European Central Bank official rails against Facebook Libra

Europe, Financial News, Politics, Regulation News, Technology NewsNo Comments

Yves Mersch, executive board member of the European Central Bank, outlined on Monday a series of warnings concerning Facebook’s proposed blockchain digital currency Libra.

What is Libra?

Development of Libra began in 2017, and public reports first came to light the next year. Creators Morgan Beller, David Marcus, and Kevin Weil formally announced it this June. They also revealed its planned release in 2020.

Whereas Bitcoin and many other blockchain currencies are decentralized, relying on unaffiliated miners to maintain solvency and stability, Libra’s assets are centralized by the Libra Association. Guarantees of $10 million investments from each supporting partner—injected before Libra opens to the public—intend to stabilize the digital currency. Concerns with volatility significantly deter investment in blockchain currencies.

Libra’s expected 2020 release coincides with the release of a digital wallet, Calibra, that will allow payment through Messenger and WhatsApp. Similar messaging-app-integrated payment systems are hugely popular in China (WeChat Pay, AliPay) and Japan (LINE Pay). This market gap still exists in other parts of the world; apps such as Google Pay, Venmo, and Cash App do not integrate payment and SMS services. Investing partners include Mastercard, eBay, PayPal, and Uber, which should give a likely indication of Libra’s plans for market implementation.

Governments push back

The criticism from the ECB is both general and specific. 

Mersch expressed distrust in Facebook as a whole, reminding the public that Libra’s developers are:

“the very same people who had to explain themselves in front of legislators in the United States and the European Union on the threats to our democracies resulting from their handling of personal data on their social media platform.”

He also criticized its centralized, hefty investment-based structure:

“With such a setup, it is difficult to discern the foundational promises of decentralization…normally associated with cryptocurrencies and other digital currencies. On the contrary, similarly to public money, Libra will actually be highly centralized, with Facebook and its partners acting as quasi-sovereign issuers of currency.”

Be humble

Digital currencies have always been subject to criticism and regulation from governments; they disrupt traditional wealth distribution and storage. Libra also seeks to profit off market disruption, creating a currency privately regulated by the very companies that are selling you their products.

Libra has received criticisms and/or cease and desist requests from the United States, France, England, Germany, and Japan.

Churchix, digital shepherd

Technology NewsNo Comments

John 10:14 “I am the good shepherd; I know my own sheep, and they know me.”

Churchix is a facial recognition software designed to identify individuals attending an event. As the name suggests, the product markets itself largely to churches, where it could track the attendance habits of individual congregation members.

Easy set up

The program initially requires a database of member photos as well as a video surveillance system, both of which are already relatively common in churches. The database, camera, and software provide metrics on each member.

Two suggested ways of leveraging congregants

Churchix CEO Moshe Greenshpan outlined two ways a church might employ the attendance data. The first conveys a traditional ‘tending to one’s herd’ mentality:

“It’s simple to see if a member isn’t attending three or four events. Then they can give the member a call and say something like, ‘See you on Sunday.’”

The second formalizes a tiered-donation structure that surely has also 

“If they see a member who is regularly attending events, they could feel more comfortable giving them a call and asking for a donation.”

Churchix is a subsidiary division of Face-Six, which provides similar facial recognition services to other locations such as airports, casinos, and law enforcement agencies.

Another interesting Face-Six product

The FA6 facial recognition capable drone, according to the website, “allows you to collect personal information and find your target in a crowd,” and can “easily collect faces of people in a crowd…whether it’s a riot or an illegal demonstration.”

CCTV facial recognition and the Hong Kong protests

Artificial Intelligence, Big Data, Digital Systems Technology, Internet of Things (IoT)

August 24 marked another long day of clashes in Hong Kong between police and protestors.

The nearly three-month long protests generally choose their location based on certain problematic aspects of Hong Kong’s relationship with China. 

That day, the focus opposed police digital surveillance tactics, specifically the city’s installation of ‘smart lampposts’; street lights that come equipped with cameras and sensors. Hong Kong authorities insist the lampposts are only used to monitor weather, traffic, and air quality. 

Police and protestors on Aug 24

After riot police forcibly dispersed an initial gathering of tens of thousands of Hong Kong citizens, groups of protestors broke off and regrouped in different neighborhoods. Several smart lamps were pulled down, dismantled, and occasionally kicked. Police fired projectiles, released tear gas, and wielded batons and riot gear while charging lines of protestors.

Facial recognition already common

Various facial recognition technologies and devices are already common across Hong Kong. They unlock mobile devices, confirm identities at ATMS, and identify individuals in photos based on their social media profile.

