Snippings

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My mother has an account with Santander. She doesn’t want to set up direct debits, so I help her to pay bills using her debit card.

Recently a payment was declined. I telephoned Santander, which said it needed my mother’s mobile phone number so it could send her an authorisation code.

She doesn’t have a mobile, and is extremely deaf and suffers from very bad arthritis in her hands, so is unable to work, or hear on, one.

From ASK TONY: Santander won’t let mother pay bills without a mobile phone | This is Money:

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You will decide in the next few months whether to launch a formal project to assess the possible introduction of a digital euro. But why do you need a digital euro? We already have many tools, such as Visa, Mastercard, Apple Pay, Google Pay…

For two main reasons: we see that people are buying more and more online and that they are using digital payment methods with growing frequency. If these two trends continue, the role of cash as a means of payment may decline significantly. But cash is the payment instrument issued by the central bank, its tangible link to citizens. Providing safe, sovereign money as a public good has been a core mission of central banks for centuries. I think we should continue to fulfil this core mission.

Second, we need to prevent the European retail payments market from being dominated by a handful of non-European players who could be relatively immune from the regulatory scrutiny and oversight of European authorities. This could result in insufficient competition and data protection. And in the absence of a European digital payments solution, our monetary and financial sovereignty would ultimately be at stake.

A digital euro would protect privacy, increase consumer choice, reduce transaction costs and support the digitalisation of the economy while making sure that sovereign money remains at the core of the financial system. And it would level the playing field by allowing all market participants to build on the digital euro to offer additional services.

From Interview with Nikkei:

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The first known attack was initiated in 1989 by Joseph Popp, PhD, an AIDS researcher, who carried out the attack by distributing 20,000 floppy disks to AIDS researchers spanning more than 90 countries, claiming that the disks contained a program that analyzed an individual’s risk of acquiring AIDS through the use of a questionnaire. However, the disk also contained a malware program that initially remained dormant in computers, only activating after a computer was powered on 90 times. After the 90-start threshold was reached, the malware displayed a message demanding a payment of $189 and another $378 for a software lease. This ransomware attack became known as the AIDS Trojan, or the PC Cyborg.

From A History of Ransomware Attacks: The Biggest and Worst Ransomware Attacks of All Time | Digital Guardian:

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To regain access, the users would have to send $189 to PC Cyborg Corporation at a PO box in Panama.

From AIDS Trojan | PC Cyborg | Original Ransomware | KnowBe4:

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Popp was eventually discovered by the British anti-virus industry and named on a New Scotland Yard arrest warrant. He was detained in Brixton Prison. Though charged with eleven counts of blackmail and clearly tied to the AIDS trojan, Popp defended himself by saying money going to the PC Cyborg Corporation was to go to AIDS research.

From AIDS (Trojan horse) – Wikipedia:

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As Alina Simone puts, 

Six years after the AIDS Trojan was first unleashed, two pioneering cryptographers — Adam L. Young and Moti M. Yung — patched the holes in Popp’s leaky programming by developing a class of algorithms known as public-key cryptography.
This innovation basically did for ransomware what the Bessemer processdid for steel.

From The Strange History of Ransomware | by Alina Simone | Medium:

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Governments could help by changing financial rules. “Would tighter regulation of cryptocurrency transactions help?” asks Ciaran Martin, the founding CEO of the U.K.’s National Cyber Security Centre. “What about mandatory disclosure of payments? At the moment, the business model works for the criminals, not for our societies.”

From Worried About Cyberhacks? Say Now You’ll Never Pay Ransom – WSJ:

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Lee Reiners, writing in the Wall Street Journal, says that there are no obvious benefits to cryptocurrencies “beyond the chance to make a quick buck”. He goes to say that “I have yet to identify a single task or process that crypto makes easier, better, cheaper or faster” but I think that this misses the key point that (eg) Bitcoin was never designed to be easier, better, cheaper or faster. It was designed to be censorship-resistant, which it is, which is why the government of Iran is mining Bitcoins to export because it can’t export oil.

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It is no coincidence that ransomware attacks exploded with the emergence of cryptocurrency.

From Ban Cryptocurrency to Fight Ransomware – WSJ:

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First, a central bank digital currency may be designed to encourage the private sector to innovate on top of it, much like app designers bring enticing functionality to phones and their operating systems. By accessing an open set of commands (“application programming interfaces”), a thriving developer community could expand the usability of central bank digital currencies beyond offering plain e‐​wallet services. For instance, they could make it easy to automate payments, so that a shipment of goods is paid once it has been received, or they could build a look‐​up function so money can be sent to a friend on the basis of her phone number alone. The trick will be vetting these add‐​on services so they are perfectly safe.

From Public and Private Money Can Coexist in the Digital Age | Cato Institute:

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the option of redemption into central bank money is essential for stability, interoperability, innovation, and diversity of privately issued money, be it a bank account or other form of money

From Public and Private Money Can Coexist in the Digital Age | Cato Institute:

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The current mix of public and private money in the UK is the result of history rather than some informed policy decision and some might argue, generally available public money is becoming an anachronism.

From Do we need ‘public money’? – speech by Jon Cunliffe | Bank of England.

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Financial exclusion is not a problem born of inadequate technology; it is a public policy problem ultimately rooted in the unequal distribution of wealth and power in our society. Commercial banks, while subsidized and regulated by the federal government, are driven by profit considerations and have little incentive to provide services to low-income individuals.

From Millions of Low-Income People Are Locked Out of The Financial System. More Big Tech Monopoly Power Is Not The Answer. – The Appeal:

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Another common argument is that Western central banks are racing to keep up with China’s advanced CBDC project, which they say could threaten the dollar’s dominance.

But van Steenis is skeptical. “I just don’t see the geopolitical angle is what’s driving it,” he says. “If you ask the Swedes what’s driving the e-krona, it’s much more about a reduction in cash and inclusion and their responsibility to provide to society, than it is because they’re trying to keep up with friends around the world.”

From Central banks aren’t running scared of bitcoin but they want to keep control, says former Bank of England digital guru | Currency News | Financial and Business News | Markets Insider:

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