Snippings

With every passing day it seems that the Canadian academic Marshall McLuhan, the father of media studies, was an astonishing visionary. Long before the internet, he began to think about the impact of communications technologies on society and way back in the 1960s predicted that in the new always-on, always-connected age there would be a breakdown of established structures and identities. The consequence, he asserted, would be a return to a more tribal society.

Now, as the marketers know, electronic tribes are different from the tribes of our ancestors. If you were a member of the Iceni, for example, under the leadership of early Brexit enthusiast Queen Boudica.  then you were not a member of the Belgae or the Cantiaci. Or, of course, the Romans. That is not true of modern tribes. Today each of us has multiple identities and multiple overlapping tribal allegiances.

Tribes, as McLuhan indicates, are a good way of thinking about identity in a digtial age.

 

 

 

 

 

As Tracey Follows, one the futurists I always listen to, said more recently,  any kind of networked media technology is going to create tribes.

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Financial giants like JPMorgan Chase have developed their own proprietary blockchain and launched their programmable dollars on top of it. And while in the ’90s Microsoft deployed a similar strategy against Netscape, which eventually proved ineffective, financial services are different. Regulation gives incumbents a chance to leverage their distribution and lobbying to slow things down to a halt while building a counteroffensive.

From: The Race to Dominate Stablecoins.

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Without stablecoins, crypto applications have to wrestle with volatility, and volatility makes financial contracts expensive.

From: The Race to Dominate Stablecoins.

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James Roberts, CommBank general manager of group fraud, comments: “CommBank customer scam losses halved compared to the previous financial year, with CommBank NameCheck technology preventing scam payments worth more than an estimated $40 million. NameCheck also stopped over $370 million in mistaken payments in the year to June 2024.

From: CommBank halves customer scam losses.

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Hackers stole six months’ worth of call and text message records of nearly every AT&T cellular network customer, the company said Friday, a breach that has the potential to reveal sensitive information about millions of Americans.

The company said in an SEC filing that it learned from an internal investigation that in April, hackers “unlawfully accessed and copied AT&T call logs” that were saved on a third-party cloud platform.

From: AT&T says hackers stole records of nearly all cellular customers’ calls and texts.

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metadata stolen at this scale has the potential to be a major national security threat as well as a problem for businesses and individuals.

 

But the hack announced Friday could pose an even greater threat to AT&T users because of a previous security issue. Some AT&T customer names were previously released in a breach announced in March, according to Jake Williams, vice president of research and development at Hunter Strategy, an IT consultancy. That incident also included Social Security numbers.

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Four people were charged with share market manipulation on July 23 following an investigation by the Australian Securities and Investments Commission.
ASIC alleges the four were behind a popular Telegram group, ASX Pump and Dump, that encouraged members to engage in a type of market manipulation known as a pump and dump scheme. In such a scheme, members of a group work to illegally drive up share prices before offloading the shares – now priced at an overinflated value – to unsuspecting investors.

From: Scammers set up new WhatsApp ‘pump and dump’ group after ASIC arrests.

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The ECB is investigating the deployment of the digital euro’s offline functionality on an embedded Secure Element (eSE) and embedded SIM (eSIM) of end-user’s devices. The ECB aims to improve its understanding of market, technical, and business aspects of such a deployment, to facilitate a timely and seamless rollout of the offline digital euro solution.

From: Experts from the industry are invited to join technical talks about the deployment of applications on Secure Elements on mobile devices.

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Heller’s biggest hope for GPT-5 is that it’ll be able to “take more agentic actions”; in other words, complete tasks that involve multiple complex steps without losing its way. This could include reading a legal fling, consulting the relevant statute, cross-referencing the case law, comparing it with the evidence, and then formulating a question for a deposition.

From: OpenAI’s GPT-5 Is Coming Out Soon. Here’s What to Expect. – Business Insider.

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What’s holding crypto back is the get-rich-quick vibe of greedy bros showing off their Bored Apes NFTs, and a seemingly endless cycle of rug-pulls and exit scams.

From: Trump’s Crypto Embrace Could Be a Disaster for Bitcoin | WIRED.

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Replacing personal IDs with anonymous digital ones would allow the state to monitor online activity while limiting companies’ ability to track consumer behaviour.

From: China’s data watchdog plans tighter control of internet users.

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