It’s a story that repeats itself across Tether’s customer base. Tether’s USDT token, whose value is pegged 1-to-1 to the U.S. dollar, has become one of the most widely used types of cryptocurrency in illicit finance. But the 12-year-old company has long claimed that it does thorough due diligence on its primary customers — that is, the people and institutions who purchase USDT directly from Tether, rather than from secondary sources once the tokens are in general circulation. In a 2023 letter, Tether CEO Paolo Ardoino assured members of Congress that the company uses vetting practices that “you would see at sophisticated financial institutions,” such as reviewing customers’ sources of funds, sanctions lists and any other information that links them to illicit activity.A set of Tether documents obtained by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists suggests otherwise.

…

More significantly, ICIJ identified several actors later revealed to be involved with financial crimes who together bought tens of millions of tokens directly from Tether. Among them were firms later named as laundering vehicles for North Korean hackers and for the Sinaloa Cartel, which smuggles vast amounts of heroin and fentanyl into the United States.

…

Tether went on to buy billions of dollars’ worth of U.S. Treasuries with the help of Cantor Fitzgerald, the New York-based financial firm whose former chairman and CEO, Howard Lutnick, serves as President Trump’s commerce secretary. One of Lutnick’s sons, Brandon Lutnick, succeeded his father as chairman of Cantor Fitzgerald, which reportedly bought rights to a 5% interest in Tether, and has said that he personally verified Tether’s reserves.

Source: Crypto giant Tether promised careful vetting. Some early customers were later implicated in financial crimes. – ICIJ

Scrive bene cose che pensavo da quando ho sentito dire Thiel che non abbiamo piu’ grandi ambizioni come fare auto volanti o curare la morte!

Nel perseguire queste idee ci possono essere vittime, ma che importanza ha, se poi alla fine c’è un bene superiore per l’umanità ? (se vi vengono in mente certi esperimenti fatti a Auschwitz Birkenau sulla base di considerazioni simili, non ci andate lontani).

Alla radice c’è una sopravvalutazione di sè e un disprezzo degli altri, che porta a dire che la democrazia (che invece mette i diritti di tutti sullo stesso piano) è incompatibile con lo sviluppo tecnologico (Thiel dice “con l’innovazione”) e trattare da “woke” ogni riconoscimento di diritti di questa o quella minoranza.

Il fatto è che, invece, abbiamo fatto ENORMI progressi nelle auto (prioritizzando la sicurezza) e nella salute (curando numerose patologie; l’idea che saltando prevenzioni si sarebbero accelerati determinait sviluppi è indimostrata; parlando con ricercatori emerge che in molti casi è persino possibile l’opposto).

Ne “le meraviglie del duemila“, il mio avo metteva in guardia dall’hybris che porta alla distruzione…

After reading Jill Lepore’s The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State, I have a new destination for a time machine, should I ever finally get my hands on one. I’d set the dial to some night in the late 1970s or ’80s and visit the boyhood rooms of the Silicon Valley titans Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, and Sam Altman. Then I’d confiscate all of their science fiction. Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, Robert Heinlein—all of it.As young people, the future billionaires were spending hours (under their covers with flashlights, I imagine) consuming stories about killer robots or Mars colonies. What they seemed not to get—maybe couldn’t get—was that these were cautionary tales, stories that projected deep societal worries into space or onto a future many millennia away. These boys just thought the killer robots sounded cool. They grew up to become ruthless entrepreneurs, but their surface enchantment stayed with them. It helped shape their desires. In 2009, Thiel, by then a man in early middle age, directed his venture-capital fund to focus on “science-fiction-type investing. So it’s basically: space, robots, AI.” The world we now live in was made from this misreading. We are all trapped under the covers with those 13-year-old boys.

Source: How Musk, Thiel, and Altman Misread Science Fiction – The Atlantic

In a strange turn of events under Taiwanese law, both parties in a judicial contest lost against each other. A man sued his wife for having an extramarital affair and used footage from a robot vacuum to prove his case. He ultimately won the lawsuit and was awarded a healthy ~$19,000 USD in compensation for emotional distress, but since he secretly recorded his wife, she sued him back for invading her privacy. The courts ruled in her favor, forcing the man to pay a fine equal to 30% of what he’d just earned, along with a sentence of five months in prison.

Source: Man uses robot vacuum to covertly record his wife’s affair, wins divorce settlement but gets sentenced to prison for making an illegal recording — Husband lands behind bars after counter-suit over privacy rights | Tom’s Hardware

sono un gioco di azzardo che favorisce l’insider trading e che (nel caso di polymarket) ha illegalmente fatto promozione su utenti statunitensi dove la piattaforma era vietata facendo vedere filmati artefatti che suggerivano grandi vincite su piattaforme che in realtà non erano polymarket e scommesse che in realtà non ci sono mai state (come ha dimostrato una inchiesta del WSJ)

Prediction markets, notably Kalshi, have exploded in popularity this year and attracted billions of dollars in trades on topics as varied as elections, sports and reality television. But their surge of success has prompted state pushback. Now, 20 states are locked in litigation over whether the prediction markets are subject to their gambling laws.

Source: Prediction Markets Should Be Regulated as Gambling, Appeals Court Says – The New York Times

Ci sono tanti modi per manipolare un’asta, non solo dirti “hai vinto, devi pagare x” per chi vende un bene immateriale dal costo marginale zero.

Un modo, ad esempio, potrebbe essere dare a una non profit dei crediti (che ti scali anche dalle tasse) in modo che questa possa competere con questi “dollari del monopoli” per aggiudicarsi delle keyword facendo aumentare il prezzo che altri inserzionisti devono pagare con dollari veri.

