A library of snippets
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N LATE JULY, OpenAI began rolling out an eerily humanlike voice interface for ChatGPT. In a safety analysis released today, the company acknowledges that this anthropomorphic voice may lure some users into becoming emotionally attached to their chatbot.
From: OpenAI Warns Users Could Become Emotionally Hooked on Its Voice Mode | WIRED.
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One singer, Sofia Pitcher, managed to rack up huge streaming numbers between December 2023 and March 2024 for tracks like “Stone Age” and “Rock,” both of which came from her album, Stone Age. But Pitcher didn’t exist, according to an investigation by Spanish news outlet El Diario.
From: Spotify is full of AI music, and it’s ruining the platform – Fast Company.
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In their latest report, Where Are the Digital IDs? Three Questions You Must Ask, Christopher Miller, Lead Emerging Payments Analyst, and James Wester, Co-Head of Payments at Javelin Strategy & Research, examine the obstacles to digital ID adoption.
From: How Digital IDs Can Impact the Adoption of Digital Wallets – PaymentsJournal.
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Miller and Wester asked three main questions:
Are consumers interested in digital IDs?
Are digital IDs available?
Are they accepted?
After researching consumer preferences, the study found that consumers are largely interested in digital IDs. Unfortunately, they aren’t often available.
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Understanding Crypto Custodians: Proliferation Continues, a new from Javelin Strategy & Research, explores how the new wave of custodians has introduced a series of innovations to the industry. Joel Hugentobler, Cryptocurrency Analyst at Javelin and lead author of the study, lays out the considerations that financial institutions should consider when selecting a custodian, including storage methods, insurance coverage, and the full range of product offerings.
From: Crypto Custodians Could Bring a Revolution in Holding Assets – PaymentsJournal.
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For example, state DMVs largely favor the “mobile driver’s license” family of digital credential standards (ISO/IEC 18013-5 mDL), and OEM wallets also privilege the mDL standard. But many educational institutions, for example, prefer the OpenBadges standard by the 1EdTech educational consortium, an alternative format built on the W3C’s Verifiable Credentials. Numerous other use cases are built using W3C Verifiable Credentials, such as Microsoft’s Entra Verified ID product, C2PA for content authenticity (a specification supported by Adobe, OpenAI, and Google), and GS1’s digital supply chain integrity efforts. Further, the EU Digital Identity efforts include SD-JWTs.
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Tesco
The supermarket said the technology will give customers more information on each garment in its F&F fashion collection, including where the materials in each product have been sourced from, The Telegraph has reported.
The European Union is rolling out new rules, designed to boost supply chain transparency, that require companies across the EU to introduce digital product passports (DPPs).
DPPs are set to be rolled out over different industries over the next eight years, and will enable companies to give shoppers detailed information on the materials used in their goods, as well as their environmental impact.
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We like to call this the “trust nothing, verify everything” era, where nothing can be perceived as real until it’s authenticated.
From: Identity’s role in the deepfake dilemma | Biometric Update.
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a large swath of the public lacks the critical thinking to discern the real from the fake
From: Welcome to Fakesville: Inside an AI Nightmare That Tore Apart a School — The Information.
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Since, as Patrick Harding, Chief Architect at Ping Identity points out, research shows that less than half of Americans even know what a deepfake is, there’s a long way to go if education is the solution.
I’ve actually send a few different groups propose using the Internet’s Domain Name Service (DNS) as the basis for identity discovery. The idea essentially, is to use fields in the DNS record to act as a pointer to an associared identity so that when you go to the DNS and lookup dgwbirch.substack.com there is a field that will give (essentially) the public key for the user dgwbirch in the domain substack.com (with the implication that that there are other credentials that can be discovered this way, such is IS-OVER-18 or whatever).
There is a proposal for “High Assurance DIDs with DNS” to do this for decentralised identities. WIth the “did:web” method there is a link between the DID document and the domain where there relelvant DNS records are located. This means that the domain specified by the did:web identifier (for example, did:web:dgwbirch.substack.com) is also the location where you can find the supporting DNS records such as a TLSA, a resource record in DNS used to specify how a client should authenticate a service’s certificate. The record includes information that can help the client verify the service is legitimate and not an impostor..
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UK SME bank Cashplus has this week officially rebranded as Zempler Bank, in a brand overhaul which the bank says has cost hundreds of thousands of pounds and was two years in the making. The bank made the change, because the name Cashplus, launched in 2005, had become outdated for a digital bank in an increasingly cashless age.
From: UK SME digital bank Zempler Bank says rebrand costs hundreds of thousands of pounds – Tech.eu.
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