“If you build a system that logs everything about a person and you know that you live in a country with laws that will force the government to give that up, then maybe you shouldn’t build that kind of system. And this is the difference between a privacy-by-policy and a privacy-by-design approach to creating secure systems.” - Jacob Appelbaum
It’s always a “gm” when I wake up and see new (free) subscriptions to CSA. And my heart sings with joy when someone will tag me on Slack or Twitter with a “#CSA”. The meme almost stands on its own. Whilst this thing has been growing entirely organically so far, if you fancy a bit of support, please share it with your friends and family. The world deserves to know. - Tim
Timeline
Sep 1 - Bank of Canada says they did not print cash to finance the federal government. Source
Sep 1 - Crypto community pushes back on decentralized exchange (DEX) dYdX for requiring biometric authentication in order to perform a “liveness check” for a promotion. Source
Sep 1 - Reports surface that the Biden administration and Facebook arranged weekly/monthly calls to discuss what to censor on the platform. Source
Sep 1 - Hackers compromise Russian ride-hailing service Yandex Taxi and order all available taxis to Kutuzov Prospect, causing a major traffic jam. Source Source 2 (thanks to @tbaut)
Sep 2 - Chinese National Radio and Television Administration (NRTA) disallows use of artist names that sound too foreign or use foreign languages. Source
Sep 2 - Audit reveals centralized exchange (CEX) Crypto.com accidentally sent $10.5 million to an Australian woman. Court case ongoing. Source
Sep 5 - CEX Binance plans to drop USDT trading pairs and auto-convert all stablecoin balances to Binance’s own BUSD. Source
Sep 7 - Investigative report by MIT Technology Review says millions are being scammed by fake profiles on LinkedIn. Source
Sep 8 - US White House says Congress may consider legislation to ban proof-of-work mining. Source
Sep 8 - CEX Coinbase bankrolls lawsuit against the US Treasury Department for sanctions on Tornado Cash. Source
Sep 12 - King Charles will not pay a 40% inheritance tax on over $34bn in assets following Queen Elizabeth II’s passing thanks to a 1993 agreement with Parliament. Source
Sep 14 - In a sequel to last month’s Lebanese bank hostage situation amidst the country’s inflation crisis, a woman holds a bank hostage to access frozen funds. Source
Sep 14 - Meta, Twitter, YouTube, and TikTok attend a hearing with the US Homeland Security Committee over national security concerns with China. Source
Sep 16 - Reports surface of a cybersecurity incident with Uber that compromises internal communications and engineering systems. Source (thanks to @philngo_)
Sep 16 - Lebanese banks announce week-long closures as more branches are stormed and held up by depositors unable to get their money out. Source
Sep 19 - US Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration gives herself a giant pat on the back for requesting the IRS to audit itself to determine whether agents have paid their own taxes. Source
Sep 20 - Crypto market maker Wintermute suffers $160m hack to its DeFi operations. Source
Sep 21 - Iran unveils plans to test a central bank digital currency (CBDC) version of the Rial. Source
Sep 21 - Iran restricts parts of the Internet, including WhatsApp and Instagram, amidst mass protests over Mahsa Amini’s death. Source
Sep 22 - A cyberattack on Australia’s second largest telco, Optus, compromises sensitive personal data of up to 9.7 million subscribers. Source
Sep 22 - Commodity Futures Trading Commission levies a $250k penalty on bZeroX, LLC, its founders, and successor Ooki DAO for offering leveraged and margin trading. Source
Sep 22 - Reports surface of crypto wallet service WalletConnect getting banned from mailing service MailChimp. Source
Sep 23 - Apple unveils new policy forcing all NFT-related transactions to go through its App Store and levying its customary 30% commission. Source
Sep 25 - Vendors on Etsy demand reversal of a company policy that forces vendors to verify through fintech service Plaid, which requires invasive amounts of personal information such as bank statements and passwords. Source
Sep 27 - Meta (formerly Facebook) says it removes content related to China-based influence operations targeting US midterms. Source
Op-Ed
If you are interested in contributing to this OpEd, please reach out to my contacts at the bottom. We’d love to hear from you!
The following series is part 2 of a 3-part OpEd by ChainSafe’s Elizabeth Kukka on society’s need for decentralization. You can read part 1 here.
