A library of snippets
xxx
company’s chief technology officer, Andrew Bosworth, said he would love to equip them with facial recognition capabilities.
In a recording of the internal meeting, Mr. Bosworth said that leaving facial recognition out of augmented reality glasses was a lost opportunity for enhancing human memory.
From The Technology Facebook and Google Didn’t Dare Release – The New York Times.
xxx
xxx
The $999 pair of augmented reality glasses, made by a company called Vuzix, connects the wearer to Clearview’s database of 30 billion faces. Clearview’s A.R. app, which can identity someone up to 10 feet away, is not yet publicly available, but the Air Force has provided funding for its possible use at military bases.
From The Technology Facebook and Google Didn’t Dare Release – The New York Times.
xxx
the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) have published their report into “tap to pay”, which finds that financial services providers can offer applications to facilitate POS payments but “cannot rely on NFC technology on mobile devices using Apple’s iOS operating system”. This means that competition is limited and that widely used payment apps such as PayPal, Venmo, and Cash App are not available via convenient contactless connectivity and that consumers must use Apple’s proprietary payment service, Apple Pay.
Tap-to-pay is here to stay.
Overall, roughly three in four of 130 million iPhone users have activated Apple Pay, with nearly 56 million U.S. consumers making an in-store payment using Apple Pay in April 2023, accounting for nearly half of iOS users. And in 2021, there were an estimated 25 million Google Pay users, which is forecast to grow by another 10 million users by 2025. Visa recently reported that 1 in 3 Americans use tap-to-pay for purchases, seven times the use from just three years ago. Mastercard reported that contactless payments globally account for over 60 percent of in-person transactions.
Anil John, Technical Director of Silicon Valley Innovation Program at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, commented on the report calling it “recommended reading” and saying that if you substitute “payments” with “identity” in much of the report, “it gives you a preview and the playbook” that is, and will be, used by the Techfins to make themselves gatekeepers when it comes to identity related transactions that take place on mobile devices (ie, pretty much all identity-rlated transactions). He is of course correct and , as has been obvious for years, when tap-to-pay becomes a subset of a more generalised tap-to-prove infrastructure, those gatekeepers will have significant power. Back in 2014, in my tongue-in-cheek reminiscences of Money20/20 in Las Vegas that year, I made the same point about Apple, saying through the voice of an alter ego “I don’t fall for your ‘easy payment’ waffle. I know it’s just a trojan horse for your wallet play: loyalty, coupons and — if you have your dastardly way — identity.”
xxx
YouTube has launched a verification system for healthcare workers in the UK as it battles disinformation online.
In 2022, health videos were viewed more than three billion times in the UK alone on the video-sharing platform.
Doctors, nurses and psychologists have been applying for the scheme since June and must meet rigorous criteria set by the tech giant to be eligible.
Successful applicants will have a badge under their name identifying them as a genuine, licensed healthcare worker.From YouTube starts verifying health workers in the UK – BBC News.
xxx
xxx
There’s been yet another story about fake medical qualifications in the news. A woman from New Zealand spent a couple of decades working as a consultant psychiatrist in our National Health Service (NHS) before it was discovered that she had made up her medical degree and forged a bogus letter of recommendation from Pakistan. The deception only came to light after she had been convicted of trying to defraud an elderly patient.
Now, I rather imagine that if I were a hospital or a medical centre or a GP practice employing a new doctor, I might be tempted to at least look them up on LinkedIn or something before I let them get their hands on a patient
From “Do you want a shot of novocain? / No, I want a shot of you getting a diploma.”.
xxx
Mr Virani told the BBC healthcare professionals were validated through a “multi-step process” based on collaboration with the Academy of Medical Royal Colleges (AoMRC) and the NHS, along with other stakeholders such as the Royal College of Nursing.
The YouTubers must have an active medical licence, and they cannot have posted any videos in the past containing disinformation.
xxx
The BBC’s first disinformation correspondent has apparently been caught in a lie.
Marianna Spring, one of the BBC’s fastest-rising stars, reportedly embellished the truth on her resume while applying for a job before she joined the broadcaster in 2018.
From BBC Disinformation Reporter Marianna Spring Accused Of Lying On CV – Deadline.
xxx
xxx
And today, a startup out of Israel doing just that is announcing a big round of funding on the back of strong business growth. ThetaRay, which has built an AI-based anti-money-laundering (AML) platform that automatically scans and identifies illicit transaction activity at banks and other financial institutions, has picked up $57 million.
Portage, a specialist fintech investor, is leading the all-equity investment, with JVP, OurCrowd and other previous unnamed backers also participating. The company has raised around $160 million to date — with previous backers including strategics like ABN Amro, as well as General Electric, Alibaba, PwC and SVB Financial.
From ThetaRay nabs $57M for AI tools to fight money laundering | TechCrunch.
xxx
Talking about money laundering, I was interested to read that Switzerland intends to “tighten obligations” for Swiss lawyers, accountants and other service providers. This will require them to conduct due diligence on clients, keep records of the checks, and report suspected instances of money laundering to official authorities. Let’s hope that the Swiss lawyers adopt the same stringent measures as in the UK, where money laundering is a thing of the past and the now ex-Russian warlord Yevgeny Prigozhin passed lawyer’s money laundering checks with his mother’s gas bill.
xxx
Critical infrastructure and other organizations should create road maps for how they’ll migrate to quantum-resistant algorithms, which are expected to become available in 2024, to help ease and accelerate that transition.
From: Fed Agencies: Plan Now for Quantum Threats to Cryptography.
xxx
xxx
Crypto-based decentralised finance (DeFi) uses “oracles” to import real-world data into blockchain environments for use in smart contracts.
Whether oracles can truly adhere to the complete decentralisation ethos of crypto is debatable. Even if feasible in practice, striving for the ideal of full decentralisation leads to complex consensus protocols that further erode blockchain efficiency.
While introducing some degree of centralisation in oracles might boost efficiency, it also means adding trusted parties to a system designed to be trustless. As a result, crypto-based DeFi is likely to remain the preserve of cryptoassets only, rather than being used for real-world assets.
xxx
xxx
Outages such as the one Square suffered late this week are rare, but can still cause major disruptions to merchants — particularly smaller businesses that may not have a multitude of non-cash payment options.
From: Square outage shows even a short disruption can cause chaos | PaymentsSource | American Banker.
xxx
xxx
Nearly one-fifth (19%) of BNPL customers used Apple Pay Later in its first three months. PayPal was still the most-used BNPL brand over the same period (39%), with Afterpay (33%) as the next-most used brand.
The average Apple Pay Later user tended to be more financially healthy than most other BNPL customers, potentially giving it a more sustainable user base than its competitors.From: Apple Pay Later gaining market share – Who should be concerned.
xxx
Snippings