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xxx It also means evidence of earlier not-quite-untraceable payments remain carved into Monero’s blockchain for years to come, visible for any snoop that cares to look. From Monero Privacy Protections Aren’t as Strong as They Seem | WIRED . xxx

xxx Marcus Schenck, Deutsche's co-head of corporate and investment banking said that bank accounts could be obsolete within 15 years. From Deutsche Bank's Marcus Schenck on the future of banking - Business Insider . xxx

xxx Thousands of user account details—many related to a bestiality website—are circulating on public image boards, according to data obtained by Motherboard. Details include email addresses, alleged IP addresses, and other apparent personal information linked to an often illegal sexual practice. From Thousands of Bestiality Users Exposed in Hack - Motherboard . xxx

The Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) initial coin offering (ICO) for the Integration Communications Observatory (ICO). My intention is to raise in the region of £1m, to be divided equally between the Institutional Charitable Offering (ICO) and the foundation that will recruit and manage the staff, the Information Commission Operation (ICO). If you would like to donate to the ICO ICO ICO ICO or ICO ICO ICO ICO (or perhaps for the ICO ICO ICO ICO ICO), please simply send your Bitcoin to 

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xxx Following extensive assessment and due diligence, the States of Jersey has selected specialist UK company, Yoti, as government’s digital ID provider. From Digital ID provider for government services . xxx

xxx Law enforcement agencies in the U.S. routinely use the fingerprints of dead people to bypass biometric safeguards meant to protect Apple iPhones from being unlocked, according to a new report. From Police routinely using dead people's fingerprints to access iPhones: Report - Washington Times . xxx

xxx Global debt issuance rose 4 per cent to $7tn last year, netting investment banks overall revenues of $23.3bn, according to data company Dealogic. In contrast, investment banking revenues from trading fixed income, currencies and commodities — the FICC segment that used to be one of Wall Street’s dominant money machines before the financial crisis — shrank again last year, by 10.5 per cent to $68bn, according to Coalition, another data company. From Big banks develop new platform for bond issuances . xxx

xxx If the Commission truly seeks to achieve a balanced market with proper competition, it should redress the design errors in the PSD-2 and allow banks to ask fees and allow them reciprocal access to the customer data. From So the EC gives open banking to bigtech via PSD-2 and Apple closes its doors to banks in return ? | Simon Lelieveldt | Pulse | LinkedIn . xxx

xxx We are experiencing a fundamental paradigm shift in our relationship to knowledge. From the ‘information age’, we are moving towards the ‘reputation age’, in which information will have value only if it is already filtered, evaluated and commented upon by others. From Say goodbye to the information age: it's all about reputation now | Aeon Ideas . xxx

xxx Analysis by Payments UK suggests that by 2018, 13.4 billion debit card payments are predicted, of which 4.6 billion (or one in three) are expected to be contactless. Cash is expected to be used for 13.3 billion payments in 2018, meaning it won’t be the most frequently used payment method for the first time. From Debit cards set to overtake cash in the UK three years ahead of sch... . xxx

xxx World of Warcraft in-game markets are going insane this week after Blizzard opened up an exchange for players to use real money to buy WoW Tokens. From How Trump strategist Steve Bannon wasted $60m on World of Warcraft | afr.com . xxx

xxx "A total of £236m was lost last year, with banks unable to return nearly three-quarters (74%) of the money lost. Victims think they are transferring money to someone official, such as a solicitor. They often occur when people transfer money during a housing transaction, or when paying an invoice for work done on the home. The fraudsters may have intercepted mail or hacked emails, then pose as the legitimate business by sending a payment demand. Legal back-up This is the first time such calculations have been made by UK Finance, showing that there were 43,875 reported cases of these scams. Nearly nine in 10 (88%) of these were consumers, who lost an average of £2,784. The rest were businesses who lost on average of £24,355 per case." From "Payment fraud: Millions lost in money transfer trick - BBC News" . xxx

xxx As a source of capital for business, equity markets no longer register on the radar screen. In both Britain and US, funds withdrawn through acquisitions for cash and share buybacks have recently routinely and considerably exceeded the amounts raised in rights issues and IPOs. From Equity markets are thriving but are they relevant? xxx