Suspicions of increased mainland monitoring

The renewed concern of protestors directly relates to the catalyst for the entire protest movement: the extradition bill that sought to allow Hong Kong citizens to be tried by the mainland Chinese judiciary system.

The general public simply does not trust the new cameras, many of them developed and sold by Chinese companies, to innocuously report weather and traffic data. 

China obviously wants the ability to extradite Hong Kong citizens for crimes committed outside of the mainland. A video surveillance network in which Chinese authorities can monitor individual Hong Kong citizens is a clear path towards building cases against political targets that could facilitate a case for extradition. 

Darwin council claims new CCTV cameras “will not use facial recognition”

Internet of Things (IoT)

Darwin council insists that the new set of cameras in the Central Business District will not employ facial recognition until the technology is more carefully considered.

The 138 cameras were installed as part of the Switching On Darwin project, which also provides public wifi, new lighting, and traffic sensors. Although the cameras do have facial recognition hardware in them, the city does not plan to utilize it at this time.

However, council general manager Josh Sattler stated that although the city will not employ the technology, “requests coming from a state or federal agency” will “need to be complied with.” 

Install first, question later

Of the 81 grants offered by Australia’s Smart Cities and Suburbs program, only the Darwin proposal included funding for facial recognition technology. The Darwin council’s addition of the technology was done without public consultation. An estimated six month study by an outside consultant agency began in August.

Concerns with facial recognition

Many question the council’s decision to include a technology that will supposedly not be employed. Julia Powles, researcher and associate professor at the University of Western Australia, questions “the real reason why [the technologies] were sought in the first place”, adding “it’s like buying a supercomputer and then saying you’re just going to surf the web and check emails.”

Security of camera feeds also stands out as a major concern. Elise Thomas from the International Cyber Policy Centre, offered a warning along these lines:

“The ways in which a lot of these projects are being implemented at the level of local councils, particularly from a cyber-security perspective, those councils may not necessarily have the resources to ensure that their systems are secure”

Internet connected devices are notoriously vulnerable to security breaches. Any gateway into a network-connected device can open doors to the entire network. Depending on the type of access provided, compromised devices can be mined for data, or even remotely controlled by outside parties.

WeChat Pay Partners up with Japan’s Line

Asia, ChinaNo Comments

WeChat, China’s hugely popular messaging and social media app, has announced plans to integrate with LINE, a similar app based in Japan. The partnership will unilaterally allow WeChat users to pay for goods and services over the Line platform.

WeChat

Tencent, a Chinese multinational holding conglomerate, released WeChat in 2011.  (Tencent has garnered a whopping zero out of 100 score from Amnesty International’s report on companies’ use of encryption to protect user data.)

WeChat Pay was introduced during the 2014 Lunar New Year, allowing users to send digital hongbao packets to friends and family. Users sent 20 million packets that year. In 2016, over 3 billion were sent.

The service has been wholeheartedly integrated into Chinese life. An estimated 900 million different accounts use WeChat Pay every month for private transfers, online goods and services shopping, and bill payments. Its messaging services have mostly replaced email for personal and business communications, the payment system largely renders credit cards obsolete, and its social media feeds and user “Moments” are one of China’s most popularly used media sharing platforms. It offers a stuffed animal, MonMon, for small children to send and receive WeChat voice messages from their parents. WeChat Pay can link to bank accounts in China, Hong Kong, Malaysia, and South Africa.

Line

Line was released in 2011 after an earthquake and tsunami disrupted telecommunications across Japan. Within two years 300 million users had installed the text, voice, and video communication app. Today almost half of the Japanese population, an estimated 78 million, uses Line. It is also one of the most popular messaging apps in Japan, Taiwan, Thailand, and Indonesia, with an estimated 164 million active users in those four countries. As of 2016, it had released over 320,000 sets of stickers. 

Line introduced Line Pay in December 2014. Like WeChat Pay, it facilitates user to user as well as user to merchant payments. In 2016, it released a free card that could be used for in-store purchases. It also allows the use of Line Taxi, a popular ride-hailing service in Japan.

One app, two countries

The cooperation between the two is intended to simplify payments for Chinese tourists or visitors in Japan. WeChat users will be able to buy goods and services in Japan without exchanging cash, or setting up a Line Pay account of their own. Line, which offers end to end encryption, is banned by the Chinese government.

AirAsia X Places Order for 42 Airbus Planes

Asia, Australia, Oceania, South East Asia, UncategorizedNo Comments

AirAisa X has closed a deal with Airbus for 42 new aircraft. Twelve A330-900 and thirty A321XLR are set to bolster the trans-Asian airline’s already formidable presence in the affordable air travel market. 

