World’s Fourth Largest Bank MUFG To Launch Own Cryptoc… | News | Cointelegraph

xxx

Japan’s Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group (MUFG), the fourth largest bank in the world, will launch its own digital currency MUFG coin… The bank also plans to peg one MUFG coin to one Japanese yen in order to maintain people’s confidence in the new cryptocurrency.

From World’s Fourth Largest Bank MUFG To Launch Own Cryptoc… | News | Cointelegraph

xxx

POST Waging war with disinformation

In the superb BBC Radio 4 documentary on Marshall McLuhan, by Douglas Copeland, one of McLuhan’s comments (from half a century ago) that really struck home with me was that in the electronic, networked, instant media age there will be “ways of being evil that we don’t understand yet”. How astonishingly prescient of the man who invented media studies. I think we are beginning to understand what at least one of those ways might be: destroying the trust that keeps a society together. We can see this happening all around us as the internet and social media are creating entirely new opportunities for “influence operations” (IO) and the mass manipulation of opinion.

It seems that (yet again) McLuhan was spot on. The era of mass manipulation is indeed upon us and it is aided and abetted by social media. The well-known example of Jenna Abrams (@jenn_abrams) illustrates the general case perfectly well. Jenna was an “alt-right” blogger with 80,000 followers on Twitter, and her tweets were cited by Buzzfeed, the NY Times and other news agencies. It subsequently turned out that “she” was a creation of Russia’s Internet Research Agency in St. Petersburg.

This emergence of this kind of directed, industrial-scale trolling isn’t just about using mass media for propaganda purposes. That’s hardly new. But the scale and intimacy of social media make the misuse of them, as McLuhan predicted, a new and different kind of evil. The impact of this evil is not to convince the general public that some particular thing is true, but to undermine the general public’s trust of anything at all. Or, as noted in the Boston Review, the most toxic consequence of this kind of social media manipulation “[is] existential distrust“.

It’s really hard to know what to do about this. In the past, new technologies (eg, rather obviously, printing) have come along and it has taken generations for society to evolve “political, cultural, and institutional antibodies to the novelty and upheaval” of the information revolutions set in motion by those technologies (remember the instructions manuals telling people to say “hello” when they pick up the telephone). However, the accelerating rate of technology-induced change is creating a shock wave, just as an airplane flying ahead of the speed of sound creates a shock wave (that we hear as the sonic boom).

Now that we’ve detected the shock wave, we have to respond. We have to change either democracy or social media.

Given that, for the time being at least, democracy is under our control and social media is not, we need to think hard about reinventing democracy in the McLuhan age. But how? At the conceptual level, it seems obvious that someone who thinks the moon landings never happened should not be allowed to participate in any decisions that impact the rest of us. But what about someone who thinks the government spends more on foreign aid than it does on the NHS? These people exist in social media echo chambers that are impermeable to reason and therefore never participate in the discourse that the rest of us depend on to learn about the world and set our opinions in response.

Perhaps the blockchain can help. Perhaps we should record the media that people access and how long they access it for, storing this in a public and immutable ledger. Maybe you have to watch 100 hours of Fox “News” and 100 hours of CNN before you are allowed to vote. Or maybe you have had to have read a book in the preceding month.

If we don’t take action, then a generation from now the rule of President Kardashian will make us rue the day the universal franchise was conceived.

This Techie Is Using Blockchain to Monetize His Time | WIRED

xxx

But coding and then deploying your own personal currency from scratch turns out to be a lot of heavy lifting. So Prodromou put his idea on hold. This year, when Ethereum took off, he realized Evancoin’s time had come. Ethereum is a platform that lets you use the same technology that underlies Bitcoin, a distributed ledger known as the blockchain, to power all sorts of other applications. As one of the most popular platforms, Ethereum provides a ready-made framework for projects to “tokenize” themselves via their own ICOs, selling cryptocoins or tokens to the public.

From This Techie Is Using Blockchain to Monetize His Time | WIRED

xxx

范一飞：对央行数字货币加载智能合约应保持审慎态度-新华网

xxx

Fan Yifei, deputy governor of the People’s Bank of China recently wrote… that the central bank’s digital currency should adopt a double-tier delivery system.

From 范一飞：对央行数字货币加载智能合约应保持审慎态度-新华网

xxx

On the internet, no-one knows you’re a fridge | Consult Hyperion

xxx

When my fridge negotiates with Waitrose to buy some more milk, what is really happening is that the virtual identity of my fridge is interacting with the virtual identity of Waitrose. That seems perfectly reasonable to me, and working out ways for the these virtual identities to transact is going to be part of the business strategy for a fair few of our clients over the next couple of years. The virtual identity of the fridge may have a number of attributes associated with its identifier, such as a credit limit for a delivery address or whatever, but the one attribute that it will not have is “IS_A_PERSON”. As I have claimed many times before, this might well turn out to be the most valuable attribute of all.

From On the internet, no-one knows you’re a fridge | Consult Hyperion

xxx

Design a site like this with WordPress.com
Get started