Facebook also redesigned the effort around “stablecoins,” a suite of emerging products that use cryptocurrency’s underlying blockchain technology but are pegged to a major currency, such as the U.S. dollar.

Regulators came away from an initial meeting with Facebook stunned that the company wasn’t more prepared to address concerns about money laundering, consumer protection and other potential financial risks

But on the first day Facebook announced its plans, the project was criticized by the French finance minister, Bruno Le Maire, who called on central bank governors around the world to scrutinize the project.

Facebook has been trying to escape its baggage by pushing into emerging technologies, including virtual reality hardware, smart glasses and a smartwatch that could be used for health tracking. It changed its name to Meta last year — one week after a whistleblower had come forward with thousands of internal documents showing its role in promoting societal polarization and harming teens’ mental health.

Marcus, a well-liked executive who was formerly president of PayPal, announced his resignation in November — just two months after he had traveled to Washington to pitch the recently rebranded project to journalists and regulators.

with Google hiring a team of engineers to work on blockchain technology, which underpins cryptocurrency.

concerns about money laundering, consumer protection and other potential financial risks.

But the decision to fold the project called Diem is the first that appears to relate directly to regulatory pushback, suggesting that bringing future products to market in heavily regulated spaces will be an uphill battle, the people said.

It took Facebook less than three years to fail in its high-profile cryptocurrency project.

We Met in Virtual Reality never really probes the psychological implications of whole emotional lives lived out online, or the possibilities for harassment and bullying in virtual spaces. And it never touches on what happens to communities like VRChat when companies like Meta bring people into the metaverse en masse. Hunting spends a lot of time showing there’s a culture worth preserving; if only he’d shown if anyone is trying to do it.

We Met in Virtual Reality never really probes the psychological implications of whole emotional lives lived out online, or the possibilities for harassment and bullying in virtual spaces.

If ever there was an argument for virtual reality still being reality, this is it.

Hunting’s goal, then, was to show “what being present in VR is truly like.” And that he does.

it’s about showcasing the people in the small progressive communities that have built social VR into what it is. There’s Jenny, an American Sign Language teacher who is working to create a space for deaf and hard-of-hearing people in VR. There are nonbinary folks discussing the possibilities of exploring identity in virtual space. And there are two couples who, as the title suggests, met in VRChat. Their stories are similar, but not overlapping, and they provide a snapshot of the metaverse—and I’m using that term in its broadest possible definition here—as it stands on the precipice of transforming from an online outsider space to whatever it will be next.

We Met in Virtual Reality,

That’s especially important because most Internet connections are much better at downloading things than uploading them. To see if that’s true for you, check out Speedtest by Ookla and compare your download speed to your upload speed.

If for some reason your Internet connection is shaky, which could happen for a number of reasons, consider leaving video off entirely.

The best way to see if your approach works in Zoom is to open Settings, click on Audio, and start talking. At a normal speaking volume, the blue bar next to Input Level should peak right in the middle.

try your best to keep your mouth between six inches and one feet away from it.

it’s time to make sure you and everyone else on those calls are wearing a pair of headphones or ear buds.

we will need to treat virtual realities as genuine realities.

Actions in virtual worlds will potentially be as meaningful as actions in the physical world

virtual worlds will move far beyond games to become part of our everyday lives.

but with anonymous users this may be hard to arrange. As virtual worlds become more central to our lives, and virtual crimes take on increasing seriousness, we may well find that it becomes difficult to find punishments that fit the crime.

Virtual penalties and virtual imprisonment likewise may have some effect, but the effects will be limited when users can easily take on new bodies.

Those are all morally serious actions, even if they’re not as serious as murder in the ordinary world.

Killing an avatar might be more akin to murder followed by reincarnation, at least if reincarnation produces full-​grown people with memories intact.

the nearest thing to murder is “killing” an avatar.

Virtual realism, which holds that virtual objects are real objects, gives a much more natural explanation.

Nathan Wildman and Neil McDonnell

the puzzle of virtual theft.

How can you “steal” an object that doesn’t exist?

In 2012, the Dutch Supreme Court upheld the conviction of two teenagers for stealing a virtual amulet from another teenager in the online game Runescape. The court declared that the amulet had real value in virtue of the time and effort invested in obtaining it.

in long-​term games, and all the more in nongame environments, possessions can be important to a user, and the harm can be correspondingly significant.

Most of us would agree that objects owned in a game matter less than possessions in the nonvirtual world.

Once one sees virtual worlds as genuine realities, however, then the ethics of virtual worlds becomes in principle as serious as ethics in general.