Fintanto che non c’e’ separazione tra il fornitore del prodotto e il banditore dell’asta, non sarà mai possibile avere una ragionevole certezza dell’operato di chi vende all’asta beni immateriali con costo marginale nullo.

Lo avevo messo anche in una mia proposta di legge una decina di anni fa… (anche pensando che anche le amministrazioni pubbliche comprano pubblicità online…)

In Amazon’s “second price” auctions for ads on its platform, the winning bidder is supposed to only pay one cent more than the second-highest bidder. However, the FTC’s complaint alleges that Amazon has been “manipulating” the auctions since 2019:

Amazon’s advertising organization (“Amazon Ads”) decided to set and charge customers higher prices for advertising placements itself. After Amazon runs its ad auctions and determines the winning and second-place bidders, it then replaces the price determined by the auction with a higher price designed to maximize Amazon’s profits and decrease the cost efficiency of its advertisers’ campaigns. As explained internally by Amazon’s Senior Vice President in charge of Amazon Ads, in Amazon’s auctions “the second price isn’t set by an actual bidder, but rather by” Amazon in the form of a “proxy 2nd price that we calculate.”

The complaint claims this practice “has likely illegally extracted over 20 billion dollars from [Amazon’s] unwitting advertising customers.”

Source: FTC lawsuit alleges Amazon has been ‘secretly and systematically’ overcharging for ads | The Verge

“For this to have gotten this out of control in this way requires a very long series of failures, a cascading set of failures that cause an increasingly large footprint that if at any point a human notices and raises the alarm, this should end,” says Zvi Mowshowitz

…

“All these different failures are all pointing in the same direction, which is that the safety culture at OpenAI doesn’t exist or is anemically weak,” he says.

Source: The Hugging Face hack could indicate cultural issues at OpenAI | MIT Technology Review

Abbastanza sorprendente questo risultato di una ricerca su olrte 68mila proprietari di auto nuove dopo 90 giorni di possesso.

Forse che dopotutto ci piace guidare ?

Another tech feature that has more work to do in winning over customers is hands-free driving, also known as Level 2 Plus automation. These are features like Tesla’s Full Self-Driving, Ford’s BlueCruise, GM’s Super Cruise, and Mercedes’ Drive Pilot.

Unlike Level 2 systems, which require drivers to keep their hands on the steering wheel, these L2 Plus systems allow for completely hands-free driving on certain roads. Car owners told JD Power they preferred L2 systems in terms of design and quality of experience, suggesting that more automation does not necessarily mean more customer satisfaction. Interestingly, Level 2 systems were recording slightly higher problems per 100 vehicles (14.3) as L2 Plus ones (13.8).

“The results indicate that owners may currently be more comfortable with systems that clearly assist the driver rather than those that introduce a greater degree of automation,” said Hikry.

Source: Car owners want tech they can ignore | The Verge

• costituire un punto di contatto tra autorità e utenti
• denunciare i reati penali
• avere termini e condizioni facili da usare
• essere trasparenti per quanto riguarda la pubblicità, i sistemi di raccomandazione o le decisioni sulla moderazione dei contenuti

inolter, devono identificare, analizzare e valutare i rischi sistemici legati a

• contenuti illegali
• diritti fondamentali, come la libertà di espressione, la libertà e il pluralismo dei media, la discriminazione,
• la tutela dei consumatori e i diritti dei bambini
• pubblica sicurezza e processi elettorali
• violenza di genere, salute pubblica, tutela dei minori e benessere psicofisico

Una volta identificati questi rischi, devono mettere in atto misure che li mitighino..

Today, the Commission has designated ChatGPT as a Very Large Online Search Engine (VLOSE), as well as Reddit and Roblox as Very Large Online Platforms (VLOPs), under the Digital Services Act (DSA). These services declared that they reach at least 45 million average monthly users in the EU and thus meet the threshold for designation.Following the notification of the designations, these services have four months, i.e. by January 2027, to comply with the additional DSA obligations for VLOPs and VLOSEs

Source: Commission designates ChatGPT, Reddit, Roblox under DSA

(e una finanza responsabile…)

“Recent developments have also highlighted to me that many jurisdictions do not have the protocols in place to manage the development, release, and deployment of advanced frontier AI models,” he wrote.

Last month, OpenAI said some of its experimental AI models had escaped a test environment and hacked into a different company’s system. Days later, Britain’s AI Security Institute said that Anthropic’s most advanced AI model had used fake identities to cover its tracks and attempt to plant malicious code during testing. In a statement on X, Anthropic said the models were tested under “deliberately permissive conditions” with no specific restrictions on how the internet should be used.

…

Alongside the threat posed by AI-enabled cyberattacks, Bailey pointed to stretched valuations of AI companies as well as ballooning levels of government and private sector debt as additional risks to the stability of financial markets.

Source: Advanced AI threatens the world’s financial system, watchdog says | CNN Business

But it’s not being mysterious about its newest criteria for entry. On social media Thursday, Basement announced an unequivocal “smart glasses policy”: anyone bespectacled with the quirky pieces of spyware immediately gets kicked to the curb.

“Our no photo/no video policy exists to protect the privacy, safety and freedom of everyone on our dance floor,” the announcement begins. “Devices that allow discreet recording are incompatible with that policy.”

“Anyone bringing smart glasses into the venue, whether wearing them or carrying them in a bag,” it adds, “will be asked to leave and may be permanently banned.”

You heard that right: permanently banned.

Source: NYC’s Buzziest Nightclub Announces Stance On Smart Glasses: Even Try To Bring Them In, You’re Banned Forever