A library of snippets
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In response to a complaint by the Consumers’ Association of Ireland, the Central Bank of Ireland issued a statement saying that cash would be accepted at all stores.
From Irish central bank announces all retailers in Ireland must accept cash:
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The Games will also feature ATM machines that can convert foreign currencies, including US dollars, into virtual Chinese money, which will be carried in a digital yuan card (Chinese).
From China’s digital yuan wallet is now in app stores — Quartz:
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Following news that customers of Nationwide were unable to carry out any payments, the third time this month, thousands of angry Brits took to social media to demand an explanation.
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Alan Brown, Professor in Digital Economy at the University of Exeter’s Business School and an expert in digital transformation in large-scale enterprise, talks about the need to develop strategies that respond to five key post-pandemic shifts: the “great acceleration”, the “great disruption”, the “great resignation”, the “great dispersion” and the “great reset”. As he says, “with so much turmoil, there is significant debate about what comes next”.
The Bank of Japan’s research paper on topic identified universal access and resilience as two key characteristics of a digital currency. It must be possible, in their view, to use a digital yen without electricity, especially given Japan’s recent earthquakes and power outages.
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Authorities in the United Arab Emirates have requested the US Department of Justice’s help in probing a case involving a bank manager who was swindled into transferring $35m to criminals by someone using a fake AI-generated voice. The employee received a call to move the company-owned funds by someone purporting to be a director from the business. But it was all a scam… The criminals used “deep voice technology to simulate the voice of the director,” it said. Now officials from the UAE have asked the DoJ to hand over details of two US bank accounts, where over $400,000 from the stolen money were deposited.
From Criminals use fake AI voice to swindle UAE bank out of $35m • The Register.
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MUMBAI : The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) on Monday set the upper limit for individual offline payment transactions at ₹200 and said such payments could only be done face-to-face.
These are part of the its “framework for facilitating small value digital payments in offline mode” and follows pilot testing by some entities from September 2020 to July 2021. On 6 August, RBI had permitted a pilot scheme to encourage technological innovations that enable small value digital transactions done offline.
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But as much as [AI and the blockchain] differ, they both share an underlying desire: to implicitly or explicitly abstract away human fallibility in service of a fully automated vision of perfection. In this, they risk falling prey to the mistaken belief that automation can achieve any meaningful autonomy at all.
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In 2019 during a military exercise, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s Strategic Communications Center of Excellence deployed a “red team” to see if it could disrupt 150 soldiers. Spending only $60 on Russian bots and using only open-source data, researchers were able to learn the usernames, phone numbers, emails and identities of soldiers. They also engaged with them on Facebook and Instagram, mapped their connections with other armed-forces members, determined their location within a kilometer, and even got soldiers to send selfies with their equipment. Apparently even soldiers believe that if it isn’t on Instagram, it didn’t happen.
According to the report on the exercise, they could “pinpoint the exact locations of several battalions” and track troop movements. Here’s the scariest part: “The level of personal information we found was very detailed and enabled us to instil [sic] undesirable behaviour during the exercise.” Janis Sarts, a director of NATO StratCom, told me: “Every time we attempted to manipulate behaviors, we succeeded.”
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my long-deceased goldfish remains on the register as a bona fide upper-tier waste dealer
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Snippings