The views expressed are those of the author’s and may not reflect those of ChainSafe’s.
DecentralMania
Part 2 - You bought it, you own it?
Globally, most people who participate in the digital world are aware of cryptocurrencies. But where do we go from there? When we think about building a new version of the internet, a system that is more equitable for the masses, the place to start is solving for digital ownership.
In a Web2 model, we do not own the vast majority of our digital goods (streaming videos, music, games) — they are either rented or licensed. You cannot resell the video game that you pay to stream from PlayStation, nor the digital movie that you purchased from Amazon. You can sometimes access the movie again and again, but you can’t lend it to a friend, donate, or re-sell it on the secondary market if it no longer serves you. This is not the case in the physical world where you can go into GameStop, Rasputin Music, Blockbuster (RIP!), purchase, and own the items that you spent your money on. As the legal owner, you have the right to resell your goods on the secondary market (EBay, Craigslist, flea market, garage sale, etc.), modify your property (such as clothing, a car, or mixing music), lend it, donate it, etc.
In the physical world, you can resell what you have legally purchased. You are not, however, legally granted the right to duplicate or reproduce the items without permission — and there’s usually a form of payment such as a licensing or royalty fee. All of this is covered by what’s known as the First Sale Doctrine, a law that moves ownership of a tangible good from the creator and copyright owner, to the legal purchaser.
In 2001, as the Internet began picking up mass adoption and digital goods began to grow, it was decided IP rights would not apply in the same way to digital goods. The reason why was because of the ease of copying and therefore potential infringement upon copyright. In the digital world, the ease of copying is seen as a threat to the creators of digital goods (e.g. software). Copying meant negatively impacting a creator’s ability to effectively capture a certain amount of market share. However, web3 technology and tools make the First Sale Doctrine a digital reality.
This is the premise of a smart contract and storing digital property in digital wallets - the enablement of moving your items out of a gated platform, where you are locked-in because that’s where you made a purchase. If you play a game online and purchase tokens, skins, and other in-game items, if the game company shuts down or perhaps Apple or Android decide to no longer support it, you’ve lost what you have spent your money on. This is all risk for the buyer-renter, and all reward for the copyright-owner. Web3 makes it possible to authenticate a digital item as an original by inserting a unique piece of code, solving for the concern of copyright infringement or the generation of knock-offs. By moving transactions, or some portion of them, on-chain, network participants can verify provenance in a cryptographically-guaranteed way.
Compare this to the Web2 world, which does not provide interoperability across platforms and marketplaces, since companies often want to protect their moat and keep buyers trapped.
At this very moment, you have builders like ChainSafe, creating solutions to ensure that you can own your in-game purchases (the coins, the skins, the art, and more) via tools such as ChainSafe Gaming’s web3.unity. While others, such as Protocol Labs (Filecoin, IPFS) and Swarm Foundation (Swarm) are building decentralized storage solutions so that you actually own your files, emails and photos — a world is being built where the opinion of a moderator doesn’t determine whether your collection of sentimental photos and records can be taken away. Moreover, someone at Google, Amazon, or Apple can no longer restrict access to what is perceived as yours because it will be stored in your decoupled web3 wallet — no longer fenced-in and forced to stick to one platform or provider.
All of this presents an opportunity to really rethink digital ownership. Web3 is a vision for a new, a co-owned and a co-operated Internet. Is this not a worthy cause to onboard people into?
If you have any feedback, send them my way or reach out via Twitter or Telegram (@haochizzle).
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About ChainSafe
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ChainSafe is a leading blockchain research and development firm specializing in infrastructure solutions for web3. Alongside its contributions to major ecosystems such as Ethereum, Polkadot, Filecoin, Mina, and more, ChainSafe creates solutions for developers and teams across the web3 space utilizing our expertise in gaming, bridging, NFTs, and decentralized storage. As part of its mission to build innovative products for users and improved tooling for developers, ChainSafe embodies an open source and community-oriented ethos to advance the future of the internet. To learn more, click here.
Thanks for the interesting content - I found you through searching Substack for people writing about centralisation (sic - I'm Aussie) for a piece I am researching on the connection between values, centralisation and the many downsides for the everyday human's lived experience of life.
These are rich topics. Join us in the solutions. Decentralization and Transparency are key:
https://joshketry.substack.com/p/embrace-decentralized-systems-fear