Snippets

xxx "Moscow’s support for Instex prompted a warning from US Treasury secretary Steven Mnuchin, who attended a G7 financial meeting in France. ‘If you want to participate in the dollar system you abide by US sanctions,’ Mr Mnuchin said, after discussing Iran with his French counterpart Bruno Le Maire." From "(4) Kremlin throws weight behind EU effort to boost Iran trade | Financial Times" . xxx

xxx "Innocent people have been questioned by police, had computer equipment confiscated and faced arrest when suspected of serious crimes following errors made by internet service providers (ISPs), telecoms companies, police and other public bodies in gathering intelligence through electronic surveillance." From "Innocent people arrested following surveillance blunders, IPCO reveals" . xxx

xxx "In October an investigative report from BuzzFeed detailed how Ads Inc. paid to place deceptive ads on thousands of personal Facebook accounts. Ads Inc. reportedly paid Facebook users $15 to $30 per month for access to their account, then sold those accounts to other marketers for $800 each. By paying Facebook users to post ads on their personal page, Ads Inc. and other companies are able to circumvent Facebook's policies for paid advertisements. Facebook prohibits account rentals and deceptive advertisements, and Facebook has been actively banning accounts sharing posts for Ads Inc. However, Ads Inc. CEO Asher Burke and other employees offered multiple Facebook contractors payment in exchange for reversing the bans" From "Facebook contractor accepted bribes to restore banned accounts: report - Business Insider" . xxx

Oh man! 2017! This was the first public “live five” of technology-driven changes in the secure transactions field that we thought would have a real business impact over the previous year. We’d used the idea internally before, but in 2017 we made the predictions public in the spirit of openness and honesty that we are famed for, to see how the predictions held up. RegTech . I think we did pretty well with this prediction. Interest in regtech has grown throughout the year and the ability of regtech to make real differences in major markets is established. Digital Identity . As we noted, one of the key regtechs, if not the key regtech, is digital identity. It did shoot up the agenda over the year and some interesting initiatives opened up. PSD2 (still). No commentary is needed!. Paying on the Go . We thought that a key use of open APIs will be payments, and very likely mobile payments. MasterCard’s purchase of VocaLink would tend to support this view! Invisible POS .  The shift fro

xxx Gibson first used the word “cyberspace” in 1981, in a short story called “Burning Chrome.” How William Gibson Keeps His Science Fiction Real | The New Yorker : xxx

xxx US officials are also concerned about the possibility that foreign countries will increasingly use mass-market digital currencies, such as Facebook’s planned Libra coin, to avoid sanctions. (1) FBI says blockchain expert aided North Korea | Financial Times : xxx