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xxx Take, for example, Roomba, the adorable robotic vacuum cleaner. Since 2015, the high-end models have created maps of its users’ homes, to more efficiently navigate through them while cleaning. But as Reuters and Gizmodo reported recently, Roomba’s manufacturer, iRobot, may plan to share those maps of the layouts of people’s private homes with its commercial partners. From The 'internet of things' is sending us back to the Middle Ages xxx

xxx when it comes to the big three areas covered in the research - payments, securities settlement, and central bank-issued digital currency - the Bundesbank experts are wary. The authors "see little prospect of DLT being put to widespread use in the field of individual and retail payments given the current state of the art". From German central bank flags DLT weaknesses xxx

xxx There are technical factors that explain why cybersecurity is so weak, but the underlying reason is political, and it’s pretty simple: Big corporations have poured large amounts of money into our political system, helping to create a regulatory environment in which consumers shoulder more and more of the risk, and companies less and less. From Equifax’s Maddening Unaccountability - The New York Times xxx

xxx blockchains are not super-computers or AI machines - neither Freenet nor Skynet - they’re databases From Monax | Blog | Smart securitisation, or: why it's time to stop talking tokens and start talking smart contracts xxx

xxx This “trustless” stuff is a bunch of bunk - what it means in practice is that you’re trusting a bunch of anonymous “miners” whose interests may be very different from your own From Monax | Blog | Smart securitisation, or: why it's time to stop talking tokens and start talking smart contracts xxx

xxx What these naysayers don’t understand is the fact that the lack of cryptocurrency regulator has already been addressed by the blockchain technology. From Adam Vaziri: Blockchain is the future regulator xxx

xxx Three of the country’s four largest parties – the Five Star Movement, the Northern League and former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi’s Forza Italia – have proposed introducing a new currency following an election scheduled for next year. From Three Of Italy's Top Four Political Parties Seek A New Parallel Currency | Zero Hedge A couple of years ago, I had lunch with the Northern League to discuss digital currencies and the potential for local and community currencies to spring up because of the decentralising nature of new technology. I was in Rome to take part in a hearing about Bitcoin in the Italian Parliament organised by my good friend Geronimo Emili from No Cash Day and was invited to the lunch as part of the day. As Geronimo is a PR wizard, there is of course a photo album of the day online. Naturally I told them that the era of fiat currencies was coming to an end, that in the future economies would be city-centric and that communities would develop currencies ...

xxx fully-decentralised networks such as Bitcoin - being completely open - don’t actually provide you with a facility to verify that the thing someone is trading is actually that thing. From Monax | Blog | Smart securitisation, or: why it's time to stop talking tokens and start talking smart contracts xxx

xxx A recent working paper from economists at Princeton and University College London found that American companies are increasingly able to demand prices well above their costs — which… suggests that the market is not truly competitive — that existing companies have found ways to block competitors. From A Start-Up Slump Is a Drag on the Economy. Big Business May Be to Blame. - The New York Times xxx

xxx Facebook would never put it this way, but algorithms are meant to erode free will, to relieve humans of the burden of choosing, to nudge them in the right direction. From Facebook’s war on free will | Technology | The Guardian Extracted from World Without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech by Franklin Foer

xxx In retail payments, the introduction of a new faster payments system in September 2018 will provide the necessary infrastructure for full person-to-person and person-to-business connectivity… The HKMA is also currently consulting the banking industry to formulate a framework for the development of Open API. From Hong Kong prepares for a new era of 'smart banking' xxx

xxx A consortium of banks, led by Mizuho Financial Group and Japan Post Bank, has won support from the country’s central bank and financial regulator to launch the J Coin, an electronic currency to pay for goods and transfer money using smartphones. From Japan’s big banks plan digital currency launch A better name might have been J-PESA (or perhaps even J-Dex) but no matter. The point is that a couple of weeks ago I gave a speech to a group of payments people saying that why I thought central bank digital currencies were unlikely (because of the impact on commercial banks) and that a central bank digital currency managed by commercial banks was more likely. (I joked, of course, that we’d done that two decades ago with Mondex.)

