Snippings

I don’t know if he will remmber this but, but this is what “Singe” Deakins wrote about this back in 2012! He pointed out that due to progressive miniaturistion, devices will become increasingly unobtrusive and specialised.  With advances in interfaces, sensors, raw computing power, battery technology (crucial, of course) and connectivity (my iPhone has NFC, Bluetooth 5G, UWB and WiFi) we will progress towards persistent ambient connectivity where we’ll become seamlessly and deeply intra-connected with things and people in our physical and virtual environments.

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On payments: give payment providers access to Fed master accounts. Insist that all payment systems be interoperable. And decide who should have oversight of governance, design decisions, etc. – historically, this has been the Federal Reserve, but the central bank has a specific set of objectives, mostly linked to financial stability and monetary policy implementation. Banks are understandably reluctant to give up control, which is why a separate overseer could ensure a more level playing field.

From: Stablecoins and the new Gresham’s Law – by Noelle Acheson.

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In the 1970s, Bernard Madoff’s market making firm started creating thousands of fake monthly account statements reflecting artificially high returns using an outdated IBM computer. Clients, regulators and even Madoff’s own sons were fooled by the fake statements for decades, before his Ponzi scheme came to light in 2008.

But where Madoff had to employ 15 people full-time to create the fake account statements, generative AI models like Copilot and ChatGPT create deepfake documents instantly, with a prompt.

From: ‘This is an arms race’: Banks cope with AI-faked documents | American Banker.

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Amazon has launched Pay by Bank for purchases in the UK, enabling shoppers on the site to complete sales and set up Prime membership via direct connections to their bank accounts.

From: Amazon rolls out Pay by Bank in the UK.

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Craig Milligan, 47, of Dumfries, used several aliases – including those of two dead men – to fraudulently open accounts and obtain credit cards.

From: Man who accumulated more than £1million in identity fraud crime jailed for four years. | COPFS.

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In October, hackers stole government IDs of 70,000 Discord users from a third-party service that Discord previously trusted to verify ages in the United Kingdom and Australia.

From: Discord faces backlash over age checks after data breach exposed 70,000 IDs – Ars Technica.

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Enter x402: The Web’s Native Payment Protocol
HTTP has always had a status code for payments: 402 Payment Required. It was reserved in 1999 but never standardized. Until now.

The x402 protocol finally gives meaning to that status code:

Client requests a resource
Server responds with 402 and payment requirements
Client signs a payment authorization locally
Server verifies and settles the payment
Client gets access to the resource
No redirects. No checkout flows. No human intervention. Just HTTP.

Nevermined’s Programmable Extension: nvm:erc4337
Standard x402 handles simple “pay X tokens for this request” flows. But AI agents need more:

Subscription models: “This agent is on our enterprise plan”
Credit systems: “Deduct 5 credits from my balance”
Usage caps: “Don’t let me spend more than $100 today”
Delegated payments: “My company’s smart account pays, not me personally”
That’s why we built the nvm:erc4337 scheme—an extension that makes x402 programmable.

From: Blog Posts.

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Apple is developing an AI-powered wearable pin that could be released as early as 2027, according to people with direct knowledge of the matter.

The device would position Apple to compete more effectively with OpenAI, which is planning its own AI-powered devices, and Meta Platforms, which is already selling smart glasses.

Apple’s pin is a thin, flat, circular disc with an aluminum-and-glass shell and features two cameras—a standard lens and a wide-angle lens—on its front face, designed to capture photos and videos of the user’s surroundings. It includes three microphones to pick up sounds in the area surrounding the person wearing it.

It also has a speaker, a physical button along one of its edges and a magnetic inductive charging interface on its back, similar to the one used on the Apple Watch. Apple engineers are aiming to make the pin the same size as an AirTag, only slightly thicker.

From: Apple Developing AI Wearable Pin in Challenge to OpenAI, Meta — The Information.

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The PoC will demonstrate how a mobile ID wallet app can serve as a trusted digital identity channel to authenticate calling customers.

From: GSMA, Telefónica Tech, TMT ID and Dock Labs collaborate to reinvent call centre authentication – GSMA Foundry.

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The data reveals that Monzo made the wrong call in 34% of 3,372 cases referred to the FOS during the course of last year. NatWest ranked second, deemed to have wrongly rejected 33% of 1,972 fraud complaints, and HSBC third, with 32% of 2,535 complaints wrongly rejected.

A spokesperson for Monzo told the Guardian that some of the cases related to fraud that had happened more than two years ago.

From: Monzo tops the charts for refusing refunds to scam victims.

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