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The age group most likely to prefer cash is those aged 55 and over. Nearly a quarter (22%) of Over 55s said that cash was their preferred payment method, compared with just 1 in 10 (10%) 18-24s

From: Study reveals Apple Pay and contactless payments have overtaken cash payments as favourite ways to pay in-store.

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As we wrote last year, KOSA’s original language would have effectively required covered platforms to verify the age and thus the identity of every user.

From: Congress Pretends It’s Fixed All The Problems With KOSA; It Hasn’t | Techdirt.

I can see why people would be uncomfortable with having to reveal their real name, address, social security number and goodness know what other personally identifiable information to to a porn site, or having their children provide their personal details to some online messaging service. But there is a world of difference between requiring age verification and requiring identification.

Remember that the porn site doesn’t need to know your age or anything else: It only needs to know that you are over 18. Your bank, amongst a great many other institutions, could easily provide your with a verifiable credential to achieve this. Similarly, the messaging site might need to know that your child is aged from 13-18 and some other site might need to know that the user is under 13 or over 65. It doesn’t matter: the point is that age verification does not need identification.

If you are wondering how this might work in practice, consider the practical example of a smart wallet. You want to obtain the IS_OVER_18 credential, so your smart wallet generates a key pair. The private key remains hidden in the secure element of your mobile phone, which it never leaves. The public key is sent to your bank where it is turned into a verifiable credential by adding the IS_OVER_18 credential that is then signed by the bank. The credentail contains nothing else. No personal information. Nothing.

Now, you show up at a porn site and the site needs to know that you are over 18, so it requests a credential that it can verify. Your present the credential from your bank, the porn site checks the digital signature (easy, because the bank’s public key is, well, public). But how does the porn site know that it is your certificate? Well, the credential (as noted above) contains a public key. So the porn site encrypts soem random data using that public key and sends it to your phone. Since your phone, and only your phone, contains the corresponding private key then the porn site knows that it was your phone that created the public key and (since the smart wallet must send the encrypted to the secure element to be decrypted, because that’s where the private key is, and the phone won’t decrypt the data unless you authenticate yourself (with FaceID or whatever) it knows and you are using the phone.

If you are launching nuclear missiles, you might want to add a biometric liveness check, but for OnlyFans that kind of 2FA is adequate. If you let a minor access porn using your phone, then you are comitting a criminal offence and deserve to be punished.

It is time to stop shying away from demanding full age verification, all the time.

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When I take it off, every other device feels flat and boring: My 75-inch OLED TV feels like a CRT from the ’90s; my iPhone feels like a flip phone from yesteryear, and even the real world around me feels surprisingly flat. And this is the problem. In the same way that I can’t imagine driving a car without a stereo, in the same way I can’t imagine not having a phone to communicate with people or take pictures of my children, in the same way I can’t imagine trying to work without a computer, I can see a day when we all can’t imagine living without an augmented reality. When we’re enveloped more and more by technology, to the point that we crave these glasses like a drug, like we crave our iPhones today but with more desire for the dopamine hit this resolution of AR can deliver.

From: Why Tim Cook Is Going All In on the Apple Vision Pro | Vanity Fair.

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I sat there for a moment, speechless. I had thought what I had been seeing was the real world, and that all the digital wonder was layered on top of that. That the Apple Vision Pro was transparent and there was a layer of technology on top of it. In reality, it was the other way around.

From: Why Tim Cook Is Going All In on the Apple Vision Pro | Vanity Fair.

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I left the Apple offices that day and went to a nearby coffee shop, and when I opened my laptop, a relatively new computer, it felt like a relic pulled from the rubble of a Soviet-era power plant.

From: Why Tim Cook Is Going All In on the Apple Vision Pro | Vanity Fair.

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The real solution is secure currencies — or “flatcoins” — such as the one my company is developing. These differ from most stablecoins that are ostensibly pegged to one asset. Instead flatcoins are backed by a basket of different assets that aim to produce returns in line with a goal such as matching inflation. Flatcoins reflect the value of the underlying basket of assets.

From: ‘Flatcoins’ are the way forward.

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Business that use open banking for payments report an average annual saving of 150 hours usually spent on operational tasks such as processing invoices and financial data, recurring payments and processing refunds, new research from NatWest reveals.

From: Businesses measure the benefit of open banking payments.

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During Austria’s ski competition, Hahnenkamm Races, Boss worked with Mastercard and wearable payment-tech provider Digiseq to develop a custom tag for its ski jackets that combined multiple contactless technologies and a web app for customers to tailor their experience. VIP guests who were gifted the jackets could tap the tag on its sleeve to access the event, the ski resort, the lifts and log in to a physical pop-up store, in addition to making contactless payments.

From: Ski lifts and instant resale: New ways to use digital IDs | Vogue Business.

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Digital twins, which rose to the mainstream during the metaverse boom, are gaining new steam in the form of digital IDs, or product passports (DPPs), that store data including manufacturing details, supply chain origins, materials used and ownership history. It’s no longer a “nice to have” for fashion brands — it will soon become a requirement.

Starting as early as 2026, the European Commission will require brands selling in the EU to equip items like apparel, accessories and electronics with DPPs in order to make supply chains more transparent and enforce brands to meet their sustainability goals. Brands currently testing the technology are figuring out ways for it to collect customer data and add perks beyond the point of purchase.

From: Ski lifts and instant resale: New ways to use digital IDs | Vogue Business.

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One-in-three consumers falling victim to APP fraud – Visa

From: One-in-three consumers falling victim to APP fraud – Visa.

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