A library of snippets
xxx
To support private sector innovation, firms exploring how to use technologies like distributed ledger (DLT) to improve financial market infrastructure will have access to a new sandbox.
From Ambitious plans to boost UK fintech and financial services set out by Chancellor – GOV.UK.
xxx
xxx
Our vision is for a more open, greener, and more technologically advanced financial services sector.
From Ambitious plans to boost UK fintech and financial services set out by Chancellor – GOV.UK.
xxx
xxx
In July 2019, the ICO initially announced its intention to issue €204,6 million (£183.39 million) to British Airways for violation of Article 31 of the GDPR. What was announced as the biggest GDPR fine every set in the UK, ended up being reduced to £20 million, in the light of a recent COVID-19 pandemic and the effect it had on the airline industry.
The incident occurred in July 2018 but was only discovered in September 2018. In those few months, the British Airways website diverted users’ traffic to a hacker website, which resulted in hackers stealing personal data of more than 400.000 customers.
xxx
xxx
LinkedIn said public information taken from its service appeared to have been mixed with data from other sources and offered for sale online. And a trove of information from audio social network Clubhouse was discovered on a site used by hackers.
From From Facebook to LinkedIn, data-scraping leaks proliferate | Financial Times.
xxx
xxx
Facebook users whose data was compromised by a massive data leak are being urged to take legal action against the tech giant.
About 530 million people had some personal information leaked, including, in some cases, phone numbers.
A digital privacy group is preparing to take a case to the Irish courts on behalf of EU citizens affected.
From Facebook faces mass legal action over data leak – BBC News.
xxx
DRI said individual users who take part in the legal action could be offered compensation of up to €12,000 (£10,445) if it is successful – based on what it says are similar cases in other countries. That would be a fine some ten trillion dollars, or about half of the GDP of the United States of America. I think it unlikely that Facebook would pay.
Anyway, my point is that I don’t want a regime of GDPR and fines, I want a regime of British Airway having personal details that are useless to a thief if stolen, a regime of LinkedIn using verifiable credentials that cannot be forged and a regime of Facebook not having my personal details at all.
xxx
the U.S. government sees digital identity as a back-burner issue. The United States needs to start treating identity as core to national securit
From Digital Identity Is a National Security Issue – War on the Rocks.
xxx
xxx
The federal government should create a Digital Identity Center to work with the private sector and state and local governments to rapidly identify and support new digital identity technologies. Doing so would strengthen America’s cyber security posture and advance the country’s counter-intelligence interests. The center should be arm’s length to the government, allowing for independence, global exposure, and flexibility to meet new challenges. Within the federal community, those entrusted with leadership positions should make use of such a center to adopt an entrepreneur’s mindset.
From Digital Identity Is a National Security Issue – War on the Rocks.
xxx
There’s no doubt about it. The block chain is a genuine innovation. The combination of an open public ledger and distributed proof-of-work is a new way to solve an entire class of problems relating to the management of digital assets. Hence I am always keen to learn about new applications of blockchain technology. I was very interested in a novel application that was suggested on Reddit a little while back.
But how can consentual sex be proven without a shadow of a doubt even if one of the parties decided to say they did not consent after the act took place? How about recording the consent to blockchain? Well, this is an idea that dates back to the earliest days of blockchain mania and I was alerted to it at the time by my good friend Izabella Kaminska from the FT. She had posted it with a comment I took to be a reflection on the gender divide in information technology and the sad tendency of the geek brain to formulate problems in a technological way and thus search for technological solutions. However, as I have a geek brain, I had a more important (to my mind) observation on the blockchain as a record of sexual consent in this way: it won’t work.
It won’t work for the same reason that unobserved electronic voting won’t work, a point I made at the Fourth World Conference on Electronic Voting at the University of Surrey in the UK a few years ago. I was invited to give one of the event keynotes and I choose to provoke the audience into thinking more about the potential use of electronic voting to develop new voting processes rather than simply automating the existing ones. My point was that the electronic voting is an interesting topic and a good way to focus thought on a number of issues, but that’s it’s not as simple as texting a vote into one of those dreary talent contests that bedevil prime-time television. Voting for the government is not the same as voting for Eurovision, because the Eurovision winner does not have power over you.