The Airline

AirAsiaX is, unsurprisingly, a sister company of AirAsia, the largest Asian international carrier. Based in Malaysia, AirAsia runs a myriad of routes between many nearby Asian (especially Southeast Asian) cities. AirAsiaX focuses on long distance routes, especially between Asia, Australia, and the United States. Its first route, commenced in 2007, was between Kuala Lumpur and the Australian Gold Coast. It tends to use peripheral airports rather than central ones to keep ticket prices down; in 2018, it swapped its KL-Melbourne route for nearby Avalon Airport.

The Aircrafts

The A330-900 is an extended fuselage version of the Airbus A330neo.  It can seat up to 300 passengers in a three-class layout; that number rises to 440 if an airline choses to forgo luxury seating options. Its range of 13,400km is sufficient for most intercontinental routes, with the exception of some trans-Pacific flights.

The A321XLR is the newest adaptation of the A321neo, the world’s best-selling single aisle aircraft. It has been refined to make its range “Xtra Long”, and can now travel up to 8500km. Smaller bodied planes better accommodate smaller airports; the A321XLR is a popular choice for smaller regional airlines. For AirAsiaX, the more efficient, but still lower passenger capacity model will enable the opening and continuation of less-traveled routes such as India-Europe and China-Australia, according to the Airbus website. 

Former CEO of Theranos’ Trial Delayed

Internet of Things (IoT)

Elizabeth Holmes, former CEO of formerly multi-billion dollar valued corporation Theranos, has been awaiting trial since June 2018 over charges of wire fraud and conspiracy to commit wire fraud. Theranos aimed to develop medical technology providing blood analyses and diagnoses outside of a hospital setting. The trial has been delayed until August 2020, granting the defense’s request to further review evidence. The nature of the fraud and the confidence it inspired in investors are important in considering the status of internet-connected medical devices. Maybe we should all review the evidence.

Vision / Reality + Investment / Fraud

As an undergraduate, Holmes imagined a wearable patch that would provide doctors with real-time changes in patients’ blood. This notion of patient data being collectable and analyzable (by patients, doctors, insurance companies, advertisers) inspires most internet-integrated personal medical devices. Refining the patch into a station that could quickly analyze small blood samples, Holmes left school and founded Theranos, securing deals from Safeway and Walgreens to begin implementing these stations at their stores. The product development story doesn’t progress much further than that. After repeated missed deadlines and inconclusive results, both companies cancelled their contracts in 2015 and 2016. Walgreens filed suit and receieved $30 million in damages. 

At the same time, investment and valuation were skyrocketing. Within four years, the company had raised over $40 million. Ten years later, it was up to $400 million, and the company was valued at $9 billion. Over $100 million each was invested by: Rupert Murdoch, Betsy DeVos, Cox Media Group, and the Walton family. Obviously, there was a lot of media coverage during this time, which certainly fueled further investment, despite the concomitant failures of the device itself.

For health or money?

Things that have been energetically invested and promoted that end up failing (Fyre ) are easy routes into the hopes of investors, consumers, and the culture that shapes them. The dream of a pocket doctor is for patients not just to be able to record their medical data from outside of a clinic—like a FitBit might—but also to offer algorithmically-produced diagnoses. Devices such as these would, and do, create huge data troves revealing unseen information about users (‘patients’ seems less applicable at this point). That such a large amount of investment in Theranos devices came from retail and media moguls gives good reason to look for other (read: commercial) uses of such a depersonalized (replacing both the doctor and patient with figures) collection and analysis of medical information. The market for internet-connected healthcare devices was estimated two years ago to reach over $130 billion by 2021.

Summer of Scooters

Start Ups

Op-ed sections in most major United States newspapers have published at least one article in the last few months lamenting or berating this summer’s most visible change in urban transportation—the mobile-hailed, electrically powered scooter. 

Resistance

The gripes are generally the same from city to city: they litter the sidewalks, interfere with pedestrian and vehicle traffic, people can use them under the influence of drugs or alcohol, there is no experience requirement, helmets are not required or provided, and some anecdote about someone tripping on a discarded scooter.

These are legitimate complaints, some more so than others, but they should not be taken as condemning personally rentable, electric transit vehicles in general.

Ride-hailing is not a viable alternative

Car-ride hailing companies such as Uber, Lyft, and Grab infiltrate a city’s market by pricing their services in competition with public transportation (not to mention traditional taxi services). Rather than reducing the amount of cars on the road, (which Uber actually claimed as its goal), they disincentivize busses and trains in cities attempting to bring them into more regular use. 

