Snippings

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Amazon has launched Pay by Bank for purchases in the UK, enabling shoppers on the site to complete sales and set up Prime membership via direct connections to their bank accounts.

From: Amazon rolls out Pay by Bank in the UK.

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Craig Milligan, 47, of Dumfries, used several aliases – including those of two dead men – to fraudulently open accounts and obtain credit cards.

From: Man who accumulated more than £1million in identity fraud crime jailed for four years. | COPFS.

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In October, hackers stole government IDs of 70,000 Discord users from a third-party service that Discord previously trusted to verify ages in the United Kingdom and Australia.

From: Discord faces backlash over age checks after data breach exposed 70,000 IDs – Ars Technica.

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Enter x402: The Web’s Native Payment Protocol
HTTP has always had a status code for payments: 402 Payment Required. It was reserved in 1999 but never standardized. Until now.

The x402 protocol finally gives meaning to that status code:

Client requests a resource
Server responds with 402 and payment requirements
Client signs a payment authorization locally
Server verifies and settles the payment
Client gets access to the resource
No redirects. No checkout flows. No human intervention. Just HTTP.

Nevermined’s Programmable Extension: nvm:erc4337
Standard x402 handles simple “pay X tokens for this request” flows. But AI agents need more:

Subscription models: “This agent is on our enterprise plan”
Credit systems: “Deduct 5 credits from my balance”
Usage caps: “Don’t let me spend more than $100 today”
Delegated payments: “My company’s smart account pays, not me personally”
That’s why we built the nvm:erc4337 scheme—an extension that makes x402 programmable.

From: Blog Posts.

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Apple is developing an AI-powered wearable pin that could be released as early as 2027, according to people with direct knowledge of the matter.

The device would position Apple to compete more effectively with OpenAI, which is planning its own AI-powered devices, and Meta Platforms, which is already selling smart glasses.

Apple’s pin is a thin, flat, circular disc with an aluminum-and-glass shell and features two cameras—a standard lens and a wide-angle lens—on its front face, designed to capture photos and videos of the user’s surroundings. It includes three microphones to pick up sounds in the area surrounding the person wearing it.

It also has a speaker, a physical button along one of its edges and a magnetic inductive charging interface on its back, similar to the one used on the Apple Watch. Apple engineers are aiming to make the pin the same size as an AirTag, only slightly thicker.

From: Apple Developing AI Wearable Pin in Challenge to OpenAI, Meta — The Information.

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The PoC will demonstrate how a mobile ID wallet app can serve as a trusted digital identity channel to authenticate calling customers.

From: GSMA, Telefónica Tech, TMT ID and Dock Labs collaborate to reinvent call centre authentication – GSMA Foundry.

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The data reveals that Monzo made the wrong call in 34% of 3,372 cases referred to the FOS during the course of last year. NatWest ranked second, deemed to have wrongly rejected 33% of 1,972 fraud complaints, and HSBC third, with 32% of 2,535 complaints wrongly rejected.

A spokesperson for Monzo told the Guardian that some of the cases related to fraud that had happened more than two years ago.

From: Monzo tops the charts for refusing refunds to scam victims.

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Klarna has joined Google’s Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP), an open standard designed to enable AI agents and commerce systems to interact across the shopping lifecycle. The announcement expands Klarna’s existing partnership with Google, which spans Google Pay, Google Store, Google Play and Google Cloud infrastructure. Klarna’s support for both the Universal Commerce Protocol and the Agent Payments Protocol reflects the company’s positioning within AI-driven commerce infrastructure development.

From: Klarna supports Google’s Universal Commerce Protocol | The Paypers.

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They said they later found that the people who had scammed them had stolen the identity of both the landlord of the property and a letting agency in order to carry out the scheme.

From: Friends left ‘in tears’ over £8k rental scam on London flat – BBC News.

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Thus far, the story of prediction markets in America has mainly been about betting on sports, particularly in states where sports gambling is illegal. In California and Texas, you can’t legally bet on an NFL or NBA game on DraftKings or FanDuel — but thanks to a contested regulatory quirk, you can on Kalshi, for now.

From: Prediction Market Bubble: Super Bowl Proves Polymarket, Kalshi Boom – Business Insider.

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