Snippings

xxx

While working at the morgue, Lodge allegedly stole parts of cadavers donated to the school, often by the deceased’s kin, to sell them to collectors, and even let Maclean and Taylor into the morgue to peruse the bodies and parts and choose what they wanted to buy.

According to the indictment, from September 2018 to July 2021, Taylor transferred 39 electronic payments to a PayPal account operated by Lodge, totaling $37,355.56, in payment for human remains he’s stolen. One of the transactions, for $1,000, came with the memo “head number 7.” Another said, “braiiiiiins.”

From ‘Braiiiiiiiiins’: Alleged Harvard Human Remains Trafficker Left PayPal Notes.

xxx

xxx

The Australian Competition & Consumer Commission (ACCC) publishes a register of all CDR participants and representatives at cdr.gov.au/find-a-provider. Almost three years on from the official launch, the data holders now sharing data include 113 bank and credit union brands representing 76 ADIs, who collectively account for approximately 99.8% of bank lending to Australian households and 99.7% of bank deposits by Australian households, based on APRA monthly banking statistics. In practical terms, the Consumer Data Right already makes near-ubiquitous banking data available to any accredited data recipient.

(A small number of ADIs not yet sharing data include those with ongoing exemptions granted by the ACCC, those with no relevant products – for example ADIs who focus on providing payment settlement services, and some very small ADIs whose exemptions have expired but are not yet compliant. Collectively their market share is negligible.)

Data sharing by Energy retailers was added in November 2022, with Australia’s three major energy retailers actively sharing data. Roll-out to the energy sector is continuing.

Data recipients must be accredited by the ACCC. There are 28 active accredited data recipients, and another 75 ‘CDR representatives’, which are organisations able to receive CDR data through another accredited data recipient. Another 11 organisations have been accredited but are not yet active. Between them the active accredited data recipients have 98 active ‘software products’ through which consumers can request that their data be shared.

From Australia’s Consumer Data Right is driving innovation and opening up benefits for consumers | Finsia.

xxx

The Apple shocked many people with the launch price of its Vision Pro headset. At $3,499 they are not going to be an impulse buy at the airport. But they are, apparently, amazing. One journalist went so far as to say that using the Vision Pro was “the most mind-blowing moment” of a career covering Apple and technology, which suggests to me at least that something interesting is going. Perhaps $3,499 really isn’t a lot of money for an entirely new way to interact with both the mundane and virtual worlds?

 

xxx

At least one Apple procurement employee has told a component supplier that they are optimistic about the headset’s success, suggesting it could follow the trajectory of the AirPods, whose shipments roughly doubled in size each year between 2017—their first full year on the market—and 2020, according to a person who spoke to the employee.

From Apple’s Learning Curve: How Headset’s Design Caused Production Challenges — The Information:

xxx

As most observers have noted, the Metaverse will be made up from many different metaverses and there is no reason to think that a games metaverse accessed using a Meta headset will be the same as a (for example) engineering metaverse experienced through an Apple headset or a (for example) media metaverse seen through Google goggles. What they all are, however, is shared social spaces where people obtain experiences together.

xxx

However, it might be that Apple is introducing a new binding process for digital identity with the launch of the Apple Vision Pro. The extended-reality headset that was launched to a fairly receptive audience earlier this month, uses biometrics in such a way as to cement the relationship between the user, the platform, their identity and, presumably in time, their wallet.

From Apple Vision Pro Signals Another Move Into Digital Identity for Apple.

xxx

xxx

However, Mark Gurman at Bloomberg has now tweeted that many people will have to set extra money aside to buy the Vision Pro. That’s because there’s no room for wearing glasses under the headset, so those who wear specs have to find a different way to be able to see the microOLED displays in perfect clarity.

This is achieved by prescription lenses which sit in front of each eye. They attach magnetically to the Vision Pro, Apple has said, but it has not given any clue about pricing.

From Apple Vision Pro: Report Claims New Eye-Watering Price Shock.

xxx

 

xxx

Finally, as a place holder in an important new category of technology, an Apple headset would be a statement of intent, rather than an end in itself. However impressive the technology behind the device, it will still suffer from the problem common to all VR and AR headsets: most people do not want to don a bulky headset or to cut themselves off from the world to enter a different digital realm.

Until the same experiences can be worked into lightweight glasses — or even, one day, contact lenses that make the technology completely invisible — VR and AR are unlikely to infiltrate everyday life in the way that smartphones did. But if Apple finally launches its headset next week, it will have taken the all-important first step.