xxx » View all newsNext story »591012APP scam data published for first time14 hours ago  |  2499 views  |  0UK consumers lost £236 million to authorised push payment scams in 2017, the first year that Britain's banks have reported data on the fraudulent activity From APP scam data published for first time xxx

xxx Why is it that a single savvy security guy can uncover a giant botnet with, essentially, the work of an afternoon, but Twitter has failed to detect it for going on ten years? From Suspicious likes lead to researcher lighting up a 22,000-strong botnet on Twitter | TechCrunch xxx

xxx As a source of capital for business, equity markets no longer register on the radar screen. In both Britain and US, funds withdrawn through acquisitions for cash and share buybacks have recently routinely and considerably exceeded the amounts raised in rights issues and IPOs. From Equity markets are thriving but are they relevant? xxx

xxx A total of £14million was stolen from contactless cards and devices in 2017. The total amount spent using the tap-and-go system doubled from £25.2billion in 2016 to £52.4billion last year. From Contactless boom fuels 51% surge in tap-and-go fraud | Daily Mail Online xxx

xxx BIS found that the proportion of payments made by card rose from 13 per cent of GDP in 2000 to 25 per cent in 2016. People are also holding more cards and using them more for smaller transactions. From Cash is not dying out, despite rise of cryptocurrencies and contactless payment, report finds | The Independent xxx

xxx Amount of cash in circulation actually rose from 7% of global GDP in 2000 to 9% in 2016 From Cash is not dying out, despite rise of cryptocurrencies and contactless payment, report finds | The Independent xxx

xxx Yet, while bitcoin and its cousins are something of a mirage, they might be an early sign of change, just as Palm Pilots paved the way for today’s smartphones. From Bitcoin not the answer to a cashless society xxx

xxx One 86-year-old Telegraph Money reader discovered fraudsters had stolen her Facebook profile picture and set up a Messenger account with her name. The scammer messaged all of her friends to inform them of a “united nation tax refund” [sic]. In order to release the money, £200 of Amazon vouchers were required. From Facebook flaw: fake Messenger accounts can't be reported xxx

xxx Overall, 72.4 per cent of those who were infected with ransomware were able to get their data back. Most of those, however, were companies that simply ignored the ransom demands, then restored their systems with uninfected backup copies. From Less than half of paying ransomware targets get their files back • The Register xxx

xxx In July 2016, someone said they accidentally sent their crypto life savings of 1,493ETH, now worth about $1.25 million, to that address. And thanks to the magic of the blockchain, one can confirm that they were telling the truth. From Why the Ethereum genesis address holds over $500m worth of tokens | finder.com.au xxx

xxx In November DBS unveiled a technology platform in Singapore to which about 70 partners have connected over 150 applications. DBS customers eyeing a home on PropertyGuru, an online estate-agency, can check their eligibility for a loan and start applying. At Homage, which provides care for the old, you can redeem DBS credit-card reward points for an assessment of needs. Neal Cross, DBS’s chief innovation officer, calls this a “standard tech-company model”, following the examples of Amazon, Alibaba and the rest. From How digitisation is paying for DBS - Notes from a small island xxx

xxx Indeed, revealing my full personal identity to services, applications and devices is against the fundamental privacy principle of ‘data minimisation’. Identity – in the formal/usual sense of identifying the full individual - may thus, in most cases, be a massive overshoot to requirements and quite illegal under and ePrivacy. From Rethinking digital identity | European Payments Council xxx

xxx It is anticipated age verification will be enforceable by the end of the year. From £25m for 5G projects on the anniversary of the UK’s Digital Strategy - GOV.UK xxx

xxx Mr. Lyles secured credit cards often using fictional names and numbers the Social Security Administration hadn’t yet assigned. From The New ID Theft: Millions of Credit Applicants Who Don’t Exist - WSJ xxx

xxx "The easy access to a repository of people’s personal data has in turn spawned a burgeoning subeconomy of data miners and traders and opened up multiple avenues for illegal and unethical trading of identities." From "Aadhaar: India’s Flawed Biometric Database | The Diplomat" . xxx

xxx We observe that banks are overwhelmed by API designs and specifications. Numerous API standardisation initiatives emerged for PSD2 (Berlin Group, STET, UK/CMA, Polish API, Slovak API) requiring banks to make a strategic decision on participation in said initiatives. From Banks should open-up beyond PSD2 to deliver on the innovation promise xxx

