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Meta wants Google and Apple to take over age verification in Europe
Meta is calling for implementing age verification across Europe and proposed a way to do it. The company wants to “ensure that parents only need to verify the age of their child once and noted that the most effective way of achieving this would be to have operating systems or app stores complete the verification process.
The move would pass on the responsibility of age verification from social media platforms to firms such as Apple and Google. Other platforms have also in argued in favor of the solution, including Twitter and Match, the company behind dating apps like Tinder, Hinge and OkCupid.

From: Meta, porn industry and Kansas governor weigh in on age verification | Biometric Update.

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Upmarket UK challenger bank Monument Bank is the latest challenger bank to offer its tech to third parties, selling its “building society in a box” tech to legacy financial institutions.

Monument Bank, which launched in 2021, targets Britain’s wealthiest savers, entrepreneurs and property developers.

Monument Bank has over 30,000 clients and last year raised £40m-plus in a Series B funding round.

Like others in the challenger bank field, such as Starling and Monese, it is now offering its tech to third parties.

It has launched Monument Technology, which has publicly announced its first client, Ecology Building Society, which focuses on sustainable lending.

Ecology Building Society will integrate Monument’s banking platform next year.

From: Monument Bank latest challenger bank to sell “in a box” tech, as snaps up first client – Tech.eu.

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A seminal 2014 paper from Google noted that dependency debt is noted as a key contributor to code complexity and technical debt in classical software engineering settings. Their studies found that data dependencies in ML systems carry a similar capacity for building debt, but may be more difficult to detect. Code dependencies can be identified via static analysis by compilers and linkers. Without similar tooling for data dependencies, it can be “inappropriately easy” to build large data dependency chains that can be difficult to untangle.

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Our online spaces are not ecosystems, though tech firms love that word. They’re plantations; highly concentrated and controlled environments, closer kin to the industrial farming of the cattle feedlot or battery chicken farms that madden the creatures trapped within.

From: We Need To Rewild The Internet.

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A report by Lloyds Bank found that romance scams rose by 22% in 2023, with an average of £6,937 stolen. Interestingly, while speculators remain interested in cryptocurrency, scammers seem to be turning away from in it. The biggest monetary losses in were via cryptocurrency or bank transfers, but scammers were also rather fond of gift cards too. A single fraudster who was found guilty of romance scamming Americans out of more than $2 billion used Bitcoin to move funds co-conspirators in Nigeria.

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Ever since the dawn of relationships, scammers have found ways to take advantage of people by spinning a convincing tale. But with the rise in online dating, these scams have proliferated, evolving into more sophisticated long cons to win the trust of victims. According to the FTC report, the most popular way scammers reached out to their victims last year was through Instagram (29%) and Facebook (28%).

From Romance Scams Are Booming — Especially on Facebook and Instagram:

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Dr. Elisabeth Carter, Associate Professor in School of Law, Social and Behavioural Sciences at the University of Kingston in London, is a criminologist and forensic linguist who has just published a rather interesting book about this. In “The Language of Romance Crimes” (Cambridge University Press, 2024), she explores the totally fascinating interplay of love, money and crime which tells us a lot of about identity, relationships and reputation in the online world. One of her key conclusions is that we cannot look at the victims in narrow terms the disguise the reality of fraud as a type of abuse and “misrepresents victims as having done something for the crime to be visited upon them”

These scams are not all about money, of course. You may have read the somewhat surprising story of the British Member of Parliament who was lured into some inappropriate behaviour (includgn the disclosure of personal details about fellow politicians) via a dating app. He was ensnared via unsolicited instant messages that were sent to a number of politicians (both gay and straight, from a sender posing as ‘Abi’ or ‘Charlie’) that soon escalted into the exchange of initimate images. Willaim Wragg, the unfortunate 36-year-old MP (vice chairman of the influential 1922 committee of Conservative Party backbenchers) said that ‘I got chatting to a guy on an app and we exchanged pictures. We were meant to meet up for drinks, but then didn’t”.

He is hardly the first person to be caught in a honeytrap and cetainly won’t be the last.

