Snippings

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Vehicles—unlike centrifuges or transformers—tend to have highly breakable humans sitting inside them while moving at high speeds, increasingly with a connection to the internet. Such links tend to have weak security standards.

From The World in 2021 – A murderous cyber-attack is only a matter of time | The World Ahead | The Economist:

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The former chief technology officer of Ripple Labs has just two more password attempts to lay his hands on $240 million in bitcoin that has been locked in a hard-drive for over a decade.

From Former Ripple CTO can’t remember a password that would unlock a fortune in bitcoin:

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An initial analysis of raw data shows that privacy of payments ranked highest among the requested features of a potential digital euro (41% of replies), followed by security (17%) and pan-European reach (10%).

From ECB receives record response to consultation on digital euro:

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The latest data from the UK’s Open Banking Implementation Entity (OBIE), the body charged with overseeing the roll out of the technology, shows that the number of API calls has increased from 66.8 million in 2018 to almost 5.1 billion in 2021, while the number of open banking payments made has grown from 320,000 in 2018, to over 3.4 million in 2020.

From one million users in January 2020, the number doubled to two  million in August 2020, and is set to hit three million over the coming months, says the OBIE. At the same time, the number of third party providers making use of the technology has grown to 294 regulated entities, of which  102  have live offerings in the market.

From The third anniversary of Open Banking in the UK: A cause for celebration?:

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“Even sophisticated investors have been completely incapable of doing any kind of management of private keys,”

From As Bitcoin Prices Swing, Millionaires Lose Sleep Over Lost Keys – The New York Times.

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A forecast on contactless payments by analyst firm Juniper Research estimates that global contactless transaction values will triple from $2 trillion in 2020 to $6 trillion in 2024.

From How Banks Can Keep Big Techs from Dominating Contactless Payments:

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In all dating markets, apps appear to be most helpful to the highly photogenic.

From Young People Are Having Less Sex – The Atlantic:

No shit, as they say, Sherlock.

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All of this data, the videos, the images, the posts, the metadata (including the GEO location of all images and videos, and the connections to the accounts that posted it, has been (since midnight) being uploaded to various cloud drives and storage arrays for the purposes of Archiving this information, for later retrieval by law enforcement, by the public, by Open Source Intelligence communities.
And the kicker.. is this: all of this information was thought to be secure and private by individuals who were making the posts. A significant number of those individuals went through the process of being a “Verified Citizen” on Parler. What does that mean?
It means they uploaded a picture of the front and back of their REAL State Driver’s License…….. Let that sink in for a second.

From All Parler user data is being downloaded as we speak! : ParlerWatch:

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There is no doubt that internet giants need to be scrutinized and regulated. But the Standard Oil or AT&T approaches might not be the most efficient as tech companies are making tweaks to the way that their systems work.

From The Antitrust Quagmire. The all-out offensive against Big Tech… | by Frederic Filloux | Dec, 2020 | Monday Note:

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Social media is not real life, until it is.

From The first phygital coup – Margins by Ranjan Roy and Can Duruk:

This is a mimetic echo of Marshall McLuhan’s wholly accurate prediction generations back that first we shape our tools, then our tools shape us.