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Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore and Thailand are planning to link their respective systems, meaning that people from each country will be able to seamlessly pay for goods and services throughout the region.
Payments will use local-currency settlements between the countries, bypassing the need for US dollar as intermediary.
From Southeast Asian countries prep QR code payment interoperability:
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Fast facts
SK Telecom said users of its wallet will be able to store, transfer and receive blockchain-issued tokens such as cryptocurrencies, non-fungible tokens (NFTs) and “soulbound tokens” (SBTs), which are permanent, non-transferable NFTs for verifiable identifications and certificates.
SK Telecom owns over 47% of all mobile communications users in South Korea as of 2021, according to Korea Information Society Development Institute (KISDI).
The telecommunications arm of conglomerate SK Group also operates its own metaverse, Ifland, which has a monthly average user base around 1.1 million people.SK Group’s information technology investment subsidiary, SK Square, has been working on its own cryptocurrency that is intended to be used within SK’s Web3 network.
From South Korea’s SK Telecom to build its first Web3 wallet:
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As soon as M-Pesa went live it was immediately apparent that the market was using it in ways that had not been part of the original business model. In particular, businesses began to use it. They started to deposit cash (as a kind of “night safe”) as well settling transactions and paying wages. What’s more, some big businesses started accepting M-Pesa for payments (including the national airline, the power utility and insurance companies). The Safaricom CEO Michael Joseph realised that something big was going on and drove his team to scale. He focused on developing the agent network. Safaricom already had agents, of course, because they used them to sell airtime, but Michael realised that they needed to increase the size of the network substantially and this meant dealing with agent incentives, float management, trading and so forth. Suffice to say that becoming an M-PESA agent became an attractive proposition.
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It lost almost 1m subscribers between April and July, as the number of people quitting the service accelerated.
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an attacker who tricks someone into loading a malicious website can determine whether that visitor controls a particular public identifier, like an email address or social media account, thus linking the visitor to a piece of potentially personal data.
From A New Attack Can Unmask Anonymous Users on Any Major Browser | WIRED:
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The technique is known as a “side channel attack” because the researchers found that they could accurately and reliably make this determination by training machine learning algorithms to parse seemingly unrelated data about how the victim’s browser and device process the request.
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The proposed “workable plan” is based in part on a survey which shows that 55 percent of UK residents support the establishment of a digital ID system to prevent asylum seekers whose claims are rejected from working and settling in the Kingdom anyway. Only 28 percent were opposed to this plan, leaving 17 percent who do not have an opinion.
The idea is to cut off demand for passage to the UK among asylum-seekers. Right-to-work checks of digital ID, often involving biometrics, are already coming into force in the UK. As of December 30, 2022, a long-planned set of requirements for employers will come into effect, but with restrictions on what forms of digital documentation are accepted.
The system proposed in the paper would involve a physical identity card with digital functionality for employers and government services to authenticate the bearer. Those with the card could provide a passport or equivalent document for identity verification to generate a public or private key pair for a digital signature. The digital signatures could be applied to necessary documents to prove the person’s right to work or receive the service.
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Baker sits among the majority of cryptoasset investors who view tokens as a “fun investment”, according to research published this month by HM Revenue & Customs. A smaller cohort, one in five, said cryptocurrencies were “‘core part” of their investment portfolio.
From Crypto voices: investors speak about the market shock | Financial Times:
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Posing as a scholar, a Chinese woman spent years writing alternative accounts of medieval Russian history on Chinese Wikipedia, conjuring imaginary states, battles, and aristocrats in one of the largest hoaxes on the open-source platform.
From A Bored Chinese Housewife Spent Years Falsifying Russian History on Wikipedia:
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Graham sold a total of 300 9mm Parabellum bulleted cartridges for £5,800 in cash during four meetings with the buyer, who was actually an undercover police officer… Cash was also found at his home, which included banknotes showing the same serial numbers as those handed to Graham on the 13 January, when 100 rounds of live ammunition were bought.
From Coldstream Guard soldiers sold ammunition for cash, court hears – BBC News:
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The banking regulator is asking the Commission to explore the possibility of having a common application programming interface (API) standard across the EU to be developed by the industry. The EBA acknowledged that introducing a single API standard at this stage would bring additional compliance costs, but these would be outweighed by the significant benefits that would accrue as a common API would reduce barriers for new market entrants. The EBA said that this common API would also be extended in the potential move towards open finance — the expansion from access to payment accounts data towards access to other types of financial data (such as savings, investments and insurance data).
From EBA: Standard API for Open Banking in New PSD3 | PYMNTS.com:
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