Snippings

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Every day, 3 trillion dollars worth of transactions are handled by a 64-year-old programming language that hardly anybody knows anymore.

It’s called COBOL (Common Business Oriented Language), and despite the fact that most schools and universities stopped teaching it decades ago, it remains one of the top mainframe programming languages used today, especially in industries like banking, automotive, insurance, government, healthcare, and finance. According to the International Journal of Advanced Research in Science, Communication and Technology (IJARSCT), 43 percent of all banking systems are still using COBOL, which handles those $3 trillion daily transactions, including 95 percent of all ATM activity in the US, and 80 percent of all in-person credit card transactions.

The problem is that very few people are interested in learning COBOL these days. Coding it is cumbersome, it reads like an English lesson (too much typing), the coding format is meticulous and inflexible, and it takes far longer to compile than its competitors. And since nobody’s learning it anymore, programmers who can work with and maintain all that code are a increasingly hard to find. Many of these “COBOL cowboys” are aging out of the workforce, and replacements are in short supply.

From The World Depends on 60-Year-Old Code No One Knows Anymore | PCMag.

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It’s the potential for games to act as bank accounts.

Ok, not literally, but here are some interesting data points (taken from the report):

There are 1.7 billion underbanked adults in the world, but roughly 1.2 billion of them own a smartphone.
There are roughly 3.4 billion gamers, or 1 in every 2.36 people.
90% of Gen Z, 80% of Millenials and 63% of Gen X interact with games and/or the metaverse.

From Friday, Dec 15, 2023 – by Noelle Acheson.

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Synthetic identity fraud has become one of the fastest-growing cybersecurity threats. It accounts for nearly 80% of all identity fraud in the U.S. and is estimated to cost businesses close to $5 billion in 2024. What makes this type of fraud so damaging? There are two main factors at play: The sophistication of the attacks, and the difficulty of verifying when they’ve even occurred.

From Combatting synthetic identity fraud – Ekata, a Mastercard company.

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The National Credit Union Administration (NCUA) is evaluating uses for digital IDs such as state mDLs. Credit unions have completed pilots using digital IDs and have reported more efficient onboarding processes, according to Charles Vice, director of Financial Technology and Access at the NCUA. Digital IDs pose opportunities to better serve the unbanked population, as well.

From US committee sees AI fintech threat, public ready for biometric defense | Biometric Update.

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And from this follows an underappreciated consequence of modern financial infrastructure: credit cards and debit transactions make the economy more efficient. One way you can measure that efficiency gain is that their users rarely go to jail. Partly that is because you can do a near real-time prediction of whether the transaction has good funds behind it at the point-of-sale. Partly it is because we more fully move credit risk from the grocery store to the bank.

From The Long Shadow of Checks.

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Next year’s artificial intelligence battle is coming into focus—and it’s all about glasses.

As they release more powerful AI that can understand images and language, Meta Platforms, Google, Microsoft, OpenAI and others are racing to apply the technology to smart glasses and other wearable devices with forward-facing cameras. It’s a vision many of the companies have discussed or worked on for years, but they have a new reason to think they can pull it off: the sudden rise of multimodal AI that understands drawings, charts, objects and hand gestures in addition to text and audio.

From OpenAI, Meta, Microsoft Chase Wearable AI — The Information.

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Yearn Finance said a faulty script wiped out 63% of a position in its treasury, but user funds were not affected.
Yearn is asking users who profited from the bug to return a “reasonable” amount to the protocol’s multisig.

From: Yearn Finance says faulty script wiped out $1.4 million from treasury | The Block.

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The launch of digital currency will be a once-in-a-generation change in the way that money works, so it is very important that the Bank of England, the European Central Bank, the Federal Reserve, and everyone else take the time to work out exactly how it should work and make sure that it is implemented correctly. There is no burning platform, as they say: we do need digital currency but we don’t need it tomorrow and it’s much more important to get it right than to get it quickly.

From Digital sterling is coming, but it won’t be anytime soon – ThePaypers.

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Apple AAPL 1.67%increase; green up pointing triangle is rolling out a new security setting for iPhones following Wall Street Journal reporting about a vulnerability that allowed thieves to break into victims’ devices and upend their lives.

The Journal reported on a nationwide spate of thefts where criminals used iPhone owners’ passcodes to change their Apple accounts, access saved passwords, steal money and lock them out of their iCloud-stored photos and videos. Thieves in New York, Chicago, New Orleans, Minneapolis and other cities watch iPhone owners tap in their passcodes before stealing the targets’ devices.

These thefts resulted in losses far beyond phones, as the Journal’s reporting showed, because Apple’s security settings gave victims few ways of preventing harm once their passcodes fell into the wrong hands. We have heard from hundreds of people over the past year whose iPhones and digital lives were stolen.

The new Stolen Device Protection setting, designed to defend against such attacks, is being released to beta testers.

From: Apple’s iOS 17.3 Stolen Device Protection Update Aims to Stop iPhone Thieves – WSJ.

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The rest of the world holds a great deal of U.S. currency, i.e., cash. Although the amount can’t be precisely tracked, the Federal Reserve Board of Governors recently estimated that foreigners held $950 billion in U.S. banknotes at the end of the first quarter of 2021, or about 45% of all Federal Reserve notes outstanding, including two-thirds of all $100 bills. Overall holdings of U.S. currency have grown rapidly, however, and overseas holdings of Federal Reserve notes would now be worth closer to $1.1 trillion if such holdings are still half of all U.S. currency.

From: The Innocent Greenbacks Abroad: U.S. Currency Held Internationally.

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