xxx Las Vegas strip club accepts cryptocurrency From I-Team: Las Vegas strip club accepts cryptocurrency - YouTube xxx

xxx A video game company, Ubisoft, is leveraging a new AI tool called Commit Assistant, which flags mistakes in a game's code before programmers even make them. From AI Predicts Coding Mistakes Before Developers Make Them xxx

xxx The last major failure of a Scottish bank before the twin collapses of the Bank and Royal Bank of Scotland was 1879 bankruptcy of the City of Glasgow bank, and within months of that event all of the directors were in jail. From Ten years after the nationalisation of Northern Rock | British Academy xxx

xxx Share on LinkedIn (opens new window) Mail Save Save to myFT Caroline Binham in London 10 HOURS AGO 8 “Shadow banking” grew by nearly 8 per cent globally to more than $45tn on a conservative measure after international rulemakers were able to include detailed data from China and Luxembourg for the first time. Shadow banking — the parts of the financial system that perform banklike functions such as lending but do not have the same safeguards — accounted for 13 per cent of total global financial assets, according to the Financial Stability Board, the international group of policymakers and regulators that makes recommendations to the G20. From Shadow banking grows to more than $45tn assets globally xxx

xxx So, companies have little inherent interest—or even ability—to provide consumer portability. Even if the leaders of a company intellectually want to provide portability, their fiduciary responsibility dictates that they cannot.   From The Double-Edged Sword of Using Blockchains for Identity Portability — The Information This is why the regulatory environment has to be the pressure for change.

xxx In today’s world, with so much talk about the policy advantages of technological transparency, the use of blockchains for transparency can an important tool. From Blockchain: What is it good for? xxx

xxx With the decline of traditional trusted intermediaries, and the discovery that social media account holders may well be bots, we will crave verifiability From Our struggle with Big Tech to protect trust and truth xxx

xxx It was here, according to accounts from Punjab National Bank (PNBK.NS) executives and government investigators, that a lone middle-aged manager, later aided by his young subordinate, engineered fraudulent transactions totaling about $1.8 billion from 2011 to 2017. From Eyes wide shut: the $1.8 billion Indian bank fraud that went unnoticed xxx

xxx Criminals have been impersonating legitimate companies such as Halifax and Vanguard Asset Management to target people with savings to invest or with access to their pension – and they are raking in £500,000-a-day from victims. So-called clone fraud investigations have almost doubled in the past year, and pensioners are especially at risk, the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) said. From ONLINE FRAUD WARNING Retirement pension fraud elderly savers scam | UK | News | Express.co.uk xxx

We think about money as a law of nature, as a kind of constant, but the way that money works today is not only just one of many ways in which it could work, it’s a relatively recent invention in the great scheme of things. It wasn’t that long ago that the developed world was on a commodity standard (ie, gold) and there was no national fiat currency. Seventy five years ago, in America, there wasn’t even a circulating medium of exchange. At the height of the Great Depression, 1932 and 1933 , when the interest rate on U.S. Treasury bills was negative, unemployment was 25 percent and bank runs and closings were common, Americans reverted to barter. It’s hard to imagine now, but this is a time when the U.S.A. literally ran out of money. In his first week in office in 1933, FDR passed legislation to enforce bank holidays, end the convertability of gold and to force the population of to sell their gold to the Federal government. It’s surprising, I think, to Europeans to realise just how much...

xxx "The modern lottery industry is highly complex, offering a zoo of products that are designed and administered with the aid of computers (cash games with a drawing, instant scratch-off games, video lottery games, keno), and the sales of all of these tickets add up to a staggering yearly figure: $80 billion. For comparison, the entire U.S. film industry sells only about $11 billion in tickets." From "The Lottery Hackers - The Huffington Post" . xxx

When the AlphaGo program became the world champion at the complex game of Go, it did so by evaluating positions and selecting moves using neural networks that been trained by human experts and reinforced with self play. It wasn’t much of a step from there to move onto a new version of AlphaGo becoming its own teacher ( Nature , 19th October 2017). This new program, AlphaGoZero, obtained superhuman performance by teaching itself with no human guidance and went on to trounce AlphaGo 100 games to zero.