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“Less than 24 hours after downloading the fake ‘Phantom Wallet’ app from Google Play, Pearlman’s real Phantom wallet was drained of more than $800,000 worth of virtual currencies, including SAMO, USDC, ORCA, and SOL, as well as four additional NFTs,” his attorneys recount in a lawsuit that seeks to recover the stolen funds from Google rather than from the bogus app’s operator.

From Man robbed of $800,000 in cryptocurrency sues Google • The Register.

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The recent cryptocurrency crashes were in large part caused by corrupt players who lied to customers or lenders about what they were doing with their money.   In contrast, DeFi protocols did not crash – the smart contracts closed automatically when the collateral was insufficient or when other terms were met.

From Gartner Blog Network.

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Smart contracts are imperfect and have some disadvantages that still limit their use in some cases or introduce skepticism about their acceptance in conservative institutions. Of course, these disadvantages are being actively worked on, but they are worth considering.

Immutability. While this is an advantage of smart contracts, it imposes additional responsibility on their creators. They need to think in advance about the perfect logic of a smart contract for any scalability. And even with this kind of attitude, an unexpected error can occur, which the creators still have no right to make.
The Imperfection of the Code. There are no perfect people and, therefore, no perfect systems. A trivial error in the code is bound to be exploited by hackers, who will always know how valuable assets your smart contract works with.

From Cost of Failure in Smart-Contract Development | Mad Devs Blog.

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The UK Government funded Agile Integrated Airspace System (ALIAS) programme will see drones being used to test cutting edge aircraft guidance technology aimed at making the skies safer for all aviation, and ultimately enabling autonomous unmanned aircraft providing a better supply-chain and connectivity to the UK and Europe.

The project will use Jersey’s world-class connectivity, which includes three separate 4G networks and multiple dedicated Internet of Things (IoT) networks.

From Jersey to be testbed for technology trial leading to autonomous flights – Channel Eye:

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John Dinsdale, research director at Synergy, said in an email that China doesn’t have the level of “privacy and personal [or corporate] security that we expect in most of the rest of the world. It is also quite clear that the Chinese government will intervene in markets or in individual companies if it feels the need to do so.” That, he said, isn’t comforting for cloud customers, for whom “privacy and data protection are pretty basic table stakes.”

From Big Tech Is the West’s Surprise Weapon in Competition With Russia, China – WSJ:

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In 2016 and 2017, the government introduced measures that forced almost all UK companies to identify their real owners. ELPs were not covered by these new transparency laws.
Since then, more than 4,500 of them have been set up.

From Banned Russian oligarchs exploited UK secrecy loophole – BBC News:

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In the province of Vicenza, a pensioner hid a million euros in a photocopier, only to forget it and take it to a recycling center for disposal.

From He hides the money in the photocopier, forgets it and takes it to the landfill: shredding one million euro banknotes-breakinglatest.news-Breaking Latest News:

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Luis Alfonso Fernández Manzano of Bird & Bird

Are the risks in the Metaverse insurable? I think there is no doubt about it.

From Metaverse and insurance – Bird & Bird.

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Just over $5.2 million in cryptoassets have been stolen so far from more than 7,900 Solana wallets, according to blockchain forensics firm Elliptic.

From Crypto Market Takes a Fresh Hit as Thousands of Solana Wallets Hacked (SOL) – Bloomberg.

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An approved research team that wants to understand, say, the severity of a new Covid variant in vaccinated, unvaccinated and previously infected individuals, would write the analytical code and test it on dummy data until it was proved to run successfully. When ready, the code would be submitted to the data warehouse, and the results would be returned. The researchers would never see the underlying data. Meanwhile the entire research community could see that the code had been deployed and could check, share, reuse and adapt it.
This approach is called a “trusted research environment” or TRE.

From How to save more lives and avoid a privacy apocalypse | Tim Harford.

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