Snippings

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Hedera, the team behind distributed ledger Hedera Hashgraph, has confirmed a smart contract exploit on the Hedera Mainnet that has led to the theft of several liquidity pool tokens.

Hedera said the attacker targeted liquidity pool tokens on decentralized exchanges (DEXs) that derived its code from Uniswap v2 on Ethereum, which was ported over for use on the Hedera Token Service.

From Hedera confirms exploit on mainnet led to theft of service tokens:

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Researchers at Stanford University’s Polarization and Social Change Lab and the Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence (HAI) wanted to probe the boundaries of AI’s political persuasiveness by testing its ability to sway real humans on some of the hottest social issues of the day — an assault weapon ban, the carbon tax, and paid parental leave, among others.

“AI fared quite well. Indeed, AI-generated persuasive appeals were as effective as ones written by humans in persuading human audiences on several political issues,” said Hui “Max” Bai, a postdoctoral researcher in the Polarization and Social Change Lab and first author on a new paper about the experiment in pre-print.

From AI’s Powers of Political Persuasion:

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In a lawsuit filed against DoNotPay Inc. in San Francisco Superior Court on Tuesday, Jonathan Faridian of Yolo County seeks damages for alleged violations of California’s unfair competition law, alleging that he would not have subscribed if he knew that the “World’s First Robot Lawyer,” as the company calls itself, was not actually a lawyer.

From Firm calling itself world’s first ‘robot lawyer’ sued in court over authority to practice law – Local News Matters:

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WhatsApp would refuse to comply with requirements in the online safety bill that attempted to outlaw end-to-end encryption, the chat app’s boss has said, casting the future of the service in the UK in doubt.

Speaking during a UK visit in which he will meet legislators to discuss the government’s flagship internet regulation, Will Cathcart, Meta’s head of WhatsApp, described the bill as the most concerning piece of legislation currently being discussed in the western world.

The UK government already has the power to demand the removal of encryption thanks to the 2016 investigatory powers act, but WhatsApp has never received a legal demand to do so, Cathcart said. The online safety bill is a concerning expansion of that power, because of the “grey area” in the legislation.

Under the bill, the government or Ofcom could require WhatsApp to apply content moderation policies that would be impossible to comply with without removing end-to-end encryption.

From WhatsApp would not remove end-to-end encryption for UK law, says chief | WhatsApp | The Guardian:

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Remind me again why in 202X we need deposit-taking institutions? Isn’t time we all get a CBDC wallet? Banks can be all full reserve by default, focus instead on identity and underwriting.

— Giyom Lebleu (@giyom)

March 12, 2023

https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

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Caroline Abrahams, charity director at Age UK, said: “It’s important that everyone can park near services, appointment venues and amenities, but the fact is that not all older people have a smartphone or a credit card, nor the ability to easily use automated services on a landline, so the parking opportunities for anyone in this position are increasingly limited.

From Scrapping traditional pay and display parking meters will isolate elderly and disabled people, critics say:

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I have to say I rather agree with Councillor Nicholas Bennett, who is the transport, highways and road safety wallah in Bromley. He observed that parts of the borough had been without “pay and display” machines for years without a problem and said that “As a pensioner myself I appreciate that some people have a problem with modern technology however we are talking about people who drive a ton and a half of steel which requires more skill than downloading an app.”

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Britian’s biggest parking app RingGo has up to 515,000 users currently but there are many other apps including ParkMe, Parkopedia, Just Park and PayByPhone which are needed across the country.

Brighton and Hove city council will scrap all of its pay and display machines by May 31 citing that changing machines to 4G would require a large budget. It admitted the move could cause ‘digital exclusion’.

