A library of snippets
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Payments providers are increasingly resuming business-as-usual as the pandemic eases, but so are criminals. Losses from identity-fraud schemes, in which fraudsters use stolen payment credentials for their own gain, soared 79% last year to $24 billion, according to a study released Tuesday by Javelin Strategy & Research
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Forty years ago, in July 1982, author William Gibson coined the word “cyberspace” in his story, Burning Chrome, published in Omni magazine.
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he report, Demystifying Crypto: Shedding light on the adoption of digital currencies for payments in 2022, finds that 30% of UK consumers intend to use crypto as a form of payment in 2022, increasing to 40% when looking at respondents globally. Almost 28% of UK consumers believe that crypto should be seen as a form of currency, rather than just an investment asset, as 45% say they trust brands who accept crypto payments.
From Checkout.com sheds light on digital currencies adoption for payments – ThePaypers.
First of all, you shouldn’t really listen to UK consumers about anything, since a quarter of them think that Sherlock Holmes was a real person. Second of all, asking people for their opinions about something they don’t understand is pointless. And third of all, the idea that a third of UK consumer intend to use “crypto” as a form of payment this year is absurd.
The British public are, in fact, wrong about nearly everything.
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At Pwn2Own, the stakes are a little bit lower, but the systems are the same as what you’ll find in the real world. This week in Miami, the targets were all industrial control systems that run critical facilities. Nearly every piece of software offered up as a target fell to the hackers.
From These hackers just showed how easy it is to target critical infrastructure | MIT Technology Review.
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One notable target at this year’s show was the Iconics Genesis64, a human-machine interface tool that hackers can break into to bring down critical targets while fooling the human operators into thinking nothing is wrong. In Miami, the Iconics Genesis64 was hacked at least six times to give attackers full control. The teams that took on the challenge won a total of $75,000.
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One of the keys to NFTs will be portability across mediums. A Twitter blue check can’t exist on Instagram, but the NFT equivalent of a Twitter blue check can — and deliver credible authenticity, thanks to that NFT deed. This is the metaverse vision of interoperability that could help make digital belongings feel similar to physical belongings.
From How NFTs Can Unlock Scarcity and Authenticity in the Digital Economy | Marker.
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An algorithmic stablecoin called Iron collapsed in a death spiral in June, costing investors about $2 billion. It was partially collateralized. Iron fell from $1 to about 75 cents, the level of collateral behind the coin. A related cryptocurrency called Titan—which had played a shock-absorber role similar to Luna—plunged from $64.04 to roughly zero within hours. The anonymous team behind Iron said in a blog post that it had suffered a “large-scale crypto bank run.”
From Cutting-Edge Crypto Coins Tout Stability. Critics Call Them Dangerous. – WSJ.
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The Bank of England is asking lenders and insurers to pay an extra £24m so it can hire 100 extra staff and keep track of new risks, including those linked to crypto assets.
The central bank’s Prudential Regulation Authority (PRA), which is in charge of managing systemic risks across the financial sector, said it was expanding its 1,341-strong workforce in response to “new policy responsibilities” that also included setting the UK’s own rules after Brexit.
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I happened to watch the CATO Institute webinar on “Financial Privacy in a Digital Era” back in April. The participants were Marta Belcher
(President and Chair, Filecoin Foundation), Paul Belonick (Assistant Professor of Practice, University of California Hastings College of Law), Michael Mosier (General Counsel, Espresso Systems) and Jennifer J. Schulp (Director of Financial Regulation Studies, Center for Monetary and Financial Alternatives). It was an valuable and informed discussion of a complex and nuanced issue that is interesting on so many levels.
The discussion was framed around the Fourth Amendment and the warrantless mass surveillance of financial transactions.
I’d never heard of the “third party doctrine” that says that, if I understood things properly, once you hand over your financial transactions to a third party (eg, your bank) then you have no reasonable expectation of privacy. That kind of seems wrong to me, especially given that the application of AI and ML to financial data means that inferences unavailable in the 1970s are now commonplace. In fact a common thread was the need to rethink financial privacy for the digital age, given the 1970s roots of the current regime.
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The most significant change in the proposed eIDAS revision is the introduction of EU Digital Identity Wallets, which must be made available for all EU citizens. In contrast to the current situation under eIDAS, in which notification of an eID scheme by member states is voluntary, it will become mandatory for member states to provide EU Digital Identity Wallets to their citizens free of charge. Not only does the draft revision contain such a measure for providing EU Digital Identity Wallets, but it also extends mandated acceptance of such wallets beyond the public sector to private sector relying parties:
“Where private relying parties providing services are required by national or Union law to use strong user authentication for online identification, or where strong user authentication is required by contractual obligation, including in the areas of transport, energy, banking and financial services, social security, health, drinking water, postal services, digital infrastructure, education or telecommunications, private relying parties shall also accept the use of European Digital Identity Wallets issued in accordance with Article 6a”.
(proposed new article 12b pt. 2 in eIDAS revision)In addition, the draft mentions that very large online platforms – i.e. online platforms that reach at least 45 million monthly active users in the European Union (which represents 10% of the 450 million consumers in the EU market) – will be mandated to accept the wallets at the user’s request. They will also have to respect the minimum attributes necessary for the specific online service for which authentication is requested, such as proof of age. Very large online platforms include marketplaces like eBay, Amazon and Zalando, and social media such as Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and Reddit, to name but a few
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Ironically, Mr. Galka pointed out, the hacker was following Beanstalk’s stated rules. The problem is there was no contingency for somebody taking over the voting mechanism, which reflects the newness of the project itself, he said.
“Everything this guy did was consistent with the code,” Mr. Galka said.
From Crypto Thieves Get Bolder by the Heist, Stealing Record Amounts – WSJ:
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Snippings