A study by the National Bureau of Economic Research in the US has found El Salvador's national Bitcoin wallet - Chivo - is a "flop". According to the study's survey, the "median active user does not send or receive a single Bitcoin payment a month nor make any Chivo ATM withdrawals" and El Savador's central bank reports that only "1.6% of all remittances were received in bitcoins via digital wallets in February 2022". One of the study's authors said "the average user did not see an incentive to keep using Bitcoin rather than dollars". To make matters worse, "users are not actually holding U.S. dollars in their Chivo wallet but rather stable-dollar coins that could be backed by either the Salvadoran government or a private company".
Financial advisor RI Advice was hacked pretty badly in 2017, with an attacker "setting up VPNs, peer-to-peer file sharing, and crypto-miners, along with a variety of hacking tools" on their servers, compromising the financial details of all their clients. It was so bad, the ASIC took them to court arguing RI Advice's piss poor cybersecurity was a breach of its license obligations. This week the Federal Court agreed with ASIC. The punishment isn't that bad (pay ASIC's legal costs, undertake security training, implement security recommendations), but it does set a precedent for other financial licence holders that if your IT security isn't up to scratch, ASIC will hold you responsible - so get your shit together.
A huge nerd has analysed the weird looking phones Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has going on. Much of it is Soviet era stuff, like the "extremely large telephone, which is ivory-colored and has a rather small display" that contains "80 direct line buttons, so the president can make a call to almost anyone by pressing just a single button". Zelenskyy also has a TEMPEST-shielded Cisco DX80 videoconferencing system to prevent electromagnetic emanations and a dedicated Cisco 7975G to talk to the Whitehouse securely. Very interesting.
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