Snippings

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We can see that we are going from 24.25GHz, right up to 86GHz. At this frequencies our wavelengths are 1.2 cm to 0.3cm. Our antennas will thus be between 0.6 cm and 0.15 cm long. As we move up 86GHz our capacity for data will move from just 240Mbps to 8.6Gbps. This is from a single wireless stream, and, if we use multiple paths, such as with MIMO antennas, we could multiple up this even more.

Our Cat-5 cables will just seem so slow compared with this. The lower frequencies (24.25–27.5GHz) will be used for macro scale networks, and which provide a wide coverage (in the way our existing 4G networks do), but local networks will scale from small to ultra-small, and support higher frequencies. The higher the frequency we go, the more reliant that we are on line-of-sight communications, thus the higher frequencies will require more localised connections (and where signals can bounce off objects).

From Get Ready for the Greatest Change in Our Digital World Since the Start of the Internet … Meet the….

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Robinhood order data is used by large institutions to allow them to profit on order information ahead of retail customers, sometimes called “front running.”

From Robinhood Crypto: The fine print behind ‘free’ crypto trading – The Block.

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It was all made possible by modern communications – the telegram, the phone, the telex, the fax, the email – and it allowed the world’s richest people to avoid the responsibilities of citizenship

From The real Goldfinger: the London banker who broke the world | News | The Guardian.

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Clearly, we need identity custodians: an entity we can trust and call upon if we have a problem. Somebody who is able to give a key back when it’s lost. Ideally, we should be able to choose which identity custodian to use and switch as often as wanted.

From The problem with self-sovereign identity: We can’t trust people.

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Through Facebook groups (essentially forums), extremists can build large audiences. There are many examples of groups that feature anti-Muslim or antisemitic content daily, in an environment which, because critics are removed from the groups, normalises these hateful views.

From Why I am seeking to stamp out online echo chambers of hate | Lucy Powell | Technology | The Guardian.

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According to the latest British Retail Consortium’s (BRC) annual payments survey, cards were used to pay for £277.1 billion worth of goods in 2017, accounting for 76% of retail sales volume.

Meanwhile, cash continued its decline both as a share of retail transactions (down 0.5%) and value of sales (down 1.2%), where it now make up just 22%.

The BRC says that the rise of card payments is hitting its members in the pocket, with retailers spending an extra £170 million to process payments in 2017. Fees are now approaching £1 billion a year.

From Card payments dominate UK retail sales as cash usage falls.

 

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“In fact many smaller retailers have questioned whether savings were ever passed on by card companies. The BRC are now looking to the Government and Regulator to tackle the alarming increases to card scheme fees imposed on retailers, and for action to simplify the complex fees and charges levied by the card payments industry.”

From Card payments dominate UK retail sales as cash usage falls.

 

I just read something from Alan Davis, a competition law expert at the lawyers Pinsent Masons, who summarised where we are quite nicely, by saying that “The Interchange Fee Regulation (IFR) capped credit card multilateral interchange fees at 30 basis points per transaction and debit card fees at 20 basis points. Although the IFR did not explicitly require it, it was always intended that this reduction would be passed on by merchant acquirers to retailers in the form of lower merchant service charges… However, the question then arises whether a review would also need to be undertaken as to whether merchants are passing or will pass on savings to end-consumers in the form of lower retail prices. There has always been a lot of scepticism as to whether consumers would ever really benefit from the IFR”. There certainly has been, and a fair share of it has come from me.

There has never been the slightest evidence that government price-fixing in the payments sector (which is what an interchange cap is) has been to the benefit of consumers. The first country to do this was Australia, and I saw predictions at the time that even if acquirers did reduce their charges, retailers would simply trouser the cash. I’ve yet to see any learned papers that offer a different view.

What is puzzling to me is why governments think this nonsense will help. We saw the same thing in the UK earlier this year with banning of surcharges for electronic payments.

Ultimately, the way to deal with this is competition.

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Just loading the main British Airways website spins up around 20 different scripts and loading the booking subpage bumps that to 30. While 30 scripts might not sound like much, many of these are minified scripts spanning thousands of lines of script.

From The British Airways Breach: How Magecart Claimed 380,000 Victims.

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Despite the fuss about it, the global gold standard only lasted for a century and it collapsed before World War II. Britain had created the standard in its modern form in 1821 and left it in 1931.