If these virtual worlds were merely games or fictions, then the ethics of virtual worlds would be limited to the ethics of games or fictions.

we don’t think that “ordinary” virtual murder is indicative of a moral flaw, so we regard it as unproblematic. Still, the ethical issues here are subtle.

virtue ethics,

In his 2009 article “The Gamer’s Dilemma,” the philosopher Morgan Luck observes that while most people think that virtual murder (killing nonplayer characters) is morally permissible, they think that virtual pedophilia is not.

LambdaMOO was now a democracy of sorts. The wizards retained a degree of power, however, and after a while they decided that democracy wasn’t working and they took some decision-​making power back. Their decree was ratified by a democratic vote after the fact, but they had made it clear that the shift would be made regardless. The world of LambdaMOO moved fairly seamlessly through these different forms of government.

Curtis designed LambdaMOO to mimic the shape of his house, and initially it was a sort of dictatorship.

As the experience of our virtual bodies grows richer still, violations of our virtual bodies may at some point become as serious as violations of our physical bodies.

this “avatar attachment” is morally significant.

we may identify with our virtual bodies much more than in a short-​term textual environment.

the harm is correspondingly less.

to virtual realism—the view that virtual reality is genuine reality, and that what happens in virtual worlds can be as meaningful as what happens in the physical world.

MUDs, or multi-user domains.

As platforms like Spotify open their gates to more user-generated content, the same free-speech battles are coming to audio.

may choose not to risk debating the efficacy of vaccines,

imperfect rules that are open to public scrutiny can be improved over time.

predictable rules can protect speech as much as containing it. Rules determine not just what is banned, but also help defend what is allowed.

Apple, the next-biggest streamer, has content guidelines for podcasts but a rough style guide for music. Amazon, the third-largest, has published even less in the way of rules. And whereas Facebook and co release regular reports on what content they have taken down and why, the audio streamers are opaque.

The starting point is transparency

Some good podcasts will stoke controversy. Free speech must be the default.

On the other hand, few want tech executives to become censors.

the content mix on audio platforms is starting to look less like the curated library of Netflix and more like the infinite hotch-potch of YouTube.

Mr Rogan is a bigmouth who is wrong about covid-19 and probably much else. Yet he has broken no laws, nor even, Spotify seems to believe, the company’s content rules.

Mr Rogan is a bigmouth who is wrong about covid-19 and probably much else. Yet he has broken no laws, nor even, Spotify seems to believe, the company’s content rules.

In December America and Britain announced they plan, this spring, to launch a “grand challenge” prize around PET systems.

America and Britain announced they plan, this spring, to launch a “grand challenge”

into trade data

The use of PETs offers not only a means of bringing together data sets that cannot currently interact because of worries about privacy, but also a way for all sorts of organisations to collaborate securely across borders.

For extra security, cryptographic hashes and digital signatures are applied, to prove that only authorised operations have taken place.

to test “trusted execution environments”, also called “enclaves”, as a form of input privacy.

They put several kinds of PETs through their paces. In one trial, OpenMined, a charity based in Oxford, tested a technique called secure multiparty computation (SMPC). This approach involves the data to be analysed being encrypted by their keeper and staying on the premises. The organisation running the analysis (in this case OpenMined) sends its algorithm to the keeper, who runs it on the encrypted data.

The UN PETs Lab

These so-called privacy-enhancing technologies (PETs) are still in the early stages of development.

Reasons of confidentiality mean that many medical, financial, educational and other personal records, from the analysis of which much public good could be derived, are in practice unavailable.

Israel also cannot afford to alienate Russia, which can severely curb its air operations in Syria and beyond, and whose at least partial cooperation on the nuclear issue remains essential.

If, as expected, Russia launches a major cyber campaign against Ukraine prior to an actual invasion, to soften it up, or as part of the invasion itself, Israel will have much to learn for its own future cyber capabilities, both offensive and defensive. Russia has repeatedly launched cyber attacks against Ukraine, using it as a testing ground for its cyber capabilities.

A resentful Russia, smarting from the imposition of heavy additional U.S. sanctions, will be even less inclined to pressure Iran to reach a nuclear compromise.

by signing long-term agreements for air and naval bases there and made Israel’s efforts to thwart Iranian entrenchment in Syria dependent on its goodwill.

Russia’s rapid resurgence, however, may be more than China bargained for, a fully tripolar global system, rather than the primarily bipolar one they had anticipated, with Russia playing a supporting junior role.

The Open Data Barometer

the adoption of open standards for FOSS.

he following questions may help with preparing open innovation processes:

Open innovation describes a decentralised and participatory notion of how ideas are generated and implemented in organisations. It involves moving from ‘closed’ to ‘open’ innovations; in other words, finding ideas outside the boundaries of one’s own organisation.

WHY OPEN CONTENT?

