Snippings

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“Digital forms of identity systems, when fully developed and deployed, are expected to be more powerful and efficient tools of identification than legacy paper systems. The power and efficiency proffered by such tools, both pose and mount a great urgency to identify, and to mitigate modern risks associated with system breach and the compromise of vital information in those identity systems, and to ensure that digital identity systems do not become tools of suppression, oppression, exclusion, or discrimination.”

From “A Failure to “Do No Harm” – India’s Aadhaar biometric ID program and its inability to protect privacy in relation to measures in Europe and the U.S. – Technology Science”.

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“A repeat of the failed attempt to roll out the Australia Card threatens to follow Coalition efforts to create digital IDs for web-users, unless the government makes changes protecting privacy, a defence think tank warns in a new report.”

From “Govpass on brink of becoming the next Australia Card debacle: report”.

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Age verification (AV) regulations presented to parliament by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) last week do not include websites on which less than a third of content is pornographic material and where it is provided free of charge.

From Millions of porn videos will not be blocked by UK online age checks | Technology | The Guardian.

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More startling is that the demand for $100 bills has exceeded that for all other denominations, growing at an annual rate of about 8 percent since 1995, double that of most other notes. In 2017, the $100 bill passed the $1 denomination as the most widely circulated Federal Reserve note.

From Cashless society not here yet, with $100 gaining | Coin World.

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I notice that Facebook has been hacked. Apparently, some 30 million people had their phone numbers and personal details exposed in a “major cyber attack” on the social network in September. Around half of them had their usernames, gender, language, relationship status, religion, hometown, city, birthday, device types used to access Facebook, education, work, the last 10 places they checked into or were tagged in, website, people or Pages they follow, and the 15 most recent searches all compromised. Wow.

Now, I don’t really care about this much personally. Like all normal people I have Facebook and enjoy using it to connect with family and close friends, but I don’t use my “real” name for it and I never ever gave in to their pleading for my phone number. Not because I was unsure that it would at some point get hacked (I assumed this to be the case) or because I thought that if I used it for two-factor authentication they might use it for advertising purposes, but on the general data minimisation principle that’s it’s none of their business.

(We should, as a rule, never provide data to anyone even if we trust them unless it is strictly necessary to enable a specific transaction to take place.)

One of the reasons that I don’t care is that just as people around the globe are getting spammed by fraudsters pretending to be Facebook, I’m not worried about spammers getting my data and pretending to be Facebook. When I get e-mail from Facebook, it is encrypted and signed using a public key linked to the e-mail address I use for this purpose (pseudonymous access). See…

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My e-mail client (in this case, Apple Mail) will flag up if the signature is invalid. If you want to send encrypted e-mail to me at mail@dgwbirch.com then you can get my PGP key from a public key server (check the fingerprint is 50EF 7B0E FD4B 3475 D456 4D7E 7268 01F2 A1C5 075B if you want to) and then fire away. It’s not that difficult. Facebook asked me if I wanted secure e-mail, I said yes, they asked me for my key, I gave it to them. End of. I really don’t understand why other organisations cannot do the same.

Banks, for example.

Here’s an e-mail that I got purporting to be from Barclays. They are asking me for feedback on their mortgage service and inviting me to click on a link. I suppose some people might fall for this sort of spamming but not me. I deleted it right away.

This of course might lead reasonable people to ask why Barclays can’t do the same as Facebook. Why can’t Barclays send e-mail that is encrypted so that crooks can’t read it and signed so that I know it came from the bank and not from spammers. Surely it’s just a couple of lines of COBOL somewhere ask me to upload my public key to their DB2 and then turn on encryption. Right? After all, it’s unencrypted and unsigned e-mail that is at the root of a great many frauds so why not give customers the option of providing an S/MIME or PGP key and then using it to protect them?

Or, better still, why don’t Barclays STOP USING EMAIL AND TEXTS since they have an APP ON MY iPHONE that I use ALL THE TIME and they could send me SECURE MESSAGES using that. It’s time to move to conversational commerce based on messaging and forgot about the bad old days of insecure, spam-filled, fraudophilic and passé e-mail.

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Work by Grant Thornton has been called into question after bosses at Patisserie discovered a £28.8million black hole in the accounts, an unpaid tax bill and two ‘secret’ overdrafts totalling nearly £10million.

The auditor has worked for the company since 2006 and most recently signed off the books for the year to September 30, which said the balance sheet was strong and contained no borrowing.

From Auditors face probe over Patisserie Valerie crisis following discovery of £28.8m black hole | Daily Mail Online.

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In the UK, at more than £80 billion ($104 billion), the value of notes and coins in circulation is in real terms one-third higher than in 2007, when the UK got its first contactless payment cards.

From What is driving the drop in UK cash volumes? – Central Banking.

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I don’t think there are many people left in government who understand digital identity.”

From Commercial concerns push two IDPs away from Verify as it heads towards private sector delivery – Government Computing Network.

To be honest, there weren’t that many to begin with.

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“Of these, 15m had their names, phone numbers and email addresses accessed. An additional 14m also had usernames, gender, language, relationship status, religion, hometown, city, birthday, device types used to access Facebook, education, work, the last 10 places they checked into or were tagged in, website, people or Pages they follow, and the 15 most recent searches.”

From “Facebook warns 30m users exposed in cyber attack – how to check if you were affected”.

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“Zelle P2P Volume Grew To $28 Billion In Q2, Against Venmo’s $14 Billion”

From “Venmo, Zelle Book Q2 Growth, Good Signs for P2P | PYMNTS.com”.

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