Now we all know what the bitcoin blockchain is, don’t we? It’s just one particular version of the general class of blockchains, which share the characteristics that data is stored in blocks and because of some cryptographic jiggery-pokery the blocks are chained together, so that you can’t go back and change the contents of a block without having to then change the contents of every subsequent block. And depending on the consensus protocol that is used, you can’t change the blocks without everyone else agreeing to let you do it. Thus it is, as my former colleague Salome Parulava describes it, “mutable by consensus”. The reason that this kind of structure is called immutable, even though it is mutable by consensus, is that it is computationally infeasible to go back post-consensus and make a change. Even if you obtain consensus and co-ordinate more than half of the “hashing power” in the case of bitcoin, and could in theory go back to the very first block, change it to send the bitcoins...

xxx As e-commerce merchants continue to invest in fraud prevention, those efforts cost, on average, 8 percent of their annual revenue, up from 7.6 percent last year, according to a new report… undertaken by Javelin Strategy & Research From Fraud Prevention Costs Merchants 8% of Annual Revenue: Report – CardNotPresent.com It’s actually nearer 10% for online-only merchants. This seems unsustainable to me, but remember I don’t understand the dynamics in the retail sector. If a lot of those online-only merchants are (just as an example) adult services then they may consider that losing a tenth of the revenue is perfectly acceptable. Nevertheless, you do have to wonder just how long the cost of fraud can continue to rise, considering that the report also says the merchants are already devoting a fifth of their budgets to fraud prevention.

xxx “You are lured into giving away all this information,” says Luke Stark, a digital technology sociologist at Dartmouth University. “Apps such as Tinder are taking advantage of a simple emotional phenomenon; we can’t feel data From I asked Tinder for my data. It sent me 800 pages of my deepest, darkest secrets | Technology | The Guardian xxx

As I’ve written many times (e.g., here ), it is difficult to overestimate the impact of artificial intelligence (AI) on the financial services industry. As Wired magazine  said, "it is no surprise that AI tops the list of potentially disruptive technologies”. With  Forrester  further forecasting that a quarter of financial sector jobs will be “impacted” by AI before 2020, there’s an urgent need to develop strategies in this. It is  because the need is so urgent that I was delighted to be asked to give a keynote at the  Digital Jersey AI Retreat  in September.  (Which began with a beach barbecue, something I recommend to conference producers everywhere.) A beach barbecue is always a good idea at a conference. The event was put together by my good friends at Digital Jersey  (where I am advisor to the board) working with Cognitive Finance and they did a great job of bringing together a spectrum of both subject matter experts and informed commentators to cover a wide variety of is...

There’s a nostalgia around the world “cyberpunk" for me. A quarter of a century ago, I co-wrote an article called “ What is cyberspace? " for the “Computer Law and Security Report” (Volume 8, Issue 2, March–April 1992, Pages 74-76) [ PDF ]. In this article I asked whether it was possible that, much like Arthur C. Clarke's much vaunted prediction of the communication satellite, the Canadian author William Gibson had produced works which were not so much science fiction as informed predictions? Gibson had, after all, coined the term “ the matrix ”, and his books were core to the cyberpunk canon. The point of the article was to explain the idea of cyberspace to a legal audience (this was before Netscape, the year zero of the modern age, so most lawyers had never been online) and it turned out to be rather popular. I like to think that one of the reasons was the conviction back then that we were exploring the actual future, not some hypothetical future. I can’t remember wh...

xxx "Research being done at the MIT Media Lab is working on ‘swappable identities’ for AI bots, based on data taken from a person’s digital identity, as detailed by VentureBeat. Personal information is culled from emails, transcribed videos and any other published statements, allowing the system to give expert advice based on human opinions." Researchers seek to mimic digital identities by analyzing email, online interactions - One World Identity xxx

xxx "‘There were a lot of people who came and clicked photos (of the sign) but apart from that no transactions,’" Bitcoin accepted here: The tiny family restaurant in India that's embraced virtual currency — Quartz xxx

One of my all time favourite television shows is “ Greg the Bunny ”, which ran for only one season in the Unites States many years ago. One of my favourite jokes is when a female character called Dottie tells the eponymous lead that she has been caught on camera in an adult situation. “Sexual situation?” he asks. “No," she replies sarcastically, “it’s a picture of me voting”. You’ll see why I started with that joke a little later on, but first I must tell you why my home town of Woking is in the news. It is at the forefront of the UK’s non-existent identity non-strategy to not introduce digital identity, because it is one of the five areas in England where voters will be asked to take identification to polling stations at local elections next year  as part of a pilot scheme . The BBC report on the pilot scheme that I saw didn't mention just how the entitlement to vote is to be established but we already know what array of high technology machine-learning AI super-robot world-...

