Snippings

Gillian Tett, writing in the Financial Times Magazine, points out that the early evidence is not promising. Researchers who were tracking half a dozen DEXes over 18 months found that they were infested with bots that enable unscrupulous traders to cream off gazillions (basically by front running).

It’s kind of interesting to see RBS become a challenger. Tyl is obviously going to compete with their former acquiring business WorldPay, and in a sector that is consolidating and pushing for scale, but they do have one obvious means to obtain traction: as the FT noted, RBS is the biggest SME lender so they have the connections and the data needed to get some traction.

We spend a lot of time talking about digital identity for people and speculating about whether Apple ID or federated Bank ID or centralised Government ID is the best implementation. But in the new online world, there are a great many things other than people that will need to have digital identities in order to participate in a functioning post-industrial economy. Things, for example. Bots will need identities. In fact I’m writing a book about this at the moment. It’s going to be called “Will Robots Need Passports?” and it will be out next year sometime.

(And the answer, as I am sure you already know, is “yes”. Spoiler alert: robots will need passports because they will need to have reputations.)

What we don’t spend anything like enough time talking about though is the digital identity of animals. I read with great interest a report in the Times of India about a new smartphone app that farmers can use to check information about cattle. This was developed in response to an appeal from Prime Minister Modi for a means to reduce cattle theft. As you probably know, India already has a national identity number for people and it has worked pretty well, providing a low-cost mechanism to establish the unique identities of citizens and thereby contribute to the goal financial of financial inclusion which (as everyone knows) is an identity problem. Therefore, it would seem logical to give animals a number too.

But how do you tell Napoleon from Snowball? Well, specific information “unique to each animal” like the footprint, height, weight, colour and tail hair is recorded in the software and a unique ID is generated. As one of the designers of the software notes, this ID “is very useful when insuring cattle”, which is a good point. I am slightly surprised that, all other things being equal, they didn’t put the IDs on a quantum-resistant blockchain in the cloud, but that’s probably version 3. Nevertheless, biometric identification of animals and the association of a digital identity clearly has economic value. I don’t know how unique animal footprints are, so I cannot comment on adjusting the false accept and false reject for optimal barnyard efficiency, but I do know that (as the Wall Street Journal recently reported) face recognition for animals is actually pretty difficult. As they put it, “It’s not like you can tell a donkey to stand still“. Quite. Nevertheless it can be done.

I know this because I was privileged to have Dr. Jion Guong Shen from JD Digits, a subsidiary of JD (China’s largest e-commerce business) on my panel about AI ethics and governance at the Innovate Finance Global Summit (IFGS) last year. This was a great panel, by the way, largely because the well-informed panellists took the discussion in such interesting and unexpected directions. Anyway, this panel is relevant because JD Digits, amongst other things, runs face recognition services for farmyard animals including cows and pigs. It turns out that pig face recognition, in particular, is a big business, There are 700m pigs in China, and the productivity gains that farmers can obtain from ensuring that each pig is fed optimally, that sick pigs are kept away from the herd (and so on) are very significant.

IFGS Panel on AI Ethics 2019 (courtesy of Emma Wu).

Apparently the face recognition system also goes some way to reigning in wannabe Napoleons, as Dr. Shen explained that there are some “bully pigs” that try to obtain a disproportionate share of barnyard resources. The system can spot them chowing down when they shouldn’t be and flag for intervention. This is a pretty straightforward use case for biometric identification that might useful introduced into British fast food outlets in my opinion.

All of which is by way of noting that digital identities are not only for people and that the future economy desperately needs digital identity infrastructure for everything. Aadhar for animals is an interesting first step, but it really is only a first step.

While I was reading something about  big data ethics I came across a fascinating comparison between the National Funeral Directors Association code of ethics and what might appear in a code of ethics for data scientists: specifically, a prohibition against “withholding services (like delaying the embalming process) or the body of a loved one (from release to a family or other legally recognised party) until payment for services has been received”. The comparison suggests that a code of ethics for data scientists might be careful to not make certain kinds of data or informational transparency “contingent on an ability to pay or by coercing users to give up more personal data in the process”.

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Option A: Mandate retailers to only sell consumer IoT products that have the IoT security label, with manufacturers to self assess and implement a security label on their customer IoT products.

From Secure By Design: All You Need To Know Consumer IoT Security | Security | Computerworld UK.

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lmost 800,000 account holders on porn site Brazzers have had their details breached thanks to a vulnerability in the vBulletin forum software, potentially exposing some to online extortion attempts.

Some 790,724 unique email addresses, as well as user names and plain text passwords, were exposed in the data dump

From Brazzers Porn Site Users Caught Out in Data Breach – Infosecurity Magazine.

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The age verification rule grew from a Conservative party campaign promise in 2015, and ended up tucked into what would become the Digital Economy Act 2017, a wide-ranging bundle of internet rules and regulations.

Among the bill’s consequential but stultifying provisions about telecommunications infrastructure, copyright enforcement and government data sharing, the porn rule remained not only intact but grew stronger over time (thanks in part to copious media coverage). The bill was hastily rubber-stamped before Britain’s 2017 general election, and questions about how exactly it would be enforced, as well as concerns about user privacy, were set aside to be dealt with later.

From How the U.K. Won’t Keep Porn Away From Teens – The New York Times.

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We’ve just had some more elections in the UK and the push for voter ID continues. It’s not all gone completely smoothly. I read in the Daily Mirror of the sad tale of woman in her eighties turned away from the polling booths because she misunderstood the instructions and “brought a photograph of herself, rather than a photo ID” to vote. An easy mistake to make.

But why is there a push for voter ID in the first place?

There is no problem with voter ID in the UK. It is a non issue. I live in a constituency where there is actual electoral fraud (people were jailed for it) and it was (as it always is) because of problems with postal ballots. The amount of what is known as “personation” (pretending to be someone else) at the polling station is utterly insignificant. 

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In Europe mobile-only banks such as n26 and Monzo already use TransferWise to handle transfers.

From Fintech takes aim at the steep cost of international money transfers – Special FX.

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Lottery bosses have refused to pay out a £4million jackpot to two players who they suspect had bought the ticket with a stolen debit card.

Organisers Camelot grew suspicious of Mark Goodram, 36, and Jon-Ross Watson, 31, when it emerged neither of them had a bank account to receive the winnings.

From Lottery bosses refuse to pay £4million jackpot over ‘stolen debit card’ | Daily Mail Online.

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