Snippings

Well, I won’t keep you in suspense, the results are as follows (from the most to the least environmentally friendly).

Credit transfers and debit transfers in batch mode. Credit transfers are better for the environment than debit transfers. In fact credit transfers are better than debit transfters all round which is why we should all be buulding “single credit message” (SCM) infrastuctures and layering request-to-pay (R2P) and variable recurring payment (VRP) layers on top for the use of businesses and customers. Not only the most environmentally friendly but also the overall lowest cost platform for the wider econony 

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Leading the charge with this use case are KBC and Howest University of Applied Sciences. In a joint press release KBC announced that “Howest and KBC will be launching Europe’s first digital student card in the coming academic year. The card will be stored in KBC Mobile under ‘My Trustbox’ and provides easy and secure access to student services and benefits”.

Statements in the press release from both KBC and Howest showcase the benefits of EBSI. They highlight the importance of customer convenience and control over data, as well as interoperability with other applications and other wallets such as the European Digital Identity Wallet .

Echoing the benefits that citizen centric approaches bring to education, the Spanish RoyalMint and partner universities announced a similar pilot, shortly after theBelgian announcement.

From: EU Digital Identity: EBSI, EUDI and Verifiable Credentials for Education.

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Meeco is delighted to be a technology partner on the ground-breaking EBSI project, working alongside KBC and Howest product development teams.

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Social media scammers are now exploiting this desperation, the Times reported, leading to learners forking out up to £250 for non-existent driving tests through dodgy Facebook groups that advertise last-minute test slots, often run from other countries including Bangladesh.

From: Rise of the rogue driving instructors! How scammers are taking advantage of record waits for tests and lessons to fleece learners out of huge sums of money for non-existent exams | Daily Mail Online.

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It’s a rule of thumb as old as the internet that every new technology’s first application is pornography. That’s held true for generative AI, despite the developers of many AI tools’ best attempts to prevent the creation of X-rated content using their services. So it’s little surprise that when AI company Luma Labs launched a new video-generation service this week called Dream Machine, it was immediately “jailbroken” by users to produce porn. Pliny the Prompter, the self-described whitehat “AI red teamer” who demonstrated the steps necessary to hijack the service for smut, showed that a variety of tricks can bypass its safeguards.

From: A Catastrophic Hospital Hack Ends in a Leak of 300M Patient Records | WIRED.

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The enclave uses Israeli shekels, but Israel’s military has blocked the entry of fresh notes, forcing ordinary Palestinians to use faded Jordanian dinars and dwindling supplies of US dollars as shekel notes rip apart from wear and tear.

From: Bank heists reach $120mn in Gaza as cash crunch hits.

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Armed gangs, including Hamas-backed groups, have plundered at least $120mn from banks in northern Gaza in just the past two months, according to UN estimates, as the war-ravaged strip suffers from a severe cash crunch.

The thefts amounted to at least a third of the cash stored in stranded vaults, according to mid-May estimates seen by the Financial Times.

From: Bank heists reach $120mn in Gaza as cash crunch hits.

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The expansion of Mexico’s avocado market since it signed a free trade agreement with the US and Canada in the 1990s has gone hand in hand with rising levels of violence and criminal networks, security analysts at the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organised Crime said in a report this year.

“International demand and organised crime groups have shaped a multibillion-dollar industry in which politico-criminal relations continue to play a crucial role,” the report said.

From: Mexican avocado and mango exports hit after US agents assaulted.

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Working in VR is also becoming more common in certain sectors such as healthcare and engineering where training applications can be useful, particularly in dangerous or high-stakes environments such as surgery or operating heavy machinery.

From: Meetings in the metaverse: new tech draws workers to virtual offices.

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Christoph Fleischmann, founder and chief executive of Arthur Technologies, a virtual office space start-up with 40 Fortune 500 clients, says that “AI is the ultimate eye candy”. As a theoretical example of future use, he points to a finance team that might meet in VR and have an “incredibly smart AI interacting directly with . . . data sources”, and be able to project that data visually in a tangible way for participants.

From: Meetings in the metaverse: new tech draws workers to virtual offices.

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While some business owners might think the 3% fee for processing credit cards is a significant cost, research over the last decade has shown that cash handling costs US retailers a great deal more —between 4.7% and 15.3%.

From: The World is going cashless…but how quickly?.

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