Two articles passed me by in the last 24 hour. The first gave me pause to think, the second was merely icing on the cake. The first article (https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-69018575) is the report where the BBC tells us that 2 brothers required no more than 12 seconds to steal 25 million dollars. This happened in April 2023. Now it is time for a history lesson. In the 13th century Amatino Manucci, working for Giovanni Farolfi & Company tarted this approach in 1299 (possibly earlier). This method was still taught when I was in school 680 years later. But the IT people al rushing to get things done faster did away with parts of that. Although this last part is speculation, it makes sense that someone got lazy. Systems have seemingly done away with checks and balances. Interesting enough the BBC also gives us ““The defendants’ scheme calls the very integrity of the blockchain into question,” US Attorney Damian Williams said in a statement on Wednesday, referring to the public ledger that records crypto payments.” I am not sure if I can agree with that. Blockchain gives a timeline, change that and the timeline gets disrupted. What matters is that crypto needs a clear set of checks and balances in place to avoid ‘batch hackers’. As I see it there is an issue with the ‘pending private transactions’ why was it pending? The reason could be very valid, but then the checks and balances for pending transactions needs an overhaul. I am certain that this is not the only case. Yes, it might be the first case, but there is a larger station. You see the department of Defense (US) will have this coming year $850,000,000,000 and how much of that is set in pending transactions? Spread over Army, Navy, Airforce, Marines and Coast Guard. I reckon the US treasury department will hauling ass to get a handle on this.
I am not arrogant enough to live by ‘this could have been prevented’ but systems evolved so quickly and with so much ‘need for greed’ that I have serious doubts whether someone set down to consider and evaluate the checks and balances on such systems. Even a odd ball geek looking at this and trying to see it inverted because that is the point where glitches are found.
The second one was also from the BBC (at https://www.bbc.com/news/business-68843985). In this article Jane Wakefield gives us the goods. It is given with “There has been a common theme to these stories, and it is all about how each celebrity made vast sums of money from an online investment opportunity in crypto currencies. And if this all sounds a bit unbelievable, that’s because it is – I hadn’t done a single one of these interviews, nor written any of the articles. And none of the famous people involved, or me, would dream of endorsing crypto investments of any kind.” Is is another setting where the system is not ready for the criminal element. In my mind it lacks checks and balances. Although here it is not as simple. You see there are a dozen roads to the honey jar and sealing them all will just be a waste of time. There is a setting of cloaking and Meta does what it can, but these criminals are as good as the Meta developers, often faster too.
For now I am still of the mind to never engage with any advertisement on Meta, it is not to be trusted. No social media is and that is a hard lesson to learn, but learn it or lose your cash. This is of course no good news to the real traders there, the real novel experiencers of hobby equipment, but it has come to this. It is time for meta to get a check mark too, one for sellers, so that the people are going to the right place. I am not sure how to go about that, it is not my field of expertise.
It is Friday here now. Joy, joy.
Lawrence van Rijn - Law Lord to be 