Snippings

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The default position in tort law is that it is very difficult to hold software developers liable for the harms their software wreaks. Software licenses — the terms on which people use software — generally disclaim all liability for problems the software causes. In keeping with the tech mantra that it’s always better to ask forgiveness than permission, these powerful shields encourage coders to experiment.

This lax liability standard may work when we are talking about sharing music or creating cat videos. It doesn’t work so well with money, finance, contracts, property records, medical records, proof of identity

From Call Blockchain Developers What They Are: Fiduciaries | Bank Think

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From September, for savings in excess of 100,000 euros (US$111,710), the community’s Raiffeisen bank will take back 0.4 per cent.

From Dailytimes | German bank starts charging customers in negative interest rate

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The combination o

FingoPay is cutting out the middlemen (the bank cards, the smartphones and smartwatches), to let you pay with – you guessed it – your finger.

From FingoPay: Move over Apple Pay, ‘Blood Pay’ is here

The use vein-scanning as the non-contact biometric.

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I also told [the BBC], in the spirit of openness and integrity that is associated with the good name of Consult Hyperion throughout the civilised world, that we had been retained by Hitachi some years ago to carry out a study on the security of this product and its suitability for certain financial services applications.

From We’ll be giving Barclays the finger next year | Consult Hyperion

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Biometrics continue to advance in Japan with the news that Hitachi is teaming with Japanese issuer JCB to develop a biometric payment system based on its finger vein authentication technology that can be used as an alternative to cards and cash at the point of sale.

From Fingering suspects | Consult Hyperion

As you will see in this piece, I was sceptical about biometric identification at retail POS because back then the use of biometric authentication against a revocable token seemed like a much better solution to me.

2009

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So, a plausible idea for son-of-chip-and-PIN, taking on board Max’s idea and merging it with our experiences gained implementing and doing security risk analysis for EMV schemes in a number of countries, might be as follows:

For micropayment, cash-replacement transactions: just wave the token (well, let’s say it, the mobile phone); For mesopayment, card-replacement transactions: enter the PIN, preferably into the mobile phone not the terminal, then wave the phone over the terminal; For megapayment, EFT-replacement transactions: enter the PIN, put the phone on the terminal and then put your finger in a vein scanner (such as the Hitachi system used in Japan).

This is a practical solution to the mass market use of biometrics, and you can make it work online as well by using challenge/response voice biometrics instead of vein scanning.

From The long and short of it | Consult Hyperion

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Festival – put token on file for four days – use fingerprint – have it all deleted at the end

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But what if law enforcement goes to the biggest miners in the world (representing at least 51% of the hashpower) and tells them that if they continue to confirm easily identifiable mixing transactions, they will be accused of money laundering.

From On Fungibility, Bitcoin, Monero and why ZCash is a bad idea. – We Use Cash

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For sending banks, the bank processes the CXC transactions as they normally do: look up the receiver, run limit checks, apply fraud controls, and initiate the transaction. However, instead of settling via ACH to the end recipient’s DDA, the bank sends the payment transaction to CXC, which originates the Visa/MC original credit transaction (OCT) on behalf of the sending bank to credit the receivers debit card. Once CXC performs the OCT, it updates the sending bank, which will see its transactions in its normal debit network settlement files.

From Levvel Blog – clearXchange Finds New Allies in the Quest For Ubiquity

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Angeloni believes so. “Proof is that in the final two months of last year, when personal incentives were no longer available, cashless payments continued to grow,” he says.

From Cashless payments: How one city has made electronic transactions pay off | ZDNet

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Instant person-to-person payment is something that people in many other countries have been able to do for years, and the absence of the service in the United States has been a marker of the relative backwardness of American banks.

From Under Pressure, Big Banks Vie for Instant Payment Market – The New York Times

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The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his “natural superiors”, and has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous “cash payment”.

From Communist Manifesto (Chapter 1)

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Berners-Lee’s new project, underway at his MIT lab, is called Solid (“social linked data”), a way for you to own your own data while making it available to the applications that you want to be able to use it.

With Solid, you store your data in “pods” (personal online data stores) that are hosted wherever you would like. But Solid isn’t just a storage system: It lets other applications ask for data. If Solid authenticates the apps and — importantly — if you’ve given permission for them to access that data, Solid delivers it.

From Tim Berners-Lee and Solid Want to Protect Your Data | Digital Trends

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Fidor is one of the best-known names in the German fintech scene. Founded by Matthias Kröner in 2009, it has built a network of 350,000 people in the UK and Germany who are rewarded for providing each other with financial advice

From France’s BPCE to buy fintech Fidor Bank — FT.com

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