Snippings

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Fraud accounts for around 40% of all crime in England and Wales, with data from UK Finance showing almost 80% of all authorised pushed payment fraud originates from social media or a fake website.

From: World first agreement to tackle online fraud – GOV.UK.

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Elven Big Tech firms and social media platforms have signed up to a UK Online Fraud Charter to combat rising levels of scams from fake adverts and romance fraud.

From: UK to bring tech firms to account under new Online Fraud Charter.

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Under the new Charter the companies, which include Amazon, eBay, Facebook, Google, Instagram, LinkedIn, Match Group, Microsoft, Snapchat, TikTok, and YouTube, have pledged to verify new advertisers and “promptly” remove any fraudulent content.

Vitalik Buterin points to four key areas where new technology is improving the situation

It is generally understood among security professionals that the current state of computer security is pretty terrible. That said, it’s easy to understate the amount of progress that has been made. Hundreds of billions of dollars of cryptocurrency are available to anonymously steal by anyone who can hack into users’ wallets, and while far more gets lost or stolen than I would like, it’s also a fact that most of it has remained un-stolen for over a decade. Recently, there have been improvements:

Secure Elements. Trusted hardware chips inside of users’ phones, effectively creating a much smaller high-security operating system inside the phone that can remain protected even if the rest of the phone gets hacked. Among many other use cases, these chips are increasingly being explored as a way to make more secure crypto wallets.

Browsers as the de-facto operating system. Over the last ten years, there has been a quiet shift from downloadable applications to in-browser applications. This has been largely enabled by WebAssembly (WASM). Even Adobe Photoshop, long cited as a major reason why many people cannot practically use Linux because of its necessity and Linux-incompatibility, is now Linux-friendly thanks to being inside the browser. This is also a large security boon: while browsers do have flaws, in general they come with much more sandboxing than installed applications: apps cannot access arbitrary files on your computer.

Hardened operating systems. GrapheneOS for mobile exists, and is very usable. QubesOS for desktop exists; it is currently somewhat less usable than Graphene, at least in my experience, but it is improving.

Attempts at moving beyond passwords. Passwords are, unfortunately, difficult to secure both because they are hard to remember, and because they are easy to eavesdrop on. Recently, there has been a growing movement toward reducing emphasis on passwords, and making multi-factor hardware-based authentication actually work (ie, passkeys).

From My techno-optimism.

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Vitalik Buterin made a very good point about this

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The need to protect against spam has led to email becoming very oligopolistic in practice, making it very hard to self-host or create a new email provider.

From My techno-optimism.

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Indeed, this is what happened to me. For years I ran a mail server for our family’s accounts but with increasing frequency it was attacked in various ways and used to send spam, which meant it kept getting blocked. It was time-consuming and exhausting so eventually I gave up and moved the accounts to Google.

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Amit Kumar, Chief Technology Officer, Easebuzz says, “UPI QR code scams represent a common method employed by fraudsters to exploit individuals online. These scammers use enticing messages coupled with QR codes, tempting recipients with promises of rewards or cash. During online transactions, it’s essential to meticulously review deducted amounts for confirmation.”

From Rising UPI scam trend: Follow these tips to keep yourself safe from scammers | Mint.

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While I have no real insights into Binance and their operations, I do read the news about them. This is why I saw Columbia Business School professor Omid Malekan’s comments that  Binance “did a reasonably decent job of onboarding tens of millions of poor, brown, and otherwise underprivileged people into the financial system”. I

Promoters plugged crypto as the key to accelerating Black America’s path to prosperity. It was going to level the playing field once and for all. The world of cryptocurrency was painted as a welcoming place for Black investors leery of traditional finance, a golden opportunity to build wealth and achieve financial empowerment. There was lots of talk of big returns, and few warnings of risks. Exuberance took hold.

But when markets began to crumble, Black people were left holding the bag.

From How the Crypto Hustle Carries on America’s Shameful History of Racial Inequality | Institute for New Economic Thinking.

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Promoters plugged crypto as the key to accelerating Black America’s path to prosperity. It was going to level the playing field once and for all. The world of cryptocurrency was painted as a welcoming place for Black investors leery of traditional finance, a golden opportunity to build wealth and achieve financial empowerment. There was lots of talk of big returns, and few warnings of risks. Exuberance took hold.

