Lifeboat Foundation

The space industry is dominated by private companies, but one of the biggest banks on Wall Street is telling clients to pay attention to coming investment opportunities.

T-Mobile disclosed an “incident” in which hackers accessed “some” customers’ personal information—but no financial data or passwords.

The virtual currency markets have been through booms and busts before — and recovered to boom again. But this bust could have a more lasting impact on the technology’s adoption because of the sheer number of ordinary people who invested in digital tokens over the last year, and who are likely to associate cryptocurrencies with financial ruin for a very long time.

The number of people who bought virtual currencies more than doubled last winter. For people who got in late, the bust has been disastrous.

Kenyan banks are seeking regulatory approval to use distributed-ledger technology, also known as blockchain, to distribute payments and create credit-scoring models to rate potential borrowers.

“This is the dark side of technological revolutions and that dark side has always been there,” Haldane added. “That hollowing out is going to be potentially on a much greater scale in the future, when we have machines both thinking and doing — replacing both the cognitive and the technical skills of humans.”

Haldane said that the so-called Fourth Industrial Revolution — a digitally-driven paradigm shift similar to previous industrial revolutions in the West — had the potential to displace numerous jobs and leave people “technologically unemployed.”

“Each of those [industrial revolutions] had a wrenching and lengthy impact on the jobs market, on the lives and livelihoods of large swathes of society,” Haldane told the BBC.

Continue reading “Bank of England’s chief economist warns A.I. could threaten ‘large’ amount of jobs” »

Doctor? Who?

New York University said Thursday that it will cover tuition for all its medical students regardless of their financial situation, a first among the nation’s major medical schools and an attempt to expand career options for graduates who won’t be saddled with six-figure debt [Editor’s note: the link may be paywalled]. From a report: School officials worry that rising tuition and soaring loan balances are pushing new doctors into high-paying fields and contributing to a shortage of researchers and primary care physicians. Medical schools nationwide have been conducting aggressive fundraising campaigns to compete for top prospects, alleviate the debt burden and give graduates more career choices. NYU raised more than $450 million of the roughly $600 million it estimates it will need to fund the tuition package in perpetuity, including $100 million from Home Depot founder Kenneth Langone and his wife, Elaine. The school will provide full-tuition scholarships for 92 first-year students — another 10 are already covered through M.D./PhD programs — as well as 350 students already partway through the M.D.-only degree program.

The FBI is warning banks about a fraud scheme called an ATM cash-out, Krebs on Security reports. With this type of heist, attackers typically compromise a bank or payment card processor with malware, disable fraud controls and withdraw large sums of money — sometimes millions of dollars — with cloned bank cards. The FBI reportedly sent an alert to banks last week. “The FBI has obtained unspecified reporting indicating cyber criminals are planning to conduct a global Automated Teller Machine (ATM) cash-out scheme in the coming days, likely associated with an unknown card issuer breach and commonly referred to as an ‘unlimited operation’,” said the notice.

Once hackers gain access to a financial institution’s system, often through phishing, they’ll alter account balances as well as disable maximum ATM withdrawal amounts and transaction limits. That way, they can quickly take out large amounts of cash from ATMs with fraudulent bank cards made from stolen card data and gift cards.

Last month, Krebs on Security reported on two successful applications of this type of scheme. Hackers were able to steal around $2.4 million from The National Bank of Blacksburg through two ATM cash-outs in 2016 and 2017.

Today, economist and Nobel laureate, Paul Krugman, wrote in the New York Times, that Bitcoin is taking us back 300 years in monetary evolution. As a result, he predicts all sorts of bad things.

A significant basis for Mr. Krugman’s argument is that the US dollar has value because men with guns say it does.

Is Bitcoin erasing 300 years of monetary evolution?

Running with the metaphor that fundamental change to an economic mechanism represents ‘evolution’, I think a more accurate statement is that Bitcoin is not erasing the lessons of history. Rather, it is the current step in the evolution of money. Of course, with living species, evolution is a gradual process based on natural selection and adaptation. With Bitcoin, change is coming up in the rear view mirror at lightning speed.

Continue reading “Is Bitcoin Erasing 300 years of Monetary Evolution?” »