(Incidentally, early on my career when I was working at NATO I was given a stern induction lecture by a senior officer who urged me to remain vigiliant when approached by beautiful women in bars in Amsterdam and explained the nature of honeytraps. I was so excited by this possibility that I developed an entirely convincing but fake narrative around my work on secure communications ready to deploy in the bedroom at the right time. Needless to say, this never happened. That is, I was eventually approached by a beautiful woman in a bar in Amsterdam, but it was Conny Dorestjin and she wanted to know about digital identity and the internet of things.)

Not all bad behaviour on dating apps is down to agents of foreign powers intent on subverting our democracy. Most of it, I am sure, is money scamming although some of the behaviour is malicious indeed, such as that the London corporate lawyer who stalked his ex-girlfriend with fictitious online dating profiles and used them to track her movements.

Now you would think that internet dating would be a rather obvious place to introduce a credentials-based 

 

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One thing that is fascinating about OnlyFans is that because it involves the exchange of real dollars, which opens up plentiful opportunities for scams and fraud, it is ironically the social platform most driven by the mantra “know your customer.” In order to sign up as a creator, you must prove your identity with a full bank, address and license validation process.

This means when it comes to the validation of social media accounts in the real world, OnlyFans creators are some of the most trusted verified accounts on the internet.

There is something deeply ironic about the fact that OnlyFans, a platform for risqué fantasy and characters, is the least likely among social networks to have a problem with fake accounts. You can trust that the creators are real people who have been validated in a way that few other platforms offer.

There is something to learn from this.

First, OnlyFans offers an example of how the desire to get paid for content online smooths the way to validating user identities. There are three major reasons other social services don’t validate the people who participate in their networks. First, the friction of going through the validation process for new accounts prevents people from signing up. Second, it is expensive and time-consuming for services to validate identities. Third, requiring proof of real-world identity is quite exclusionary, as many people can’t easily make that proof. The desire to get paid for content provides a level of motivation that overcomes at least the first two of these hurdles.

From Lessons From the Rise of OnlyFans — The Information:

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OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, is exploring whether users should be allowed to create artificial intelligence-generated pornography and other explicit content with its products.

While the company stressed that its ban on deepfakes would continue to apply to adult material, campaigners suggested the proposal undermined its mission statement to produce “safe and beneficial” AI.

OpenAI, which is also the developer of the DALL-E image generator, revealed it was considering letting developers and users “responsibly” create what it termed not-safe-for-work (NSFW) content through its products. OpenAI said this could include “erotica, extreme gore, slurs, and unsolicited profanity”.

From: OpenAI considers allowing users to create AI-generated pornography | Artificial intelligence (AI) | The Guardian.

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China has been trying to expand the clout of the Chinese yuan amid a broader trend to diversify away from the US dollar.

But even Chinese businesses aren’t sold on the yuan right now.

Official data from the People’s Bank of China, the country’s central bank, shows that foreign-exchange deposits rose from $778.9 billion in September to $832.6 billion in March.

This means some Chinese businesses have been holding back from converting their foreign-exchange earnings into their home currency.

From: De-Dollarization: Even Businesses in China Are Hanging Onto Their USD.

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Standard Chartered maintains its bitcoin price targets of $150,000 by the end of this year and $200,000 by the end of 2025.

From: Bitcoin to $200K? SCB Thinks So, While Market Forecast Signals No Fed Rate Hikes This Election Season.

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The idea is you’ll be able to get the key points out of a document, a webpage, or a conversation thread without having to read through it in its entirety – and presumably Apple is going to offer certain assurances about accuracy and reliability.

From: More details of the AI upgrades heading to iOS 18 have leaked | TechRadar.

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In the second quarter of 2023, the average costs of sending USD 200 to developing regions continued to be high at 6.2 per cent, more than twice the target of 3 per cent of the Sustainable Development Goal 10.c.1 (Ratha et al., 2023a). Sub-Saharan Africa continued to have the highest average remittance costs, at about 7.9 per cent; South Asia had the lowest average remittance costs at 4.3 per cent (ibid.).

Though mobile operations account for less than 1 per cent of transfer volumes, they remain the cheapest channel for sending remittances, with an average cost of 4.1 per cent during the second quarter of 2023, followed by money transfer operators (average cost of 5.3%) and post offices (7%) (ibid.). With an average cost of 12 per cent during Q2 2023, banks remained the most expensive channel for remittance transfers (ibid.)

From: Remittances data.

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