one of the Philippines’ leading e-wallet providers, and The Western Union Company (NYSE: WU), a leader in cross-border, cross-currency money movement, today announced a collaboration to enable more than five million customers to receive international and domestic money transfers directly into their Coins.ph wallets in the Philippines.
The unique integration of the Coins.ph blockchain-enabled platform and Western Union’s cross-border platform allows Filipinos to receive and hold international money transfers initiated from Western Union’s digital network in more than 60 countries and retail network in more 200 countries and territories.
“There are many overseas Filipino workers who send money back home regularly and are always looking for additional remittance options that will make it most convenient for their loved ones to receive money,” said Ron Hose, Coins.ph co-founder and CEO. “By pairing Coins.ph’s payments technology with Western Union’s expansive global network, we are giving Filipinos a seamless choice to receive money digitally, on the go.”
“There are an estimated 10 million1 Filipinos working or residing overseas. With this collaboration, we are proud to serve their families back home with even easier access to our suite of services and maximize positive impact on communities in the country,” added Hose.
With over five million Coins.ph wallet holders in the Philippines, the agreement signals the continued efforts of both companies to offer millions of Filipinos quick and convenient access to remittances, in urban and remote underserved areas.
“Over the years, Western Union has fueled innovation centered around the needs of customers, giving them their choice of channels, currencies, access and opportunities to connect with family and friends around the globe,” said Molly Shea, Senior Vice President & General Manager, Global Money Transfer, Asia Pacific, Western Union. “With this collaboration with Coins.ph, we are delighted to offer customers in the Philippines with an unmatched depth of services and capabilities, and convenience right at their fingertips.”
Remittances are crucial for millions of Filipinos. According to the World Bank’s Migration and Remittances Brief 302, the Philippines is one of the top remittance receiving countries in the world. Western Union has been providing money transfer services in the Philippines since 1990 and has more than 12,000 Agent locations3 in the country.
— ir.westernunion.com/news/archived-press-releases/press-release-details/2019/Coinsph-Wallet-Holders-to-Receive-Western-Union-Money-Transfers/default.aspx
Category: Mobile
PayPal Backs Digital Identity Startup Cambridge Blockchain – Coinjournal
PayPal has joined Cambridge Blockchain’s Series A funding round, marking the US payment giant’s first blockchain investment.
Cambridge Blockchain, a startup developing digital identity management software for financial institutions, initially closed its Series A in May 2018 after raising US$7 million from Foxconn’s HCM Capital, Partech Partners, Future\Perfect Ventures and Digital Currency Group, but according to documents filed with the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), the startup has raised a further US$3.5 million from a number of other investors including Omidyar Network and Flourish over the last nine months.
With the investment, PayPal and Cambridge Blockchain said they will “explore potential collaboration to leverage blockchain.”
Cambridge Blockchain provides financial institutions with blockchain-based digital identities solutions geared towards both protecting identities and streamlining know-your-customer (KYC) compliance, all the while allowing them to be compliant with rules such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and PSD2, a European payments directive.
The startup plans to use the new capital on new hires as well as research and development.
A spokesperson for PayPal told CoinDesk in an email:
“We made an investment in Cambridge Blockchain because it is applying blockchain for digital identity in a way that we believe could benefit financial services companies including PayPal. Our investment will allow us to explore potential collaborations to leverage blockchain technology.”
Matthew Commons, CEO of Cambridge Blockchain, said PayPal has been involved with the startup for the past year or so.
— coinjournal.net/paypal-backs-digital-identity-startup-cambridge-blockchain/
Report: Huawei Riddled With ‘Long Term Security Risks’ – ExtremeTech
UK officials tasked with evaluating Huawei’s network security and overall suitability to be a leading 5G partner in its upcoming deployments have released a report on their findings. The UK and Huawei have an agreement in which Huawei’s compliance with security standards is monitored by the Huawei Cyber Security Evaluation Centre (HCSEC). This organization is overseen by the HCSEC Oversight Board, who authored this most recent report. Their conclusions are quite negative — but they may also finally shed some light on why Huawei has been such a divisive topic over the past few years.