Electoral fraud isn’t a huge problem in the United Kingdom but it does happen, and it looks as if it’s been happening with increasing frequency in certain areas. So the government has decided to do something about it and they are going to introduce an “voter ID” scheme that will require people to provide some evidence of their identity when they go to vote, initially in local elections but presumably in general elections downstream. The voter ID scheme will be trialed in 18 areas which have been identified by police and the Electoral Commission as being "vulnerable" to voting fraud, including Bradford, Birmingham. From  Voters will have to show passports to combat voter fraud in 'vulnerable' areas with large Muslim populations And, as it happens, in my own dear Woking. But that is not the reason for my interest in the topic. My particular interest in electronic voting because it is one of the hard cases for digital identity. If we can figure out how digital ident...

xxx Wicker acknowledges that it is obviously important to continue security surveillance, for example, to prevent terror attacks, but the tradeoffs need to be properly considered. “There are other ways to do police work, in my opinion,” Wicker said. From Cornell Researchers Highlight Ethical Lapses in Recent Cybersecurity Failures | The Cornell Daily Sun xxx

xxx consumers spent a whopping £57.8bn on cards in July, an increase of 7.4% from July 2016, when £54.2bn was spent. From Consumers spend £57.8bn on cards - Credit cards - News | moneyfacts.co.uk xxx

Well, Woking is in the news. It is going to be part of a pilot scheme at the forefront of the UK’s non-existent identity non-strategy to not introduce a working digital identity infrastructure to our great nation at any time in the foreseeable future The government has decided that voters in five areas in England will be asked to take identification to polling stations at local elections next year, and Woking is one of those areas. The report doesn’t mention just how the entitlement to vote is to be established but we already know what array of high technology machine learning AI super intelligent giant killer robot world brain quantum neuro-computing systems are to be deployed, because local authorities will be invited to apply to trial different types of identification, including forms of photo ID such as driving licences and passports, or formal correspondence such as a utilities bill . Wait, what? It’s pointless enough showing a trivially counterfeitable physical identity documen...

xxx 51 percent of Canadian consumers are expected to do away with using cash entirely by 2020. Paysafe also found that 56 percent of Canadian consumers visit an ATM only once a month, while 19 percent said they rarely carry cash at all. From Less than half of Canadians expected to use cash by 2020, says research xxx

Writing in the Bank of England’s “Bank Underground” blog, Simon Scorer from the Digital Currencies Division, makes a number of very interesting points about the requirement for some form of Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC). He remarks on the transition from dumb money to smart money, and the consequent potential for the implementation of digital fiat to become a platform for innovation (something I strongly agree with), saying that: Other possible areas of innovation relate to the potential programmability of payments; for instance, it might be possible to automate some tax payments (e.g. when buying a coffee, the net amount could be paid directly to the coffee shop, with a 20% VAT payment routed directly to HMRC), or parents may be able to set limits on their children’s spending or restrict them to trusted stores or websites. From Beyond blockchain: what are the technology requirements for a Central Bank Digital Currency? – Bank Underground If digital fiat were to be managed ...

We’ve been in mobile payments from the earliest days. We worked on the UK’s first prepaid scheme, first WAP “walled garden”, first NFC trials and, I’m proud to say, M-PESA in Kenya. Success has many fathers, of course, but carrying out the original feasibility study for M-PESA is one of the bigger feathers in the CHYP cap. We also work for customers all around the world (I mean it: in the last year we have consultants working in China, India, the Americas, Australia, the Far East. Leeds, even. We have a pretty realistic picture of what is happening at the forefront of the payments industry. Hence it was no surprise to us to read that: Payments through mobile she says have rocketed from 5% two years ago to more than 40% now. From BBC - Future - The surprising place where cash is going extinct Yes, the BBC points to Somaliland rather than powered-by-Swish Sweden as the place where cash will first vanish into memory. And if your memory is good, you may recall that you read it all her...

