A library of snippets
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ERC-725 specifically defines and standardizes the actions all identity implementations need to take, such as adding claims to the smart contract and the mechanism for obtaining those claims later.
From The Father of the ICO Is All About Identity Now – CoinDesk
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The “petro” will be backed by Venezuela’s key natural resources (diamonds, gas, gold and oil) and, in theory, will help it get around the “financial blockade” imposed by the US and other nations.
From Venezuela will start its own digital currency to beat sanctions
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Amazon Pay is coming soon to apps developed for Amazon’s Alexa by third-party developers… A developer preview made available yesterday also indicated that Alexa’s Amazon Pay-powered skills will expanded more dramatically in 2018.
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Why Hong Kong has Mao to thank for ID cards
From Design of new Hong Kong smart identity card revealed | South China Morning Post
Well, we can’t testify to any input from Mao, but we certainly can testify to the great job that Consult Hyperion did helping to design this, the world’s first modern (ie, smart) national identity card, all those years ago!
Which set me thinking. Half a century ago, the media theorist Marshall McLuhan who predicted that seismic social shift that the coming online environment would cause in human relationships said of it that “In the new electric world, where everybody is involved with everybody, where everybody is involved in complex processes, the old identity cards, the old means of finding out who am I, will not work”.
Indeed.
So what will work?
McLuhan had this notion of identity as smeared across entities, depending on the relationships and interactions between identities (what Ian Grigg calls “edge” identity). IN t
So what will work? I (and others) have long argued that shifting to an infrastructure where transactions are between virtual identities and enabled by credentials is the way forward.
In Phil Windley’s “Self-sovereign Identity and the legitimacy of Permissions Ledgers” he says, if I interpret him correctly, that a claim is the process of providing a credential and authenticating its use in order to obtain authorisation. That seems like a reasonable working definition, so let’s move forward with that. What McLuhan
Who might launch the world’s first post-modern (ie, digital) national identity card in the future? To answer this, we first have to think what the defining characteristics of a post-modern national identity might be. Now, as I am sure that you all know, the essence of post-modernism is relativism, so this is that natural place to begin: with symmetry. In a post-modern identity scheme, no identity is privileged. All identities can be validated by all other identities: the identity card of the policeman and the identity card of the citizen are the same and each is capable of checking the credentials of the other in order to ensure that the holder is authorised to perform whatever action they are attempting. So when the policeman says to the citizen “papers please!”, the citizen’s identity card can check that the policeman’s card is valid and that they are entitled to ask for the identification.
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truthfully answering secret questions is a surefire way to get your online account hacked
From San Francisco Rail System Hacker Hacked — Krebs on Security
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But there is a risk for banks that customers move away from their own apps or online services, weakening their relationship and thwarting their ability to cross-sell. It could leave banks as the plumbing behind the scenes, used to facilitate the movement of money.
From UK banks prepare to share customer data in radical shake-up
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Thanks to Richard van Arnholt for pointing out to me that
NIST now states that if authentication is used via sms (out-of-band), ‘the verifier SHALL verify that the pre-registered telephone number being used is associated with a specific physical device. […] Verifiers SHOULD consider risk indicators such as device swap, SIM change, number porting, or other abnormal behavior before using the PSTN to deliver an out-of-band authentication secret.’
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Blockchain could become the future of the passport. It is a transparent and tamper-proof ledger, which can be used to verify a person’s identity.
This sounds like typical magical thinking, but if you look at the diagram in their report, what it actually shows is something not entirely crazy. The idea would be to have some form of government shared ledger (let’s call it the UKLegder) that is validated by a number of public bodies.
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Instead, du Toit predicts, banks will partner with Amazon and others. Lenders would manufacture financial products, and tech giants would serve as distribution and servicing channels. In other words, what Amazon already does with consumer goods.
Yet because distribution accounts for two-thirds of banking profits, according to a McKinsey & Co. report, banks may not love being relegated to mere factories for mortgages and credit cards.
And because Amazon wouldn’t have to pay to lure customers — it already has millions of them — it could afford to set up digital accounts without “all the nuisance fees and relatively high minimum balances” that lenders impose
From Consumers Want Tech Firms to Take On the Banks – Bloomberg
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Facebook’s new “proactive detection” artificial intelligence technology will scan all posts for patterns of suicidal thoughts, and when necessary send mental health resources to the user at risk or their friends, or contact local first-responders.
From Facebook rolls out AI to detect suicidal posts before they’re reported | TechCrunch
This is admirable, of course. No-one would say otherwise. But it must be transparently obvious that the same technology could detect all sorts of other patterns as well.
Snippings