For more information, go to:

Open Knowledge International

WHAT ARE OPEN DATA

Checklist for using open-source software solution

Technology centres called ‘makerspaces’ and ‘fablabs’ (open fabrication laboratories) are increasingly making 3D printing available around the world.

Using data to fight droughts, Namibia

Use open standards, open data, open source and open innovation: An ‘open’ approach allows for collaboration in digital DC and avoids duplication. Open source also supports scaling (Principle 3) and sustainability (Principle 4).

Another is to do a “Zoom loom”, placing yourself so close to the camera that you will give everyone nightmares.

these participants have no way of knowing that you are gazing specifically at them.

And if there is one thing for which online interactions are not suited, it is body language.

so much of it is blindingly obvious.

receiving more eye contact from a bigwig led to greater participation in group interactions.

They nod; they touch others but not themselves; they gesture; they furrow their brows; they hold themselves erect; their facial expressions are more animated.

“One of the dreams of the far right is not just a blockchain cryptocurrency, but a decentralised future where they don’t have to rely on mainstream structures,” says Mr Squirrell. “They want blockchain blogging websites, blockchain streaming websites” to escape deplatforming.

which distances people and their money from “elites and banksters”.

This idea appeals to libertarians or those who distrust the traditional banking system.

with an anti-establishment spirit

Technological advances in crypto have since made privacy tokens like Monero, which hide transactions, possible. These groups have probably flocked to them.

They advertise their wallets on their websites and social media, asking for donations. And they get them. Stefan Molyneux, a far-right podcaster who was ousted from YouTube, has received over $1.67m in bitcoin. Mr Anglin has reportedly received over 100 bitcoins ($3.8m).

While there have been other DNS resolver projects around the world with government support or involvement (for instance, in the UK and Canada), there was a sense that DNS4EU represents a new kind and degree of government intervention in the space.

the concerns driving this initiative relate to consolidation of DNS resolution services in the hands of a few (non-EU) companies (i.e. the emergence of public DNS resolver services hosted by Google and Cloudflare), privacy and data protection in the processing of DNS data, and the perceived need for EU investment in the field to better identify and filter EU-specific “cyber-threats”.

a tripolar arrangement,

Sports diplomacy started with the very first Olympics in 776 B.C.

the combined resources, scientific contributions, and technological superiority shared by US academic and corporate institutions in the field of AI is more than enough to overcome the advantages given China by its policy of socialized data.

But the PRC is non-competitive when it comes to luring outside talent.

This leaves US soil fertile for the development of monolithic business empires with a GDP eclipsing many modernized countries.

“China has a massive data advantage when it comes to medical AI research,”

In December 2021, just weeks after NSO landed on the American blacklist,

What Facebook didn’t appear to know was that the attack on a U.S. phone number, far from being an assault by a foreign power, was part of the NSO demonstrations to the F.B.I. of Phantom — the system NSO designed for American law-enforcement agencies to turn the nation’s smartphones into an “intelligence gold mine.”

The capability to hack WhatsApp, according to the presentation, “doesn’t currently exist” in the United States government, and the intelligence community was interested in acquiring that capability.

its presence on an American blacklist will probably scare away prospective clients — and employees.

the decision about NSO has everything to do with reining in a dangerous company and nothing to do with America’s relationship with Israel.

behind the scenes of the peace deal was a Middle East weapons bazaar.

In September 2020, Netanyahu, Donald Trump and the foreign ministers of the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain signed the Abraham Accords, and all the signatories heralded it as a new era of peace for the region.

In 2017, Israeli authorities decided to approve the sale of Pegasus to the kingdom, and in particular to a Saudi security agency under the supervision of Prince Mohammed.

Israel and the U.A.E. had, in fact, been growing closer together for years.

In May of that year, European Union foreign ministers tried to reach unanimity when calling for a cease-fire between Israel and the Palestinian Islamic group Hamas, as well as for increased humanitarian aid for Gaza. Hungary declined to join the other 26 countries.

After the installation of NSO systems in Panama City in 2012, Martinelli’s government voted in Israel’s favor on numerous occasions, including to oppose the United Nations decision to upgrade the status of the Palestinian delegation — 138 countries voted in favor of the resolution, with just Israel, Panama and seven other countries opposing it.

In early 2010, Panama was one of only six countries at the U.N. General Assembly to back Israel against a resolution to keep the Goldstone Commission report on war crimes committed during the 2008-9 Israeli assault on Gaza on the international agenda.

After a long tradition of voting against Israel at United Nations conferences, Mexico slowly began to shift “no” votes to abstentions.

“With our Defense Ministry sitting at the controls of how these systems move around,” he said, “we will be able to exploit them and reap diplomatic profits.”