Ernest Harvey, the Bank’s deputy governor at the time, wrote to Ramsay MacDonald, the prime minister, and Philip Snowden, the chancellor, on September 19, 1931, saying that reserves worth more than £100m were close to running out.

“‘Gentlemen, His Majesty’s Government have given the most serious consideration to your letter of the 19th instant in which you inform them of the grave difficulties with which you are faced in meeting the obligation placed on the Bank of England by the Gold Standard Act… ‘His Majesty’s Government are of the opinion that the Bank of England should place such restrictions on the supply of gold as the Bank may deem requisite in the national interest.’”

From “How the Bank of England abandoned the gold standard – Telegraph”.

 

As Ed Conway points out in his excellent book “The Summmit“, which is about the 1994 Bretton Woods agreement and the foundation of the modern monetary system, the run on the reserves was because of the Invergordon Mutiny, which was an industrial action by around a thousand sailors in the British Navy that took place on 15–16 September 1931. For two days navy ships at Invergordon were on strike (one of the few military strikes in British history). This mutiny caused a panic on the London Stock Exchange and a run on the pound, bringing Britain’s economic troubles to a head and finally forcing it off the gold standard for good on 21 September 1931.

The United States left on 5 June 1933.

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“This Technology Quarterly will take a more sceptical view. It will point out that, despite a decade of development, bitcoin has failed in its stated objective: to become a usable currency.”

From “What to make of cryptocurrencies and blockchains – The pot of gold at the end of the rainbow”.

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I’m sure that by now you are all familiar with the major data breach that occurred at British Airways earlier this month. It was a “Magecart” attack on the scripts running on the BA web site (the booking page at BA runs 30 scripts, and remember that many of these are minified scripts spanning thousands of lines of code). The breach was pretty serious: 380,000 customers were affected. In fact, it was so serious that “shares of British Airways’ parent company IAG fell around 4% as markets opened” the day after it was reported. The stolen data included customers’ names, e-mail addresses, billing addresses and payment card information (including CVVs) but not passport details. 

Since I had booked a fair few flights during this period, which included arranging for family members to attend a funeral, I didn’t for one moment that my card details had been hijacked by cyber-criminals. I don’t really care though. If the Magecart miscreants do have my card details and use them to buy something, then it is Amex’s money that has been stolen, not mine. Thanks to a combination of consumer protection legislation and Amex terms and conditions, when the transaction shows up on my bill I’ll just call up and cancel it.

(Incidentally, the last couple of times I’ve attempted to charge things back to Amex, it was for transactions that were actually correct. Due to the ancient ISO 8583 protocol, transactions don’t carry enough information for consumers to recognise them. So when I see a charge of £35 to “BA.COM” with no explanation of what it’s for, I of course automatically click on it for more details only there are no more details, so I charge it back only to discover it was for a change to a family member’s flight that I’d completely forgotten about. But I digress.)

Now, to be honest, I’m pretty unsympathetic.

This sort of breach of card data may not be around for much longer though. Earlier in the year Deutsche Bank announced a pilot project with the International Air Transport Association (IATA), the trade association for the world’s airlines, to test a new payment model using account-to-account payments enabled by PSD2. I’m sure my BA app will sprout a new button to pay directly from my bank account (in return for double Avios or whatever) fairly soon and the very notion of storing payment card details to pay for travel will seen almost quaint. The reason that I say this so confidently is that I remember an interesting comment from last year’s Google I/O conference, referring to the opening up of the European payments marketplace under PSD2 in a discussion with Bank Innovation. Talking about Google wallet Daniel Döderlein, the CEO for payments systems provider Auka, said that the service is linked to a user’s credit card, but not for long (at least for European users) because “once Google’s able to go to direct to account they will cut out the cards companies and to some extent, the bank,”

This resonated with a story that I heard more than a year ago and mentioned to a few clients in seminars and workshops. A friend of mine was on a study tour of the US during which he visited a number of different technology companies as well as a number of different technology users in a group of related industries. He told me that the whole time he was in the US, the only people who had asked him about PSD2 came from Facebook and Google. Not from banks, not from retailers, not from payment processors and not from card issuers. From the internet giants. Giants who control platforms and devices that can tie together authentication and authorisation using modern cryptography that does not involve entering sensitive personal information into web forms and then posting it through the internet tubes.

Tired: Card Present and Card Not Present; Wired: Cardholder is Present and Cardholder Was Present.