Snippings

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Despite their growing role in modern systems, machine identities are still often managed with tools designed for people. Traditional identity and access management (IAM) systems assign roles to employees, enforce login policies, and monitor activity based on job function or department. These methods work well for human users but do not translate easily to machines.
Unlike human users, machine identities are generated programmatically—by scripts, deployment tools, or services—and scale rapidly. A single application can generate hundreds of credentials in minutes. These identities vary widely in lifespan and function, making governance especially complex… As they accumulate, these unmanaged identities introduce mounting risk. Many lack clear ownership or expiration timelines. When issues arise, teams may not know what a credential does, who created it, or whether it’s still in use. Human-centric IAM tools weren’t built for this complexity. Managing machine identities effectively requires a governance model rooted in automation, visibility, and system-level adaptability.

From: Why Machine Identities Are the Next Big Compliance Challenge.

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An award-winning ice cream shop ranked the best in Bristol has gone cashless in a move to protect the safety of its staff.

From: Award-winning ice cream shop Panunzio’s goes cashless ‘to protect staff’ | Bristol Live.

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Economic benefits. Delivering economic value to all participants is essential for stablecoin adoption. For example, holding USDC on Coinbase allows users to earn 4.1 percent (annual percentage yield) and has led to deposits of $12 billion.26 In contrast, the MiCA regulations in Europe prevent issuers from passing such yield to depositors; by comparison, the largest stablecoin in Europe has a circulating supply today of just €200 million.

From: Stablecoins payments infrastructure for modern finance | McKinsey.

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Stablecoins have now become a genuine contender to satisfy new payment needs, achieving the first true market fit for (non-crypto) digital assets. A proliferation of needs, including merchant settlements, business-to-business payments, cross-border payments, retail remittances and automated payments (for example, from government) are driving the global demand for real-time, low-cost inclusive global payment solutions. I rather agree with McKinsey’s view that (and they are very polite) incumbents “may have hesitated to pursue innovative payment systems” because they do not want to disrupt existing (and very healthy) sources of revenue. Added to this natural reluctance, competition between institutions has subverted collaboration for to increase net welfare. However, it now seems that growing competion amongst serious players to provide stablecoin-based solutions that are nearly instant and incur lower costs and (not to be underestimated in strategic terms) expand access through wallet-based rather than account-based infrastructure.

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These systems do not decentralise power in any meaningful governance sense. They decentralise accountability, dispersing legal obligations across a network of offshore entities, unaudited smart contracts, and user-facing wrappers that obscure the true nature of the risk. Decentralisation means that no one can be held accountable when things go wrong. Governance tokens, so often portrayed as democratising tools, tend to concentrate power in the hands of early insiders or institutional investors. Meanwhile, ordinary users are invited to participate in systems they cannot understand and which offer no enforceable rights.

From: Tokenised trading creates structural risks.

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As Mario Draghi pointed out in his recent report, the productivity gap between the United States and the European Union is mostly explained by technology and finance.[
1
] If we take the information and communications technology (ICT) and financial sectors out, the gap disappears.

If we want to close the productivity gap with the United States, we need to focus on these areas.

From: The role of the digital euro in digital payments and finance.

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Furious Welsh villagers have mistaken a group of charity workers at a summer camp for asylum seekers because they couldn’t understand their Scottish accents.

Angry locals confused a group of around 30 teenagers, who travelled around 400 miles from Scotland to Newbridge, South Wales, to do youth work, for immigrants.

A video of the charitable group arriving to the CRAI Scout Activity Park, claimed to show ‘immigrants’ being moved to the location in Caerphilly.

Police have since launched a probe into the online abuse after quashing the false rumours after being alerted to the emergence of the clip to social media.

From: Angry Welsh villagers abuse group of charity workers at Scout summer camp – after mistaking them for asylum seekers because they couldn’t understand their Scottish accents | Daily Mail Online.

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I happened to be listening to a SlateTBD podcast about AI generated music. One of the presenters was talking about AI “slop” music being piped into to bars and restaurants and elevators and wherever. She said “most people consume music passively, and I don’t think they’re going to mind that much that what they’re consuming passively is AI”. This immediately made me think about George Orwell’s “1984”, in which he wrote

The tune had been haunting London for weeks past. It was one of countless similar songs published for the benefit of the proles by a sub-section of the Music Department. The words of these songs were composed without any human intervention whatever on an instrument known as a versificator.

If only Orwell had know just how accurate a prediction this was. He wrote it long before the internet, long before Large Language Models (LLMs) and long before streaming sites. But as of now, one of streaming sites willing to disclose the statistics says that almost a fifth of the music uploaded for distribution is AI generated. Now, while pretty much all of the new music I hear via the wireless sounds AI generated to me, some of it is apparently real.

It seems, though, that no-one cares.

 

So, here’s a question for you payments people out there. Do consumers see retail payments more akin to elevator music or psychotherapy.

 

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There’s a new song doing the rounds, and in the immortal words of Kylie Minogue, you just can’t get it out of your head.
But what if it was created by a robot, or the artist themself is a product of artificial intelligence (AI)? Do streaming sites have an obligation to label music as AI-generated? And does it even matter, if you like what you hear?
A survey published last week suggested 97% of respondents could not spot an AI-generated song.

From: How can you tell if music is AI-generated?.

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Richard Crone

Author
CEO Crone Consulting LLC
2d

Steve Klebe — always great insights, thank you! Three Qs for you:

1) Chase has been aggressively promoting its Account Data Sharing APIs on its Developer Portal since 2017—complete with interactive sandboxes, OAuth flows & even a Pronovix DevPortal Award nomination. Wasn’t this always a long-game to move from FREE → FEE once fintechs were fully dependent on that feed & demand became near-inelastic?

2) When hashtag#AgenticWallets & hashtag#AgenticPayments kick in, they’ll query all 19+ financial relationships the avg HH has to find the “best” tender in milliseconds. If Chase prices API calls so high it slows that query down, doesn’t that risk losing their seat at the tender-steering table entirely?

From: (2) Post | Feed | LinkedIn.

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About 119,000 scholarly journal articles and conference papers are published globally every week, or more than 6 million a year. Publishers estimate that, at most journals, about 2% of the papers submitted – but not necessarily published – are likely fake, although this number can be much higher at some publications.

From: Fake papers are contaminating the world’s scientific literature, fueling a corrupt industry and slowing legitimate lifesaving medical research.

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