From Apple’s mixed reality headset is a hedge against disruption | Financial Times:

xxx

Not what you’ve signed up for: Compromising Real-World LLM-Integrated Applications with Indirect Prompt Injection

Kai Greshake from Saaland University and his colleagues note that while LLMs can produce convincing scams, when integrated into applications they could not only enable the creation of scams but also act as automated social engineers. As this is a new territory without previous experience and awareness of such attacks, users might now trust a search engine’s output over a phishing email. LLMs could be prompted to facilitate fraudulent attempts by, e.g., suggesting phishing or scam websites as trusted or directly asking users for their accounts’ credentials. It is important to note that ChatGPT can create hyperlinks from the users’ input (i.e., the malicious indirect prompt), which attackers could use to add legitimacy and hide the malicious URL itself.

xxx

The technology of Conversational AI has made significant advancements over the last eighteen months. As a consequence, conversational agents are likely to be deployed in the near future that are designed to pursue targeted influence objectives. Sometimes referred to as the AI Manipulation Problem, the emerging risk is that consumers will unwittingly engage in real-time dialog with predatory agents that can skillfully persuade them to buy particular products, believe particular pieces of misinformation, or fool them into revealing sensitive personal data.

From (PDF) The Manipulation Problem: Conversational AI as a Threat to Epistemic Agency:

xxx

xxx

By offering a family digital wallet, institutions can begin to help children develop money management skills while building crucial brand loyalty. Those that don’t have an answer for young customers today are at risk of losing their customers tomorrow.

From Family Digital Wallets: Deposit Acquisition Opportunity For Banks:

xxx

xxx

Financial institutions can develop new payment methods for the metaverse, such as consumer-focused wallets similar to those used for e-commerce, but with blockchain security and payment options that include cryptocurrency as well as other forms of payment. This approach would make consumer transactions as well as peer-to-peer payments easier, while maintaining the security and lower transaction costs that drove blockchain’s initial popularity for bitcoin transactions.

From Metaverse Payment Rails: Opportunities for Financial Institutions:

xxx

xxx

The tech commentariat has been scathing about the $3,500 cost of Apple’s new gadget. But actually it isn’t all that expensive by historical standards. It is pricier than the iPhone was when it launched; but it’s significantly less expensive than an IBM PC was in 1981, or the Compaq ‘portable’ after which I lusted in 1983.

From Monday 12 June, 2023 – by John Naughton – Memex 1.1:

I remember showing up in San Francisco in the early 1980s and going to a downtown store — somewhere around Embarcadeo if memory serves — to buy an Apple IIe. It cost around $2,500 back then and I thought it was the most amazing piece of technology in the world. I installed a modem and bought a ProDos external hard drive and felt like I was NASA.

While I certainly used the IIe to play some games, it was mostly used in those early days for a variety of hacking experiments with a friend of mine (we ran a serial cable out of a window and down to the floor below so we could write in C and then load the compiled assembly code on to another machine), for remote access to the work mainframe (I can still remember the frisson of excitement when I realised I could use the dial-in port that the manufacturer used and use my machine at home as a terminal) and for early ventures into cyberspace with Compuserve. I think I’m way past my coding years so I doubt I’ll be using C++ or whatever the kids are into these days to build anything on Apple’s VisionOS, but I probably will order one of the headsets to start playing around.

Push is much cheaper than pull so the right way to do this is to implement push infrastructure then put request-to-pay (customer is present) and variable-recurring-payments (customer was present) on top of it. The gym request-to-pay goes to your (eg) bank app, you authorise and tell you bank app to do it automatically in the future within certain parameters.

 

Direct debits are a 1970s hack to get around the fact that consumers, biller and banks were not connected by an always-on network. They are now.

xxx

According to a new report from Cornerstone Advisors, The Rise of Family Digital Wallets, community-based financial institutions should set their sights on offering a specialized digital wallet focused on helping consumers manage the finances of their Gen Z (born 1995-2009) and Gen Alpha (born after 2009) children.

Americans are no strangers to digital wallets. According to Morning Consult, seven in 10 American adults use PayPal, four in 10 use Venmo and Cash App, and more than three in 10 use Apple Pay and Google Pay.

These tools, however, typically lack the features and functionality to help consumers manage their family’s finances, nor do they help parents monitor, control and guide their children’s’ spending activity. In addition, banks have done little to develop products to address the younger segments beyond offering “youth savings” accounts.

From Family Digital Wallets: Deposit Acquisition Opportunity For Banks:

xxx