Warnings about Huawei’s security practices began during the Obama administration but ramped up after President Trump took office. What’s been missing from those reports, however, was any firm technical sense of why Huawei’s equipment and software were to be avoided. Did the equipment contain backdoors or other forms of spyware? One of the regular topics around the ExtremeTech water cooler has been the degree to which the government’s consistent-but-vague warnings reflected actual security concerns. In the interests of disclosure: I’ve tended to think the government probably did have reasons it wasn’t willing to publicly disclose. If the UK report reflects the US experience, there are definitely issues to be solved.
In its report, the HCSEC OB states that “Further significant technical issues have been identified in Huawei’s engineering processes, leading to new risks in the UK telecommunications networks” (emphasis original). It also states that Huawei has made no progress towards resolving any of the critical security issues identified in the previous year. As a result, the Oversight Board writes that it would be “inappropriate to change the level of assurance from last year or to make any comment on potential future levels of assurance.”
— www.extremetech.com/internet/288570-report-huawei-riddled-with-long-term-security-risks
Telegram Gained 3 Million New Users During WhatsApp, Facebook Outage
WhatsApp, Facebook, and Instagram faced a widespread outage yesterday with users from around the world reporting issues with sending messages on WhatsApp and Messenger, posting feeds on Facebook and accessing other features on the three Facebook-owned platforms.
While the outage was quite troubling both for the social media giant and its millions of users, guess who benefits the most out of the incident?
TELEGRAM.
Pavel Durov, the founder of the popular secure messaging platform Telegram, claims to have had a surge in sign-ups within the last 24 hours, at the time duration when its rival messaging services were facing downtime.“I see 3 million new users signed up for Telegram within the last 24 hours,” Durov wrote on his Telegram channel. “Good. We have true privacy and unlimited space for everyone.”
Telegram is an excellent alternative to Facebook’s Messenger and WhatsApp services, offering users an optional end-to-end encrypted messaging feature, so that no one, not even Telegram, can access them.
Telegram adopted end-to-end encryption support way back in 2013—three years before WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger.
Besides this, Telegram messenger has introduced many unique features in recent months that no other widely-adopted messaging app is yet offering. Two of these features include:
Multiple Account Support: Users can add up to 3 Telegram accounts and easily switch between them simultaneously without logging out.
Create Polls: Telegram offers built-in polling feature for large communities, allowing them to coordinate their activities and discuss complex issues efficiently.The telegram has previously faced restrictions and bans in countries like Iran, as well as in its home country Russia, after Durov refused to comply with government requests for encryption keys and information on its users.
“In 5+ years, Telegram disclosed exactly zero bytes of private data to third-parties including governments. That’s why Telegram is banned by authoritarian governments such as Russia and Iran. Other apps such as WhatsApp have no issues with there,”
— thehackernews.com/2019/03/encrypted-telegram-messenger.html
Why AI researchers should reconsider protesting involvement in military projects – MIT Technology Review
AI expert who was involved in Project Maven, the DoD’s program to accelerate artificial intelligence and machine learning for military uses—said that “constructive engagement” with the armed forces was necessary to avoid bad decisions.
In June, Google said it would no longer work with Project Maven after more than 4,000 employees signed a letter that accused the company of being “in the business of war.”
But speaking at EmTech Digital, MIT Technology Review’s AI conference, McCord said that it would be better for society as a whole to see such collaborations continue, and for those dissenting employees involved in AI projects to reexamine their stance.
“Most here today would agree that militaries and their role in deterrence, offense, and defense are a part of the world, and they will be for the foreseeable future,” he said. “A strategy of constructive engagement versus one of opting out is a far more optimal one.”
“Working on AI for defense does not make you less principled,” he added.
The secretive nature of Project Maven, which was said to be focused on improving analysis of footage captured by military drones, had caused concern across a wide group of AI researchers. But the US armed forces remain a “powerful force for promoting peace and stability in the world,” said McCord, reflecting arguments that AI researchers who reject the military on principle are actually handing the advantage to those with less rigorous ethical standards, including other nations.
While McCord said he would not expect “antiwar pacifists” to change their minds, he asked researchers to consider what would happen if other countries were making their own advances in emerging fields. A more positive attitude to the military was particularly important, he added, since governments now play a lesser role in the development of new technological discoveries than they once did.
