A library of snippets
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Harries called Qian — referred to in court by a false name, Yadi Zhang — a “supervillain” and told the jury she was a “master of deception” who indulged in “skilful manipulation”.
From: Accused crypto laundering mastermind dreamt of being a Buddhist goddess.
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Wen eventually provided the correct blockchain address to Liffen. But the blockchain evidence didn’t match Zhang’s story. Mined bitcoin would come newly minted from just a few sources, but Zhang’s bitcoin had come from hundreds of sources, including crypto exchanges.
From: The mystery of the Hampstead mansion and the £1.4bn bitcoin haul.
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The latest data from ING suggests that the dollar did not market share in global transactions last year. The euro, for comparison, did lose some ground and this led to rebalancing in favour of a number of Asian currencies. These included the Yuan, which remains challenged as an alternative reserve currency, but is certainly advancing as a transactional option.
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The global data regarding the FX structure of transactions is also suggesting that the US dollar didn’t lose ground in 2023. Here the international SWIFT system with its over 11,000 participants and over $400bn in daily transaction volume and monthly disclosures remains the primary data source. One important caveat for the 2023 data is that there has been a change in methodology which led to the exclusion of a large portion of non-transaction financial messages done by European central banks. This has led to a material drop in the previously inflated share of the euro in transactions. Therefore, both the 14ppt decline in the EUR share to the 22-23% level, the 6ppt increase in the share of USD to 46-47%, and the increase in the shares of ‘other currencies’ should be taken with a pinch of salt. Nevertheless, the overall picture suggest that the US dollar at least didn’t lose its dominant position in transactions, in line with the decade-long trend.
From: Global de-dollarisation takes a pause, embattled euro gives room for Asian FX | articles | ING Think.
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Another general observation from the SWIFT data, is that despite the stable and high role of the US dollar, diversification is taking place at the regional level and is focused primarily on the Asian currencies. RMB has gained the most in 2023, showing a 2ppt (or 1.3ppt net of the effect of changed methodology) increase in the share to 4.0% in the last year. Meanwhile, the Chinese yuan is not the only winner: Singapore dollar gained 1ppt (0.7ppt net of the methodology shift), while JPY’s share increased 1ppt (or by 0.3ppt net of the shift). The change in other major currencies, including GBP, CHF, CAD, AUD adjusted for the changed methodology was, in our estimates, negative.
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For consumers, the changes could be a decent deal. By the CFPB’s calculation, late fees cost American families $14 billion a year, and it says the rule will save people some $10 billion annually. The swipe-fee cap will save merchants some money for a while, which could, in theory, be passed on to their customers, though it’s unclear how much that will happen in practice.
From: Credit Card Companies Are About to Invent New Fees for Consumers.
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Retailers have found a few ways around it, so consumers aren’t devoid of options on their rest day. Supermarket chain Tegut, for instance, has run automated stores without any human workers for the past four years.
But now, even those won’t open after a German court upheld a ban impacting Tegut’s stores—even those without human staff—forcing them to remain closed on Sundays. In December, it ruled that Tegut’s 40 automated shops will not be excluded from the Sunday rest law, or Sonntagsruhe, despite the absence of workers.
A member of Tegut’s management board, Thomas Stäb, described the move as “entirely grotesque” in an interview with the Financial Times, since the shops were more like “walk-in vending machines” than actual supermarkets. Business on Sundays also contributed to up to 30% of the shops’ weekly sales as few establishments are typically running.
From: German chain Tegut under pressure from law closing businesses on Sundays | Fortune Europe.
Automated supermarkets aren’t exacty new.
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We’re in Memphis Tennessee, 1948, at the Keedoozle store, a vending machine concept developed by the man behind Piggly Wiggly, Clarence Saunders, who had patented the concept of the “Self-Serving Store” in 1917.
