Transfer by Worldline’ has been operating in pilot mode during the last nine months and is now integrated into around 500 of Worldline’s existing merchants’ online payment services and pay-by-link services.

Covering both online and invoice payments, the product features low-code integration, rapid settlement notifications, hassle-free refunds, and consolidated payout, reporting, and reconciliation for both domestic and cross-border transactions.

The launch takes in Austria, Belgium, Croatia, France, Germany, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Slovenia and Spain, with Poland, Slovakia, Czech Republic and Hungary set to come onstream later this year.

From: Worldline moves into account-to-account payment market.

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Several factors, however, make it harder to create agents than chatbots. One is data. Unlike chatbots, which scrape information from the web to answer questions, agents require data on the way tasks are performed, including the sequencing of actions and the reasoning behind them. For routine tasks, such as processing a customer order, that may be straightforward. In many cases, though, it will be difficult to find sufficient data to train the tool.
A second problem is trust. Checking whether a chatbot has given a right or wrong answer is usually easy. Determining whether an ai agent has booked the best restaurant or holiday it could within your budget may be more difficult. Google deliberately prevents Mariner from spending money in case it garbles the decision. Users may also balk at providing ai agents with sensitive information about, say, their purchase history, which may be required for the tools to function properly.
A final problem is cost. In order to reason, plan and solve problems on behalf of users, ai agents need access to models that can handle complex tasks. They also require low latency and the ability to interact with other tools such as a web browser, as well as plenty of memory to provide a service tailored to the user. All that is tricky and expensive to build, and requires lots of computing power to run.

From: What do the gods of generative AI have in store for 2025?.

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As “Stranger Things” attests, a generation of storytellers who grew up playing d&d are coming of age. David Benioff and D.B. Weiss, the creators of the tv adaptation of “Game of Thrones”, both played d&d as teenagers; Jon Favreau, director of “Iron Man” and creator of Disney’s “The Mandalorian”, has also attributed his creative chops to the game. “People learn something about how to administer fantastic worlds and shepherd characters through them from playing this game,” says Mr Peterson, the game historian.

From: How did “Dungeons & Dragons” win?.

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Since its invention 50 years ago, d&d has been seen as a niche, geeky pastime. But recently the game has made the jump from nerd culture to popular culture. It has been adapted into a Hollywood film and a video game. The movie, “Dungeons & Dragons: Honour Among Thieves”, grossed more than $200m. “Baldur’s Gate 3”—the bestselling game of 2023 on Steam, a pc gaming platform—made an estimated $660m. According to Wizards of the Coast, the firm behind d&d, the game has more than doubled its fan base in the past five years, from 40m to 85m globally.

From: How did “Dungeons & Dragons” win?.

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That information includes names, contact information, dates of birth, national identification numbers, copies of government-issued identification documents, other identification documents such as utility bills, bank account numbers, MoneyGram Plus Rewards numbers, transaction information and, for a limited number of consumers, and criminal investigation information.

From: MoneyGram says hackers stole customer data.

Wait, what? The hackers got “criminal investigation information”? That sounds like it could be worth quite a bit of money to criminals!

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The sheer volume of data out there, the hacked credentials, the Social Security numbers and the fake IDs are fodder for scammers to pose as someone else in a bid to commit fraud. The Identity Theft Resource Center estimated that there were about 1.1 billion data breach victims in the first half of 2024, an increase of 490% compared to the first half of 2023.

From: Stop Real Estate Fraud: Is the Government-Issued ID Fake?.

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As David Birch points out in Forbes, templates “are much more secure because they do not store the biometric itself but an abstraction of it.” It does not eliminate the risk, he notes, but it dramatically reduces the ease, cost-effectiveness and scalability of attacks based on stolen templates.

From: The fallacy of hacked face biometrics’ vulnerability | Biometric Update.

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Online gaming sits atop an unregulated, complex, financial ecosystem. Forget earning a few quid washing cars and deciding whether to spend it on football stickers or save for later – kids are entering the world of money online, alone. And they find a universe of message board NFT offers and dodgy in-game loot box trades.

Predictably, loads of them are getting scammed, ripped off, and duped. And no-one seems to care.

From: Kids are getting constantly scammed online too.

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Some troves of bitcoin are particularly susceptible to quantum thievery. In bitcoin’s early days, it was held in addresses with exposed public keys, including the roughly one million coins believed to belong to Satoshi Nakamoto, bitcoin’s mysterious creator. Some 1.72 million bitcoins—valued at more than $160 billion at current prices—are held in such addresses,

From: A Looming Threat to Bitcoin: The Risk of a Quantum Hack – WSJ.

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But big tech companies won’t give up control over identity easily. By integrating elements of decentralized identity—such as verifiable credentials—and shifting parts of AI training and inference to users’ devices, they can address privacy concerns while preserving their gatekeeping role, ultimately reducing the value of decentralization. Governments will also want to retain significant control over digital identity, as it is crucial for law enforcement, national security, taxation, and the delivery of public services

From: Can Crypto’s Scarcity Tame AI’s Infinite Abundance?.

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