[NEWS] Facebook plans to launch 'GlobalCoin' cryptocurrency in 2020

Mark Zuckerberg met governor of Bank of England last month to discuss decision
AS SEEN @https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/may/24/facebook-plans-to-launch-globalcoin-cryptocurrency-in-2020

Facebook is planning to launch its own cryptocurrency in early 2020, allowing users to make digital payments in a dozen countries.

The currency, dubbed GlobalCoin, would enable Facebook’s 2.4 billion monthly users to change dollars and other international currencies into its digital coins. The coins could then be used to buy things on the internet and in shops and other outlets, or to transfer money without needing a bank account.

Mark Zuckerberg, the founder and chief executive of Facebook, last month met the governor of the Bank of England, Mark Carney, to discuss the plans, according to the BBC.

Zuckerberg has also discussed the proposal, known as Project Libra, with US Treasury officials and is in talks with money transfer firms, including Western Union, to develop cheap, safe ways for people to send and receive money. A report last year said Facebook is working on a cryptocurrency that would let users transfer money using WhatsApp, its encrypted mobile-messaging app.

“Payments is one of the areas where we have an opportunity to make it a lot easier,” Zuckerberg told the company’s developer conference last month. “I believe it should be as easy to send money to someone as it is to send a photo.”

In order to try to stabilise the digital currency the company is looking to peg its value to a basket of established currencies, including the US dollar, the euro and the Japanese yen.

Facebook is also looking at paying users fractions of a coin for activities such as viewing ads and interacting with content related to online shopping, similar to loyalty schemes run by retailers.

However, experts believe that regulatory issues and Facebook’s poor track record on data privacy and protection are likely to prove to be the biggest hurdles to making the currency a success.

“Facebook is not regulated in the same way as banks are, and the cryptocurrency industry is, by definition almost, unregulated,” said Rebecca Harding, chief executive of banking trade data analytics firm Coriolis Technologies.

“In the UK, for example, there are no formal laws that govern this market because cryptocurrencies are not legal tender. Facebook has also had issues with protecting user data in the past few years and this may well be an issue for it as it tries to provide guarantees to users that their financial information is safe.”

Following an Observer investigation last year, it emerged that the data of up to 87 million Facebook users had been used improperly by Cambridge Analytica to target ads for Donald Trump in the 2016 US presidential election.

Earlier this month the US Senate committee on banking wrote an open letter to Zuckerberg asking how the currency would work, what consumer protection would be offered and how data would be secured.

It has also emerged that Zuckerberg held talks with the billionaire Winklevoss twins, Cameron and Tyler, whose bitter legal battle over the origins of Facebook was chronicled in the film The Social Network. The twins, who went to Harvard with Zuckerberg and later sued him for stealing their idea for a social network, founded the cryptocurrency exchange, Gemini, in 2014.

In the highly unregulated world of cryptocurrencies Gemini is notable as being one of the first two companies to win regulatory approval to launch a digital currency pegged to the US dollar, the Gemini dollar.

It emerged last month that Facebook is looking for $1bn (£790m) in funding to support the project, and has held talks with payments giants including Visa and Mastercard.

Facebook has been long expected to make a move in financial services, having hired the former PayPal president David Marcus to run its messaging app in 2014. Marcus, a board member of crypto exchange Coinbase, runs Facebook’s blockchain initiatives, the technology on which cryptocurrencies run.

In February JP Morgan became the first major US bank to create its own cryptocurrency, JPM Coin, as a way for its clients to settle payment

[NEWS] Amazon preparing a wearable that ‘reads human emotions,’ says report

Time to strap Alexa to your wrist and let it know how you really feel

In a week of eyebrow-raising headlines surrounding the US-China trade spat, this latest report from Bloomberg still manages to stand out: Amazon is said to be working on a wrist-worn, voice-activated device that’s supposed to be able to read human emotions. This would be a rather novel health gadget, of the sort we’re more used to seeing in tenuous crowdfunding campaigns instead of from one of the world’s biggest tech companies.

Bloomberg has spoken to a source and reviewed internal Amazon documents, which reportedly show the Alexa voice software team and Amazon’s Lab126 hardware division are collaborating on the wearable in development. The device, working in sync with a smartphone app, is said to have microphones that can “discern the wearer’s emotional state from the sound of his or her voice.” In a mildly dystopian twist, Bloomberg adds that “eventually the technology could be able to advise the wearer how to interact more effectively with others.”

Lab126 has already been responsible for the Kindle, the Fire Phone, and the Echo speaker that first introduced Alexa to the world, and a report last year suggested the group is also developing a home robot. The unifying thread to all of Amazon’s hardware efforts right now is to build out an ecosystem of Alexa-capable devices, with the rumored robot making Alexa more mobile and the alleged emotion-sensing wearable giving the voice assistant access to a whole new dimension of user awareness.

The notion of a gadget that can sense emotions isn’t too far-fetched, as there are a number of measurable biomarkers that can suggest states like agitation. Research into all the information contained in the way people speak also bolsters Amazon’s case for an emotionally sensitive device. Achieving an accurate, or at least generally reliable, picture of a person’s emotional state, however, still seems like a hugely ambitious undertaking.

This is definitely one of those things that hasn’t yet been done because of how hard it is to do. Today’s report does conclude by saying that it’s not immediately obvious how far along Amazon’s project is or whether it’ll result in any sort of commercial product. So we should probably keep our emotions in check for now.