I have long maintained that voting must be in public in order to dispel any suspicion of coercion. Maybe it won’t have to be a polling booth any more (you could have general elections that last a week during which people can vote at Post Offices or bank branches or whatever), but it has to be somewhere public. It’s all about coercion, you see. The fact that you put an electronic cross in an electronic box is meaningless unless the “system” can know that you are not coerced. When it comes to voting, we solved this problem by making voting a public act, which is how it must remain in the electronic era. Now, despite all of our surveillance technology, we still don’t know what happens outside the polling booth, so the vote itself must remain observed but secret: the observer must see that you are in a fit state to vote, but not how you vote. This makes it pointless to put a gun to someone’s head outside the polling booth.
The blockchain does not solve the problem of consent. It records a decision, but it does not record the circumstances. Suppose you were to ply me with Krug in order to get me to vote for Boris Johnson? The fact that I put my finger on my mobile phone sensor to assent to to this repulsive act is useless as a record of consent. It does not record whether I was coerced or not, nor does it record the mechanism of the coercion. It merely records I was there, but so does DNA evidence and CCTV evidence and mobile phone records and all sorts of other corroborating material. The identification and authentication not matter.
So, sorry geeks. Bitcoin isn’t a silver bullet or a magic wand and you’re going to have to polish up that old-fashioned negotiated nexus between the genders: respect.
Citibank’s April 2021 “Future of Money” report talks about a race to digital money 2.0, saying that “some have framed it as a new Space Race or Digital Currency Cold War”. Indeed. I, for example, framed it as both in my book “The Currency Cold War”, building on the obvious analogies of a Space Race about technology leading into a Cold War about controlling the economy. When I wrote the book, I thought I was being helpful to strategists in finance, government and technology sectors by describing scenarios across a 3-5 year horizon. It turns out that the space race has accelerated and the Cold War is upon us before we have begun to develop the strategies that we need.
xxx
Nevada Gov. Steve Sisolak on Friday unveiled details behind a plan to allow private industry to develop technology “innovation zones” that would include new cities with their own government that would use a “stablecoin” as its cryptocurrency
From Nevada Governor Lays Out Plans for a City Built on Blockchain – WSJ:
xxx
xxx
Próspera is a nice place to do it. Located on Roatán, a tropical island off the coast of Honduras, it features a series of airy offices and communal outdoor spaces with ocean views. There are other real estate developments on the island, but Próspera is the only one with its own set of laws and governing system.
Próspera is the first project to gain approval from Honduras to start a privately governed charter city, under a national program started in 2013. It has its own constitution of sorts and a 3,500-page legal code with frameworks for political representation and the resolution of legal disputes, as well as minimum wage (higher than Honduras’s) and income taxes (lower in most cases).
xxx
xxx
Akon City, a “futuristic cryptocurrency themed city” founded by music mogul Akon, is ready to begin construction in Senegal, after securing $4 billion from investors. The city will exclusively use the “Akoin” digital currency and plans to have parks, universities, schools, a stadium, hotels, and more. It will be the de facto currency in a Senegalese city he’s constructing on land donated by the government.
From Akon Is Ready To Build A $6 Billion Cryptocurrency City:
xxx
xxx
there is indeed every possibility of competition between these approaches stimulating innovation in the short-term but then a longer-term convergence as the platforms for exchanging digital asset tokens are used to implement both private tokens and public tokens (including CBDCs).
xxx
xxx
As for data flowing to and from banks, the benefits of sharing are indisputable. “The value of information coming from a network of banks is thousands of times higher than the information any one bank has, because you can see not just where the money came from, but where it went, and where it went from there, and so on. It gives you a picture of the network,” says the head of a large international bank.
From :
xxx
xxx
Three big problems hobble the fight against financial crime: a lack of transparency; a lack of collaboration; and a lack of resources.
From :
xxx
Snippings