Snippings

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The European Central Bank (ECB) has said the term “stablecoin” should be replaced with something less “confusing” or potentially “misleading”.

From ‘Misleading’ Term Stablecoin Should Be Ditched, Says ECB – CoinDesk:

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A recent illustration of this was in the British government’s review of company registrations procedures where the official record of companies (known as “Companies House”) is to be reformed to introduce proper checks on whether directors are real people, in an attempt to combat major crime. Yes, you read that correctly. Right now, there is no check on whether a company directors is even a  real person or not, let alone whether they are a “fit and proper” person, to the use the English legal description, to even act as the director of a company.

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To prevent problems like these from occurring, each IoT device needs to be able, as it were, to show an identity document—”authentication,” in professional terms. Normally, speaking, this is done with a kind of password, which is sent in encrypted form to the person who is communicating with the device. The security key needed for that has to be stored in the IoT device one way or another, Lieneke Kusters explains. “But these are often small and cheap devices that aren’t supposed to use much energy. To safely store a key in these devices, you need extra hardware with constant power supply. That’s not very practical.”

Digital fingerprint

There is a different way: namely by deducing the security key from a unique physical characteristic of the memory chip (Static Random-Access Memory, or SRAM) that can be found in practically every IoT device. Depending on the random circumstances during the chip’s manufacturing process, the memory locations have a random default value of 0 or 1.

From A fingerprint for the Internet of Things:

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n contrast, the magnetic PUF is resistant to attack and insensitive to environmental variations.

“In all previously proposed MRAM PUFs, a procedure to set random magnetization orientations is necessary for their practical application,” said Zhe Guo, a post doctor in You’s team. “In our IAE-PUF, the random distribution of magnetization orientations is formed during the MgO layer thinning process, so no initialization is required.” The avoidance of setting random states with an external magnetic field or writing current makes it easier to integrate and scale down with low power consumption.

From Highly secure physically unclonable cryptographic primitives based on interfacial magnetic anisotropy:

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The payment technology has largely failed to gain popularity, analysts say, as some consumers have found the sign-up process cumbersome and had concerns about how their images and data would be used. It shows that even a major fintech innovator with a large customer base can face privacy concerns and struggle to change user habits.

From In China, Paying With Your Face Is Hard Sell – WSJ:

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British payments firm Pay.UK’s Answer Pay service and new enrollee Mastercard have successfully completed their first post-testing transaction involving Answer Pay’s “Request to Pay” service, Answer Pay announced on Thursday (Sept. 17).

From Answer Pay, Mastercard Execute First Transaction | PYMNTS.com:

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My observation is that many digital driving licence designs being rolled out right now fail on several of these “good/better” design checks, in fact, when closely examined, most are a step backwards not forwards despite their “look at me” quality for press releases.

From (2) Digital Driving Licences – failing the test? | LinkedIn:

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The EU will set up a new college of supervisors, including national and European authorities, to oversee “significant” digital currencies including Facebook’s Libra, according to the European Commission’s cryptocurrency draft proposal

From LEAK: EU to create ‘superbody’ of watchdogs to oversee digital currencies – EURACTIV.com:

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The European Commission wants financial firms and other companies to share more customer data to create a “broader open finance space” with new services for citizens, according to a draft of the Digital Finance Strategy seen by EURACTIV.

The strategy, which could still be subject to changes, is expected be presented later this month. It outlines the Commission’s priority actions by 2024 to make “the benefits of digital finance available to European consumers and businesses,” the draft document reads.

From LEAK: Commission plans new revolution for “open finance” in 2022 – EURACTIV.com:

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The average transaction value of fast payments in Denmark and Sweden are less than 0.3% of GDP per capita, indicating they are used mainly for person-to-person payments. At the other end of the scale, the average transaction value of fast payments in Hong Kong SAR is over 6%, suggesting that they are used mainly for payments involving businesses (eg payment of rent).

From Fast retail payment systems:

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he Feds claim that between January 2019 and February 2020, somewhere between 45 per cent and 95 per cent of NS8’s listed assets appear to have been fictitious. During that period, the firm raised about $123m from investors.

From Online fraud prevention biz fails to prevent CEO’s alleged offline fraud • The Register:

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