Same companies, different models

Scooters are designed (albeit by a lot of the same companies that offer ride-hailing services) in conjunction with public transportation systems, and in opposition to the private automobile cityscape that has emerged in American cities over the last 50 years. A collection of them at a transit hub enables one to take a mass transit line as close to your destination as possible, after which everyone branches off on foot or by rented scooter or bicycle. it almost sounds natural. compared to the tradition of sitting in rush hour traffic for two hours while checking your car’s embedded GPS for alternate routes, its certified organic.

The clientele of scooter-users is easy to misjudge as well; if you’re in an affluent, downtown area it might seem like they are mostly used by wealthy under 35’s hopping between cafes and boutique restaurants. But records show the average income of a scooter rider to be under $50,000 per year, and not exclusively in gentrified/gentrifying neighborhoods. Implemented correctly, scooters could actually resist and change the urban landscape away from prioritizing enclosed, time-consuming, and environmentally destructive private vehicles.

5G network infrastructure on the rise, projected to rake in $4.2 billion in 2020

Digital Systems Technology, General, Networking

International research firm Gartner estimates that the global 5G network infrastructure market is expected to raise $4.2 billion in revenue in 2020. That would mark an 89 percent rise in revenue from 2019 ($2.2 billion). Moreover, the company anticipates that investments in 5G new radio (NR) infrastructure will make up 6 percent of communications service providers’ total wireless infrastructure revenue this year; in 2020, Gartner says, that figure will double to 12 percent.

According to Sylvain Fabre, senior research director at Gartner:

“5G wireless network infrastructure revenue will nearly double between 2019 and 2020. For 5G deployments in 2019, CSPs are using non-stand-alone technology. This enables them to introduce 5G services that run more quickly, as 5G New Radio (NR) equipment can be rolled out alongside existing 4G core network infrastructure.”

5G trials are currently being run in the United States, South Korea, the United Kingdom and other countries. These are expected to expand into larger projects as technology develops. For instance, companies in Canada, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Spain, Sweden, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates have stated that they intend to make 5G services more widely available in 2020. Gartner suggests that 7 percent of communications service providers are already employing 5G technology.

There remains a lot of work to be done, however. “National 5G coverage will not occur as quickly as with past generations of wireless infrastructure,” Fabre explained, according to InformationAge. “To maintain average performance standards as 5G is built out, CSPs will need to undertake targeted strategic improvements to their 4G legacy layer, by upgrading 4G infrastructure around 5G areas of coverage.

“A less robust 4G legacy layer adjoining 5G cells could lead to real or perceived performance issues as users move from 5G to 4G/LTE Advanced Pro. This issue will be most pronounced from 2019 through 2021, a period when 5G coverage will be focused on hot spots and areas of high population density.”

Twitter, Facebook suspend accounts allegedly tied to Chinese government effort to undercut Hong Kong protests

Big Data, General, Social Media

Twitter has gone on another account suspension spree, this time targeting nearly 1,000 accounts it claims are agents of a Beijing-devised conspiracy to influence the world’s perception of political events in Hong Kong. Meanwhile, Facebook has banned seven pages, three groups and five accounts for “coordinated inauthentic behaviour as part of a small network that originated in China and focused on Hong Kong.”

“Inauthentic behavior” is Facebook’s latest catch-all term for content that runs counter to its own Western-oriented ideology. (Facebook has partnered with organizations with ties to Western governments in its efforts to root out “fake news” and “disinformation.” One such organization is the Atlantic Council, funded in part by the US State Department and NATO.)

A total of 936 accounts have been unplugged by Twitter, all allegedly based in China, all allegedly in violation of Twitter’s “platform manipulation policies.” The South China Morning Post reports:

“The social media activity of the suspended accounts, which posted in both English and Chinese, were part of efforts to undermine the ‘legitimacy and political positions of the protest movement on the ground,’ the company said.”

Of the accounts suspended, 326 had over 10,000 followers, some with close to 300,000. But Twitter assures us that “intensive investigations [found] reliable evidence to support that this is a coordinated state-backed operation.”

Speaking of coordination, Facebook confirmed that its own China-backed users were shut down thanks to a “tip” from Twitter. Partners in censorship?

Of course, it’s safe to assume that China is doing what it can to undermine the legitimacy of the Hong Kong protests, but it’s equally safe to assume that the US government is doing what it can in the opposite direction. At the time of writing, neither Twitter nor Facebook has suspended any accounts for being part of a US-led campaign to drum up support for political unrest in Hong Kong.