Snippings

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The detectives outlined how the two accused were unemployed but there was just more than €7 million in their accounts. Gardaí identified €14.7 million in cryptocurrency wallets, of which €4.4 million has been seized or frozen by the investigation team.

Their apartment was searched – resulting in an alleged seizure of €20,000, gold coins and five envelopes with “seed words” to access a cryptocurrency wallet.

From: Married couple charged over alleged €21m international money laundering operation – The Irish Times.

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For Amazon customers, identity proofing is not a requirement. “We don’t know the underlying human,” Paul Grassi of Amazon says. “That’s not a bad thing.” He describes Amazon’s protections against account takeovers as “very stringent.”
In the case of vendors, or consumers purchasing age restricted goods, however, the company must verify their identity or age.

From: Amazon is ready to use digital identity, even though its hard | Biometric Update.

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Amazon currently uses “the simple demographic check” and ID document and selfie biometrics checks, “which we’re starting to hate as well from a usability perspective and a security perspective,” among its current measures, Grassi says. The ecommerce giant is planning to start accepting digital IDs like mobile driver’s licenses (mDLs) and European national IDs presented from mobile wallets in 2025, he revealed. Federated identity based on Aadhaar will also be added.

We tend to think about the use of AI in financial services as a way to deliver products and services, or (as I am constsntly insisting) a way to make customers 100x smarter.

 

Maria Lucia Passador — Department of Law, Bocconi University; Harvard Law School and European Banking Institute — wrote a paper about this called “AI in the Vault: AI Act’s Impact on Financial Regulation” in which she advances the view that AI haas the potential to improve banking supervision by enhancing the efficiency, effectiveness and consistency of practices and tools. Across a rapdily evolving financial landscape, AI can overcome some of the challenges to, and constraints of, the existing supervisory framework by streamlining processes such as data collection, analysis, and reporting. Furthermore, AI can enhance the effectiveness of supervision by improving the quality of risk assessment and monitoring helping to proactively detect (and, hopefully, prevent) risks and misconduct.

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Eric Schmidt says drones are the future of warfare, calling tanks “useless.”

From: Ex-Google CEO Says AI Combat Drones Will Make Tanks ‘Useless’ in War – Business Insider.

I said that tanks were useless (on the Jeremy Vine show, as it happened) and whatever. Now because Eric Schmidt says it, it’s news. So unfair.

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Overall, current drones seem to increase the vulnerability of fixed assets such as tanks or troop formations, or for that matter oil refineries or Moscow or Ukraine fixed landmarks.  A very large and sophisticated U.S. aircraft carrier might be able to repel the drones (albeit at high dollar cost), but a bunch of tanks in an open field will not have comparable protection.

From: Do current trends in drone technology favor offense or defense? – Marginal REVOLUTION.

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Data from the battlefield suggest that the hit rate for these ai-guided drones is currently above 80%. That is higher than the rate of manually piloted drones.

From: How Ukraine uses cheap AI-guided drones to deadly effect against Russia.

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Clients will not immediately abandon their existing counsel in favor of those at a law firm that introduces a dashboard for matter management. Incumbency has benefits. The cost of switching lawyers is significant and not worth incurring for marginal improvements in the user of experience. But I know, deeply, that product matters. At some point, marginal improvements add up, and markets flip.

From: The Future of Legal Services Is Product | by Tom Brown | Sep, 2024 | Medium.

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A digital identity is a digital representation of a person or things about them. It lets people prove these things without presenting physical documents and all of the information they contain.

From: Data (Use and Access) Bill factsheet: making lives easier – GOV.UK.

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UBS Digital Cash uses a private blockchain network to which only the permissioned clients have access. The settlement is performed via smart contracts, which, for example, automatically execute payments as soon as predefined conditions are met.

From: UBS pilots blockchain-based payment system.

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As of July 29, 2024, governments around the world hold 2.2% of Bitcoin’s total supply, or 471,380.6 BTC, worth $32.7 billion.

From: Governments Now Hold 2.2% of All Bitcoin | CoinGecko.

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The US has something like $20 billion worth (at current prices).

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“I can assure you that the humans in the rest of the world, all the normal people — because you all are not normal, sorry to say, you’re special in some way — the normal people are not ready,” Schmidt told the Princeton crowd.

From: Ex-Google CEO Eric Schmidt Says ‘Normal People’ Are Not Ready for AI – Business Insider.

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One of the things that’s worth saying is that none of us thought, when we invented social media, that we would become a threat to democracy

From: Ex-Google CEO Eric Schmidt Says ‘Normal People’ Are Not Ready for AI – Business Insider.

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I remember when an old friend of mine, Keith Gold (who is something of an expert in banking technology) told of his experiences with his bank. Keith is the Treasurer of his local Bridge Club. In this capacity, he recieved an invitation from his bank to open a business savings account online. As that sounded like a reaonable idea, he tried to do it online but without success, so as a desparate last resort he telephoned the bank. After some 20-30 minutes talking to two different memebers of staff, he was sent a link to follow for online account opening. Needless to say, it did not work this time either, so he telephoned again and went through another 20-30 minutes with two more members of staff before the account was opened. As he pointed out at the time, he gave up an hour and a half of his time to speak with four different bank employees to make a deposit of around £5,000 and an interest rate of around 1%.

This is totally unsustainable, and is the sort of thing that any reasonably competent AI working on this behalf could have taken care of in a few minutes. The AI woul dnot bother telephoning the bank, it would first of all go through a discovery phase, pinging banks with business accounts to get the interet rate (and terms and conditions, of course) and then choosing the best one based on the rates and rights. After a few minutes it will have made the best choice and can then use open banking to move the Bridge Club’s money to the best destination, all while Keith enjoys a few rubbers.

AI can’t come soon enough for me. My bank sent me a message saying that that I could borrow up to £20,000 (or whatever it was) for my business and I thought it might be a good time to get a new MacMini, MacBook Air and a few other bits and pieces. So I clicked on the link, which took me to a page that told me to call my business banking team by phone, which of course I couldn’t be bothered to do. I look forward to the time when I can tell my trusted Money Supermarket bot to go and get me a business loan then use it to order the new kit.