In the 1930s, Clarence Saunders, founder of the Memphis, Tennessee-based Piggly Wiggly supermarket chain, introduced the “Keedoozle.” Customers viewed products behind glass-enclosed display cabinets, then inserted a key into a corresponding keyhole near the display cabinet to identify the product they wanted, according to Wikipedia. Stock personnel then put the selected items onto conveyor belts that took the products to the cashier for checkout. The system, which was not fully automatic, proved mechanically unreliable.
The idea of a vending machine version of supermarket has been tried in the UK as well. I can remember working on a project for one of the major supermarket chains here many years ago. The project was to do with communications and although I can’t remember exactly what it was I was doing, I know it involved looking at different types of stores to try to work out the bandwidth requirements of the town centre mini stores, the edge of town stores and the out of town macro stores.
At that time one of the stores had been fitted with an experimental vending machine which carried a limited number of goods (I think from memory it was 300 lines but I may be wrong) that could be sold outside stores hours. I can’t remember where it was exactly but it was somewhere up near Manchester I think. I do remember that I was dispatched to visit the store very early in the morning to talk to the manager and some of the employees before the store opened for business. I done this at a couple of other stores, but this one was particularly interesting because of the vending machine.
As a junior deputy assistant under consultant I took my pencil and notepad and went off to see the woman who was in charge of the vending machine. I don’t remember anythign about the communications requirements, other than that it was fitted with a (then new) chip and PIN reader that was desgined for external use. I do, however, remember the two key things that I learned about this fascinating experiment in automated shopping. I asked her what the best selling items in the vending machine (just out of curioisty as it had nothing to do with the bandwidth requirements) and she told me that the two top items were milk and condoms. When I commented, somewhat naïvely, that I didn’t understand the connection between the two she told me it was because of the nursing accomodation near the supermarket. And I remember, pencil poised, what the main lesson learned from the vending machine experiment had been and she told me “you have to sellotape the egg boxes shut”. So much for high technology.
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The big picture here is the software supply chain. A software supply chain is the collection of components, libraries, tools, and processes used to develop, build, and publish software. Software is very rarely one monolithic thing. Instead, it’s made up of lots of different components. Some may be open-source libraries, and some may be proprietary to the company selling them.
From: The Evolving Landscape of Non-Human Identity – Spherical Cow Consulting.
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Users of the open source XZ Utils data compression library may have narrowly avoided falling victim to a major supply chain attack, after evidence of an apparently intentionally placed backdoor in the code was revealed.
The malicious code, embedded in versions 5.6.0 and 5.6.1 of the library, enabled unauthorised access to affected Linux distributions, and over the past few days has been the subject of alerts from the likes of Red Hat and the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA).
From: Open source alert over intentionally placed backdoor | Computer Weekly.
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This new kind of non-human identity operates in ways human identities don’t. Batch processing is a great example since the process does not necessarily act on behalf of a user. Training an AI model is batch processing that runs for a week and has no human involved. Batch transactions in the bank, such as payroll, run unsupervised and aren’t handled as a person. Furthermore, a human may be flagged by a computer’s security system as showing strange behavior when they are logging in from both Brisbane and Chicago simultaneously. An application, in all its glory, may suddenly expand to be in data centers around the world because it’s dealing with a Taylor Swift concert sale. What would be anomalous for a person is just another day in cloud computing.
From: The Evolving Landscape of Non-Human Identity – Spherical Cow Consulting.
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TikTok touts itself as a platform where creators can stand out and build a following. But the company has begun discussing with advertisers an artificial intelligence-powered feature that would generate avatars to star in videos—virtual influencers that would potentially compete with human creators for ad deals.
From: TikTok Plots Using Virtual Influencers for Advertising — The Information.
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While several central banks are experimenting with wholesale central bank digital currency (CBDC), instead the UK created central bank omnibus accounts for institutions. This supported the creation of Fnality, a private institutional form of tokenized money. To receive Fnality tokens, institutions transfer money to Fnality’s omnibus central bank account. Ms Breeden described this as simulated central bank money.
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Snippings