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There are billions of identities coming online in coming years whether this be refugees and those in developing countries (as referenced heavily at Davos), or devices and things These identities all need to be secured, at massive scale...this requires innovative, flexible, future proof identity platforms that can handle this complexity Position on blockchain (which I need to verify with our internal experts that I am relaying correctly) We think it has a lot of potential value, but there's also a lot noise in the space We're taking a measured approach, have joined the Hyperledger Project to explore more around tracking of valuable assets (IoT, documents, KYC), active policies for authorization that are more dynamic, an immutable record of user consent and its withdrawal It was truly interesting, but not surprising, to see digital identity become a recurring theme throughout the agenda of this year’s Davos (or, more properly, the 48th World Economic Forum Annual Meeting...

xxx The most toxic consequence of social media manipulation [is] existential distrust. From Philip K. Dick and the Fake Humans | Boston Review xxx

xxx The world where we communicate and interact at a distance is increasingly filled with algorithms that appear human, but are not—fake people generated by fake realities. From Philip K. Dick and the Fake Humans | Boston Review xxx

xxx Japan’s Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group (MUFG), the fourth largest bank in the world, will launch its own digital currency MUFG coin… The bank also plans to peg one MUFG coin to one Japanese yen in order to maintain people’s confidence in the new cryptocurrency. From World’s Fourth Largest Bank MUFG To Launch Own Cryptoc... | News | Cointelegraph xxx

xxx “We were hired for community management. We had their ceo passport as proof of identity. Comes out it is also fake”. From Benebit ICO Does a Runner with $2.7 Million of Investor Funds - Bitcoin News xxx

xxx victims turned on the group’s admins, who claimed to have been taken in by Benebit, alleging that they even used fake passports as proof of identity. Their images were plucked from a boys’ school website. From Benebit ICO Does a Runner with $2.7 Million of Investor Funds - Bitcoin News xxx

In the superb BBC Radio 4 documentary on Marshall McLuhan , by Douglas Copeland, one of McLuhan’s comments (from half a century ago) that really struck home with me was that in the electronic, networked, instant media age there will be “ways of being evil that we don’t understand yet”. How astonishingly prescient of the man who invented media studies. I think we are beginning to understand what at least one of those ways might be: destroying the trust that keeps a society together. We can see this happening all around us as the internet and social media are creating entirely new opportunities for “influence operations" (IO) and the mass manipulation of opinion . It seems that (yet again) McLuhan was spot on. The era of mass manipulation is indeed upon us and it is aided and abetted by social media. The well-known example of Jenna Abrams (@jenn_abrams) illustrates the general case perfectly well. Jenna was an “alt-right” blogger with 80,000 followers on Twitter, and her tweets we...