xxx There are not many things tiny Somaliland can claim to be a world leader in, but cashless payments might be one. From BBC - Future - The surprising place where cash is going extinct xxx

Look, it’s not just nobodies like me who say this. Nathan Myrvold is XXX and a pretty smart (and pretty rich) guy. Here’s what he said about this a couple of decades ago when the first attempts at electronic cash were beginning [Levy, S. E-money in "Wired", December 1994)]. "There's a role for untraceable transactions. But it's not a panacea. Some people get very worked up about it. But there's been a very steady trend away from untraceable cash. There are cases where explicit traceability is a good thing. Like in my business expenses. I want them to trace it! All these things are there for a reason. They're not there as part of a plan by nefarious Big Brother. Look, I understand Chaum's concern to a certain degree. There's a lot of concern for privacy today. But I do worry about the idea of saving people from themselves. Just because I sign up for a traceable form of money doesn't mean I want my next-door neighbor to see my transactions....

xxx App Annie says that dating apps made up one-third of the top 15 apps by iOS revenue yesterday, along with video and music streaming apps. From Tinder hits top grossing app in the App Store on heels of Tinder Gold launch | TechCrunch xxx

xxx Postal workers are being offered £1,000 a week to steal bank cards, a BBC investigation has found. From Post workers recruited by gangs to steal bank cards - BBC News xxx

xxx "The banking customer today is being wooed by the richest men in top four economies of the world - USA (Jeff Bezos - Amazon Pay), China (Jack Ma - PayTM), India (Mukesh Ambani - Jio Money), and Japan (Masayoshi Son - Flipkart/PhonePe). " Barbarians at the Gates: Consumer tech companies will eat banks' lunch - The Economic Times xxx

xxx In a growing number of online attacks, hackers have been calling up Verizon, T-Mobile U.S., Sprint and AT&T and asking them to transfer control of a victim’s phone number to a device under the control of the hackers. From Identity Thieves Hijack Cellphone Accounts to Go After Virtual Currency - NYTimes.com xxx

xxx "'Age verification could lead to porn companies building databases of the UK's porn habits, which could be vulnerable to Ashley Madison style hacks,' argued Open Rights Group director Jim Killock." UK to implement age-verification system for porn sites | Ars Technica This is indeed the case, and the inevitable outcome of the government’s “plan” as it stands. But it may not be the porn companies building the database of who prefers spanking to and prefers foot fetishism (hint: MPs ). It may be the government. I heard the “Digital Minister” Matt Hancock interviewed on the BBC’s Today programme about his half-baked ideas. He said that people visiting porn sites could show their passports to gain access. This is one of the stupidest things I’ve ever heard a Minister say (and that’s against some pretty stiff competition) for two reasons: first off all it would lead to a massive increase in crime (identity theft, blackmail and so on) and it would also give the ...

xxx "The head of fintech partnerships and strategy at HSBC, Kaushalya Somasundaram, reiterated Jaffrey's belief that USC could help delineate a path forward for central bank digital currencies, one of the reasons HSBC  joined to begin with. Explaining how she sees the the token eventually working, Somasundaram told CoinDesk: 'The settlement coin will be a collateralized digital currency, backed by cash assets at a central bank, which allows us to transfer ownership easily through the exchange of USCs, thus reducing process complexity and the time taken for settlement.'" HSBC, Barclays Join Settlement Coin as Bank Blockchain Test Enters Final Phase - CoinDesk xxx

xxx This is a guy who knows a guy, a middleman in the black market for Instagram verification, where anyone from a seasoned publicist to a 22-year-old digital marketer will offer to verify an account—for a price. The fee is anywhere from a bottle of wine to $15,000 From Inside the black market where people pay thousands of dollars for Instagram verification xxx

xxx The expanded analysis reviewed more than 165 million retail banking accounts opened over a nearly eight-year period – from January 2009 through September 2016 – and identified a new total of approximately 3.5 million potentially unauthorised consumer and small business accounts. From Wells Fargo fake bank account scam gets bigger » Banking Technology xxx