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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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The Cyberspace Administration of China, alongside the country’s Ministry of Public Security (MPS), released draft regulations to issue unified digital IDs for internet users on Friday last week. Concern about the idea has increased over the past few days.

The IDs, which would be jointly administered by the CAC and police, are initially envisaged as voluntary and would be used in place of real names and phone numbers to register on internet platforms.

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

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Scam losses originating on social media were up 17 per cent in 2023.

Scam reports were up 31 per cent.

And the social media companies are dragging their heels.

From: Address to National Press Club, Canberra | Treasury Ministers.

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