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Madonna sang the praises of nonfungible tokens, or NFTs, depicting cartoon portraits of bored apes. Tampa Bay Buccaneers quarterback Tom Brady appeared in commercials endorsing crypto exchange FTX, which collapsed suddenly in November. And Kim Kardashian gushed about EMAX tokens on Instagram.

Now they and other celebrities are facing civil lawsuits from investors who suffered losses on virtual assets, as well as scrutiny by regulators for allegedly duping the investing public.

From Celebrities Who Endorsed Crypto, NFTs Land in Legal Crosshairs After Investor Losses – WSJ:

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Now, I am not a lawyer, but it sounds like promoting cryptocurrencies might get you into trouble. Therefore you can imagine my surprise when I started getting messages from friends asking me why I was advising them to buy some obscure cryptocurrency that I’d never heard of.

 

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Increasingly, the best place to create a false identity and use it to identify, target and groom potential victims is on social media, via Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. In the US, the Federal Trade Commission says 27 per cent of all reported fraud is initiated this way, declaring social media to be “a gold mine for scammers”.

From The UK’s weak digital bill will fail to deliver knockout blow to online fraudsters:

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The USA is confronted with three epic-size problems: (1) the need for production of energy on a scale that meets the current and future needs of the nation, (2) the need to confront the climate crisis head-on by only producing renewable, green energy, that is 100% emission-free, and (3) the need to forever forestall the eruption of the Yellowstone Supervolcano. This paper offers both a provable practical, novel solution, and a thought experiment, to simultaneously solve all of the above stated problems. Through a new copper-based engineering approach on an unprecedented scale, this paper proposes a safe means to draw up the mighty energy reserve of the Yellowstone Supervolcano from within the Earth, to superheat steam for spinning turbines at sufficient speed and on a sufficient scale, in order to power the entire USA. The proposed, single, multi-redundant facility utilizes the star topology in a grid array pattern to accomplish this. Over time, bleed-off of sufficient energy could potentially forestall this Supervolcano from ever erupting again. With obvious importance to our planet and the research community alike, COMSOL simulation demonstrates and proves the solution proposed herein, to bring vast amounts of green, emission-free energy to the planet’s surface for utilization. Well over 11 Quadrillion Watt hours of electrical energy generated over the course of one full year, to meet the current and future needs of the USA is shown to be practical. Going beyond other current and past research efforts, this methodology offers tremendous benefits, potentially on a planetary scale.

From Yellowstone Caldera Volcanic Power Generation Facility: A new engineering approach for harvesting emission-free green volcanic energy on a national scale – ScienceDirect:

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But OpenAI’s breakout hit did not come out of nowhere. The chatbot is the most polished iteration to date in a line of large language models going back years.

2017: Transformers
The breakthrough behind today’s generation of large language models came when a team of Google researchers invented transformers, a kind of neural network that can track where each word or phrase appears in a sequence. The meaning of words often depends on the meaning of other words that come before or after. By tracking this contextual information, transformers can handle longer strings of text and capture the meanings of words more accurately. For example, “hot dog” means very different things in the sentences “Hot dogs should be given plenty of water” and “Hot dogs should be eaten with mustard.”

From ChatGPT is everywhere. Here’s where it came from | MIT Technology Review:

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Mark Hays, senior policy analyst with Americans for Financial Reform, said predatory inclusion comes from the overall cryptocurrency market being based on a form of extraction capitalism. The industry has yet to demonstrate a clear use-value, other than facilitating both blue-collar and white-collar crime.

From Bitcoin ATM Companies Are Preying on the Poor – Truthout:

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There’s a laundromat in a working-class immigrant community on the outskirts of Washington, D.C. that is much more than a place to wash and dry clothes. The store offers alternative financial services — bill payment processing, money orders and check-cashing services — charging for many transactions that most banks perform for customers at no extra cost.

From Bitcoin ATM Companies Are Preying on the Poor – Truthout:

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One report by the U.S. Treasury published in September 2022 cited the Free Press and Journal-Constitution reporting to classify the proliferation of crypto ATMs as an example of financial service companies targeting “vulnerable communities, especially low-income communities and communities of color … using deceptive sales tactics and marketing.”

From Bitcoin ATM Companies Are Preying on the Poor – Truthout:

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Millions of people in the United States rely on services like those offered by the laundromat because they don’t have enough money to open bank accounts, with the potential for monthly fees to snowball into overdraft fees bleeding their modest income dry. But their reliance on stores like the Hyattsville, Maryland, laundromat leads them to incur up to thousands of dollars in additional costs every year. It’s the result of a phenomenon described by analysts and policy makers as people being either “unbanked” or “underbanked,” and it might be the most clear example of how, as the saying goes, it’s expensive to be poor.

From Bitcoin ATM Companies Are Preying on the Poor – Truthout:

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“I think cash is limited,” said Andrew “Andy” Kartiganer, president at Professional Vending Services Inc., a Deerfield Beach, Florida based convenience services operator. “Credit is about 75% of our sales, 25% is cash. It’s a double-edged sword; there are different problems with both, but I would never eliminate cash. If your (card) reader goes down, that’s the only way you’re going to collect.”

On the digital side, Kartiganer added that card readers have hidden costs and headaches, equipment failures or expiration (e.g., the sunsetting of 3G) and losing a percentage of each sale to credit card transaction fees. Also, there can be human errors in paperwork and configuration or even deposit routing, like when a machine sends transaction profits to the wrong business. Auditing is also much harder with these transactions thanks to sheer volume.

On the other hand, there are fees for processing and counting cash, Kartiganer said.

From Cash is not dead — it’s in transition | Vending Times:

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A judge on Friday sentenced a Chula Vista man to more than 11 years in federal prison for the bombing of two ATMs in 2017 that netted him and an accomplice just $3,420.

From Man who bombed 2 San Diego ATMs sentenced to 11 years – The San Diego Union-Tribune:

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By no later than December 2023, firms must be monitoring the payments that they are receiving to help them identify suspicious inbound payments and accounts that might be being used by scammers.

From Take back control: Its like asking a fox to guard the henhouse:

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