Snippings

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Australian Minister for Government Services Bill Shorten also revealed that credentials such as New South Wales licenses will be admissible to the state’s equivalent of a digital wallet.
In June, New South Wales took an important step towards its national digital identity wallet scheme by launching its first digital credential, a digital first-aid certificate. Service NSW also added a  digitized Working with Children Check (WWCC) late last year.

From: Australia makes headway in digital ID interoperability | Biometric Update.

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“Acquiring/replacing a national ID in Uganda is likened to the pain of getting a kidney donor,”

From: Refugees In Uganda Turn To Bitcoin Due To National ID Restrictions.

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Investors in digital currencies are also more likely to be men, rely on fringe social media sources, believe in conspiracy theories and feel victimised.

From: Scientists claim crypto owners are likely to be narcissistic, psychopathic or sadists | The Independent.

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The latest numbers from TRM’s threat intelligence team show twice as much money has been stolen in hacks and exploits in the first half of 2024 compared to the same period in 2023.

From: Thefts From Hacks and Exploits Surge in First Half of 2024 | TRM Insights.

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Curve’s one-to-many card routing (allowed in EEA) allows similar functionality to Visa’s new Flexible credentials. Where Curve operates under the existing transaction mechanics, Visa’s Flex credential enables retrieval of the underlying card. It allows each Issuer to approve the “wrapping” entity or wallet just as they do under staged digital wallet rules. Both Visa VTS and MA MDES allow issuers to approve “wallets” and provision payment tokens. There are no US exceptions to this process.

From: ApplePay gets iOS Competition – Curve | Noyes Payments Blog.

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Drones have broadened the buffer zone between Ukrainian and Russian combatants from a couple of kilometers to as much as 20 km, Ukraine’s deputy minister of digital transformation Alex Bornyakov told POLITICO. “Anything you put in this ‘gray area’, it can be destroyed by drones,” he said.

From: ‘Our Oppenheimer moment’ — In Ukraine, the robot wars have already begun – POLITICO.

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“The scammer convinced them to wire their $32,430 down payment to a fake bank account and vanished.”

 

 

Well, I’m sure it was a real bank account, otherwise the money couldn’t have been wired there. And given the famously expensive KYC/AML regime in the USA, it should be straightforward to arrest the scammer (or the bank’s compliance officer?). 

 

 

So what’s the problem?

 

 

“A detective who investigated our case told us that our money was transferred to an overseas account and turned into Bitcoin.”

 

 

Of course it was.

 

A detective who investigated our case told us that our money was transferred to an overseas account and turned into Bitcoin.

From: Millennial Couple Lost $32,430 Down Payment to Real-Estate Scammers – Business Insider.

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Eventually, Madrid’s porn passport is likely to be replaced by the EU’s very own digital identity system (eIDAS2) — a so-called wallet app allowing people to access a smorgasbord of public and private services across the whole bloc.

From: Spain introduces porn passport to stop kids from watching smut – POLITICO.

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The Spanish government has a plan to prevent kids from watching porn online: Meet the porn passport.
Officially (and drily) called the Digital Wallet Beta (Cartera Digital Beta), the app Madrid unveiled on Monday would allow internet platforms to check whether a prospective smut-watcher is over 18. Porn-viewers will be asked to use the app to verify their age. Once verified, they’ll receive 30 generated “porn credits” with a one-month validity granting them access to adult content. Enthusiasts will be able to request extra credits.

From: Spain introduces porn passport to stop kids from watching smut – POLITICO.

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Instead, active funds are struggling. That pokes a hole in one of Wall Street’s most cherished narratives—namely, that it’s worth paying a premium for active management and that stock pickers are sure to do better at some times than at others. The funds’ travails are a reminder of a basic rule: The asset-management industry depends more on marketing than on markets.

For starters, despite this purportedly ideal investing environment, stock pickers are doing even worse than usual. In the first half of 2024, according to Morningstar, only 18.2% of actively managed mutual funds and exchange-traded funds that compare themselves to the S&P 500 managed to outperform it.

From: Why Your Fund Manager Can’t Beat Today’s Stock Market – WSJ.

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