AS SEEN @https://www.theverge.com/circuitbreaker/2019/5/23/18636839/amazon-wearable-emotions-report

[NEWS] PLA’s furtive underwater nukes test the Pentagon

Until recently, China lacked a reliable nuclear second-strike capability. Its ballistic missile submarines, which can deliver a nuclear weapon, are changing that. Now, the United States is pursuing these subs in a cat-and-mouse contest reminiscent of the Cold War.


READ THE ENTIRE ARTICLE @https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/china-army-nuclear/


Satellite imagery reveals the regular presence of nuclear-powered ballistic missile submarines at the strategic base near the resort city of Sanya. Specialized surface warships and aircraft designed to protect the subs are prowling key waterways off the coast. Facilities at the base appear to have been built to store and load ballistic missiles. Antenna arrays that support the hunt for foreign submarines have appeared on Chinese-held islands in the hotly contested South China Sea. And a veteran submariner has been appointed to command Chinese forces in the south of the country.

Taken together, this means China has a force of missile submarines that can launch nuclear attacks from beneath the waves and now appear to be heading out on patrols, according to serving and retired naval officers, diplomats and security analysts. That gives Beijing something it has until recently lacked: a more reliable “second strike” capability if its land-based nuclear arsenal comes under attack.

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After six decades of battling to master complex and challenging subsea military technologies, China has joined the United States, Russia, the United Kingdom and France in the nuclear ballistic missile submarine club. In its most explicit assessment so far of this Chinese capability, the Pentagon in its latest annual report on China’s military, published in August, said that Beijing now has a “credible” and “viable” sea-based nuclear deterrent.                   

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Each of China’s four Jin-class submarines is armed with up to 12 ballistic missiles that can carry a nuclear warhead with an estimated range of 7,200 kilometers (about 4,500 miles), according to the Pentagon. That would put the United States within striking distance from the Western Pacific. Analysts at the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies estimate these missiles could fly at least 8,000 kilometers. The U.S. believes China has up to 100 nuclear missiles based on land.

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"An armed Jin-class SSBN will give China an important strategic capability that must be countered,” Admiral Harry Harris, then head of the U.S. Pacific Command, told a congressional committee last year.

That response appears to be happening. The United States and its allies are expanding their anti-submarine naval deployments across East Asia. This includes stepped-up patrols of America’s advanced, sub-hunting P-8 Poseidon planes out of Singapore and Japan.

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As it strengthens and improves its nuclear arsenal, Beijing is the only major nuclear power to be adding warheads to its stockpiles. China is developing an air-launched ballistic missile and plans to build a long-range stealth bomber capable of carrying nuclear weapons. With the sea-based second-strike deterrent in place, those programs suggest Beijing eventually intends to field a triad of air, sea and land-based nuclear weapons like the United States and Russia.

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Commercial satellite images of the submarine base give insight into the furtive force stationed there. They appear to show missile submarines regularly tied up alongside long piers in the harbor. Satellite images from Google Earth in June last year show what appear to be three Jin-class missile submarines at the base.

Problems and Prospects for 5G Deployment in the United States

In recent weeks several major developments affecting the roll out of 5G systems in the United States highlight the promise and the difficulties for near-term deployment of this transformative technology. British intelligence issued a report signaling its deep suspicions about the security of Huawei’s 5G system, which reinforces the view in the U.S. that the Chinese company should not play a role in providing equipment for commercial wireless systems. The White House later issued a strong statement that any commercial 5G system would be the province of the principle, private sector wireless carriers now operating in the U.S. Finally, Apple settled its disputes with the leading 5G technology innovator, Qualcomm, which was necessary if Apple is going to succeed in offering competitive 5G-capable mobile devices by 2020.  Apple’s reliance on other semiconductor firms, notably Intel and its own research units, had not kept pace with Qualcomm and threatened to put the iPhone juggernaut in danger of a significant technology deficit with rivals.

Although these developments show the path for the 5G future in the U.S.—a private sector system primarily using domestic and legacy European technology—they do not erase some serious problems with the rapid construction of the new wireless networks, nor do they suggest an economically compelling alternative in the rest of the world to the increasingly sophistical and state-supported competitor, Huawei.

A major issue in the next few years will be the capital costs of installing the needed 5G infrastructure and software upgrades in the U.S. Effective deployment will require hundreds of thousands of new cell sites, new or upgraded connective nodes and central switches, new software and redesigned mobile devices. Cost estimates run into the hundreds of billions of dollars for the full transition. 

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The likely path of installing 5G in the U.S., given the high cost of building entirely new infrastructure, is to retrofit existing 4G systems, locking the major wireless operators into existing hardware providers (mostly Nokia and Ericsson). These providers are not as advanced as Huawei which is able to offer entirely new, integrated systems at reasonable (often subsidized) prices. This dynamic too will slow the deployment of the most advanced new 5G technologies and features in the U.S.

READ THE ENTIRE ARTICLE  @https://www.forbes.com/sites/thomasduesterberg/2019/04/30/problems-and-prospects-for-5g-deployment-in-the-united-states



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The April Apple-Qualcomm settlement is strong confirmation of the importance of the latter’s fundamental core 5G technology. As Huawei moves ahead with the newer 5G infrastructure in China and around the world, the superior scale of its business and China’s non-market economy incentives are allowing it to outcompete and move ahead of Nokia, Ericsson, Samsung and others in perfecting new technologies. Huawei is able to channel significant new funds into the research narrowing the Qualcomm lead and powering it ahead of the infrastructure firms.

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