But when markets began to crumble, Black people were left holding the bag.

From How the Crypto Hustle Carries on America’s Shameful History of Racial Inequality | Institute for New Economic Thinking.

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“Using bitcoin prices around the time of transfers to crypto accounts as a proxy for investment price, we find that lower-income households bought crypto at substantially higher prices,” the report said.

From No, crypto isn’t the secret to building Black wealth. Here’s why. – The Washington Post.

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Tonantzin Carmona, a Brookings Institute fellow who researches crypto’s impact on minority communities, said that for inexperienced investors, this sort of high-profile hype easily obscures crypto’s drawbacks.

Carmona considers crypto’s marketing to racial minorities part of a legacy of “predatory inclusion” in the tradition of payday loans and subprime mortgages — risky services that promise access to financing that would otherwise be out of reach.

From Black, Hispanic investors struggle with faith in crypto | AP News.

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Or — an even wilder possibility! — Meta could roll out strong age verification across all its services, forcing users to confirm they are old enough to have to pay to protect their privacy. Albeit enforced age verification might be too controversial a step even for Meta (it has previously written about the complexity of understanding people’s age online at length, but in the context of trying to stop underage users from signing up for its services; so it would be ironic indeed if it ends up having to reverse its applications of age assurance tech to try to spot privacy-loving adults from masquerading as freeloading ad-free teens).

From Meta’s latest privacy rip-off will test the EU’s mettle for reining in Big Tech | TechCrunch.

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Doing a ‘back of an envelope’ pass on these figures: If we take Meta’s total monthly active users (3.74 billion, as of December 31, 2022), and assume every user is worth €120 a year in targeted ads to Meta (aka the annual cost of the ad-free subscription on web), then the company should be raking in around €448 billion annually. In fact Meta’s full year revenue for 2022 was the far lower figure of $116.61 billion (~€110 billion). Which implies its subscription offer overcharges individuals for protecting their privacy compared to the revenue Meta generates from continued access to their data. (Or, put another way, it’s a privacy rip off.)

From Meta’s latest privacy rip-off will test the EU’s mettle for reining in Big Tech | TechCrunch.

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Forced to use real names on platforms like Weibo, Chinese influencers quit social media instead.

From: Weibo is losing influencers over legal display name rule – Rest of World.

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I saw in several place that Bitcoin number go up on the back of the appointment of Javier Milei, a pro-bitcoin candidate, as the President of Argentina. He is not only in favour of Bitcoin, he is also in favour of allowing the poor to sell their organs, asking his dead dog for advice via a medium and the dollarisation of the economy. That last point caught my attention and made me wonder why Bitcoin went up when his plan is not to use Bitcoin, but greenbacks.

Earlier this year I saw a tweet from someone had just sent money to friend in Argentina using a stablecoin, USDT (Tether). It was the recipient’s preferred method of payment. The tweeter pointed out that the recipient had access to Bitcoin, but did not want it. What this confirmed to me was that in many places, people want cryptocurrency only as a second-best way of getting fiat currency. They don’t want Dogecoin, they want Dollars.

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Argentina’s central bank might lack dollars, but Argentine citizens and companies do not. Private sector actors do try to shield themselves from the country’s frequent bank runs by holding dollars in other jurisdictions or under their mattresses. At the end of 2022, Argentines held over $246 billion in foreign bank accounts, safe deposit boxes, and mostly undeclared cash, according to Argentina’s National Institute of Statistics and Census. This amounts to over 50 percent of Argentina’s GDP in current dollars for 2021 ($487 billion). Hence, the dollar scarcity pertains only to the Argentine state.

From: The Economist Gets It Wrong on Dollarization in Argentina | Cato at Liberty Blog.

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Binance was required to report suspicious transactions to FinCEN through suspicious activity reports (SARs). But they never did. Binance’s former Chief Compliance Officer told personnel that the CEO’s policy was to not report such activity, and Binance never filed a single SAR with FinCEN.

From Greedy Criminals- Binance Never Filed A Single SAR Ever – Frank on Fraud.

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