“At the end of the Cold War the locus of innovation shifted to the private sector,” he said. “The world has changed. The capacity for government, and the role of government, has been diminished to a point where it’s never been so low in my view. The net effect is that big tech companies have assumed the mantle—whether they wanted to or not—of being the arbiters. They’re often self-regulating.”
— www.technologyreview.com/s/613208/emtech-digital-brendan-mccord-project-maven/
China: Shenzhen Issues Country’s First Subway Electronic Invoices Backed With Blockchain
China’s first blockchain-based electronic invoice for a subway ride was issued at the Futian Station of the Shenzhen Metro, local finance publication Securities Daily reports on March 18.
Shenzhen is the first economic special zone in China. The e-invoice function is the jointly developed project of the Shenzhen Municipal Taxation Bureau and Chinese tech giant Tencent, which provided the blockchain technology back-up through its 1 billion user social media platform WeChat.
As the publication states, after the end of each trip, the Shenzhen Metro passenger code can be seen on the WeChat Payment voucher page. It also underlines that as of March 15, 2019, the Shenzhen City Blockchain electronic invoicing system has issued more than one million electronic invoices backed with blockchain tech, with the total invoices amounting up to 1.33 billion yuan (around $200 million).
The article states that the blockchain electronic invoice system for subway passengers, once launched, is expected to record 170,000 online self-service invoices a day.
The application of the Shenzhen Metro is the first step in the implementation of blockchain-backed e-invoicing that will affect all public transport system including “taxis, airport buses and other traffic scenes simultaneously with on-line blockchain electronic invoicing functions.”
As Cointelegraph reported on Dec. 12, the Shenzhen Municipal Taxation Bureau and Tencent announced that they had successfully linked a blockchain invoice system with the WeChat payment platform.
Last month, SUBE (Sistema Único de Boleto Electrónico), the Argentinian state public transport card, partnered with Bitex, which provides blockchain-driven financial services to businesses to provide the payments’ ability by Bitcoin (BTC), as Cointelegraph reported on Feb. 9.
Decentralised YouTube, finally
DTube, as you might have guessed is the decentralized answer to YouTube. The app looks similar to the familiar video site, but there are a few key differences. Content creators can upload videos and have the opportunity to earn cryptocurrency.
The app is censorship resistant, claiming that only the users can censor content through the power of upvotes and downvotes. There are no ads and creators don’t have to worry about algorithms prioritizing popular content over new posts.
We browsed around, finding that most of the content is about crypto and blockchain topics. Granted, that’s probably because DTube isn’t exactly widely publicized on mainstream internet publications or social networks.
PlanetMobile company public update
The company is conducting contracts with telecom providers and makes appropriate adjustments to the logic of the system.
Information on the web site will be updated in the coming days. Also, our SIM cards will be offered to a selected group of users for testing.
Planet Mobile – Stay online always and everywhere!
Blockchain Research Now Granted Tax Credit in South Korea
South Korea’s government has added blockchain to the fields of research and development eligible for a tax credit meant to boost innovation, English-language local media TheNews.Asia reports on Jan. 8.
The local Ministry of Strategy and Finance announced the proposed changes to the enforcement decree of last year’s tax law, which will be enforced in February. The proposed amendments also include among the eligible fields wearable robots and fine dust reduction technology.
According to the aforementioned article, a result of this amendment will be that 30 to 40 percent of the research and development expenses of small enterprises and 20 to 30 of large and medium-sized enterprises will be tax deductible.
Currently, the research and development tax deduction rate for large corporations reportedly ranges from 0 to 2 percent, 8 to 15 percent for medium companies and 25 percent for small enterprises.
As Cointelegraph recently reported, some of South Korea’s biggest cryptocurrency exchanges have passed a government security audit, but the majority could still be exposed to attacks.
Facebook Is Said to Develop Stablecoin for WhatsApp Transfers – Bloomberg
Facebook Inc. is working on making a cryptocurrency that will let users transfer money on its WhatsApp messaging app, focusing first on the remittances market in India, according to people familiar with the matter.
— Citește pe www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-12-21/facebook-is-said-to-develop-stablecoin-for-whatsapp-transfers