From Pay-as-you-go parking machines set to be removed from city streets leaving motorists using 30 apps | Daily Mail Online:

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There’s no obvious why in the not-too-distant future your car and the council cannot just sort it out between themselves without 

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The emergence of transformer models that leverage deep learning and web-scale corpora has made it possible for artificial intelligence (AI) to tackle many higher-order cognitive tasks, with critical implications for industry, government, and labor markets in the US and globally. Here, we investigate whether the currently most powerful, openly-available AI model – GPT-3 – is capable of influencing the beliefs of humans, a social behavior recently seen as a unique purview of other humans. Across three preregistered experiments featuring diverse samples of Americans (total N=4,836), we find consistent evidence that messages generated by AI are persuasive across a number of policy issues, including an assault weapon ban, a carbon tax, and a paid parental-leave program. Further, AI-generated messages were as persuasive as messages crafted by lay humans. Compared to the human authors, participants rated the author of AI messages as being more factual and logical, but less angry, unique, and less likely to use story-telling. Our results show the current generation of large language models can persuade humans, even on polarized policy issues. This work raises important implications for regulating AI applications in political contexts, to counter its potential use in misinformation campaigns and other deceptive political activities.

From OSF Preprints | Artificial Intelligence Can Persuade Humans on Political Issues:

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DeFi does not rely on intermediaries and centralized institutions. Instead, it is based on open protocols and decentralized applications (DApps). Agreements are enforced by code, transactions are executed in a secure and verifiable way, and legitimate state changes persist on a public blockchain. Thus, this architecture can create an immutable and highly interoperable financial system with unprecedented transparency, equal access rights, and little need for custodians, central clearing houses, or escrow services, as most of these roles can be assumed by “smart contracts.”

From Decentralized Finance: On Blockchain- and Smart Contract-Based Financial Markets | St. Louis Fed.

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Nicholas Weaver, writing in the Yale Law School’s digital whitepaper on “The Death of Cryptocurrency” asks a fundamentally very interesting question about the fintech future, which is: “If a smart contract is a contract, and the terms allow an attacker to take the cryptocurrency, is it actually theft?”

This is not hypothetical 

A California federal judge has ruled that South Korean crypto project ICON (ICX, a blockchain-powered network that supports smart contracts and was historically considered South Korea’s answer to Ethereum) may have acted improperly when it instructed Kraken and Binance to freeze 14 million tokens minted by a crypto “hacker”. The word hacker is in quotes here, because it’s a matter of some dispute what constitutes a hack when it comes to smart contracts on a blockchain.

In this case, the alleged hacker, Mark Shin, countered that he had never hacked any part of ICON’s system, but he had [simply used the code as it had been programmed]. Mr. Shin’s lawyer is quoted as saying that “if the blockchain says you have certain tokens, and you didn’t take those tokens from another individual, the rules of blockchains are that that property belongs to you”. In other words, code is law and this has nothing to do with “hacking” and everything to do with redistributing value to, as my friend David Gerard would put it, cryptographically more deserving causes.

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Just the top 10 major cryptocurrency exploits garnered over $2 billion for malicious actors in a year that was marred with bankruptcies and collapses.

From The 10 largest crypto hacks and exploits in 2022 saw $2.1B stolen:

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While most jurisdictions apply the Basel rules to their entire banking system anyway, the US has a strong and powerful community bank lobby, and US community banks are usually quite aggressive in their use of the borrow-short/lend-long business model.

So the Fed adopted a rule under which only the very largest international banks were subject to the full Basel NSFR requirements (several of those large banks are actually holding companies for foreign institutions). It adopted a second tier, under which the ratio only had to be 85%, and a third tier where it was calibrated to 70%. And even then, the majority of US banks are not required to follow the NSFR or LCR standards at all.

Despite being the 16th largest bank in the US by balance-sheet size, SVB was apparently not subject to the “no more Dexias, no more HBOSes” regulation.

From Silicon Valley Bank is a very American mess | Financial Times.

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Overall, consumers trust PayPal to store their money in an app more than they trust their bank to store their money in an app. There are nevertheless some consumers who trust their banks more: the consumers who have either never stored their money in an app, or who have only stored their money in a merchant app. After PayPal and their banks, consumers most trust Visa, Mastercard, Apple, Amazon and American Express, in that order.

From Money-Storing Apps Grow With Consumers’ Embrace | PYMNTS.com:

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