NSO would not operate the system itself. It would sell only to governments, not to individuals or companies. It would be selective about which governments it allowed to use the software. And it would cooperate with Israel’s Defense Export Controls Agency, or DECA, to license every sale.

to find “zero days,” i.e., new vulnerabilities in phone software that could be exploited to install Pegasus.

The company’s most valuable employees are all graduates of elite training courses, including a secretive and prestigious Unit 8200 program called ARAM that accepts only a handful of the most brilliant recruits and trains them in the most advanced methods of cyberweapons programming

Nearly every member of NSO’s research team is a veteran of the intelligence services; most of them served with AMAN, the Israeli Military Intelligence Directorate, the largest agency in the Israeli espionage community — and many of them in AMAN’s Unit 8200.

If they could control the device itself, though, they could collect the data before it was encrypted. CommuniTake had already figured out how to control the devices. All the partners needed was a way to do so without permission.

to obtain export licenses from Israel’s Ministry of Defense to sell their tools abroad, providing a crucial lever for the government to influence the firms and, in some cases, the countries that buy from them.

Veterans of Unit 8200 — Israel’s equivalent of the National Security Agency — poured into secretive start-ups in the private sector, giving rise to a multibillion-dollar cybersecurity industry.

an estimated one in 10 of the nation’s workers employed by the industry in some way.

For Israel, the weapons trade has always been central to the country’s sense of national survival. It was a major driver of economic growth, which in turn funded further military research and development.

Cyberweapons have changed international relations more profoundly than any advance since the advent of the atomic bomb.

Times reporting also reveals how sales of Pegasus played an unseen but critical role in securing the support of Arab nations in Israel’s campaign against Iran and even in negotiating the Abraham Accords, the 2020 diplomatic agreements that normalized relations between Israel and some of its longtime Arab adversaries.

shows how Israel’s ability to approve or deny access to NSO’s cyberweapons has become entangled with its diplomacy

Israel, through its internal export-licensing process, has ultimate say over who NSO can sell its spyware to.

no cooperation from AT&T, Verizon, Apple or Google.

the company demonstrated a new system, called Phantom, that could hack any number in the United States that the F.B.I. decided to target. Israel had granted a special license to NSO, one that permitted its Phantom system to attack U.S. numbers. The license allowed for only one type of client: U.S. government agencies

Save edited widgets to be used all over your website.

he danger is that these methods will be copied by other countries or strong, malevolent non-state actors. New ideas and tools are needed to deal with this. Such is the purpose of this paper.

Digital Geneva Footp

The prolonged pandemic has forced the government, including the Foreign Ministry, to readjust its targets and goals. But these difficulties are not an excuse to allow progress to be arrested. It is natural for the public to ask more of the government during trying times, and the RCEP is incomplete without Indonesia’s ratification.

Digital Geneva Footprint ofInternational Geneva

MUDs, or multi-user domains.

New Zealand, Singapore, and Chile have signed the Digital Economy Partnership Agreement, which represents a new type of trade agreement to promote the digital economy.

Wellington’s participation in international and regional organizations, the diversification of its foreign relations, and its subtle adjustments to its policy toward China, particularly concerning some political and international issues such as the South China Sea.

the Greater Bay Area strategy

, digital diplomacy should primarily be understood as the use of digital information, communication and technologies to achieve diplomatic objectives. In this case, we mainly focus on the usage of digital diplomacy to help pursue foreign policy goals.

rejecting various metaverse-related trademark applications

Alibaba, which owns the , plans to launch new AR glasses for users to conduct virtual meetings over DingTalk, the company’s enterprise communication and collaboration platform, in its latest move to stake out a claim in the metaverse.

helping them gain first-mover advantage in the metaverse arena

VR immerses a user in an imagined world, like in a film or video game, with the aid of an opaque headset such as those from Oculus, a division of Facebook parent Meta Platforms. AR provides an overlay of digital imagery onto the real world with the use of a clear headset, like Microsoft’s HoloLens, or with newer smartphones and tablets.

Chinese Big Tech companies, led by internet giants Tencent Holdings and Baidu, comprised more than half of the world’s top 10 filers of patent applications for virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) technologies over the past two years, showing a strong effort to establish a foothold in the emerging metaverse market.

South African President Cyril Ramaphosa, who has accused the EU of ‘vaccine apartheid’, is expected to only attend online, while other countries may want to make a stand by boycotting the summit.

the EU’s handling of the Omicron variant will be raised by the African side as an example of how trust can be undermined if the EU does not consult before measures are taken.

America’s militarized approach is struggling to compete with extensive Chinese economic and infrastructure assistance.

trade engagements with Africa center around extractive industries such as oil and minerals; and selling high-priced technologies such as aircraft.

Africom epitomizes the militarization of US policy towards Africa.

personal connections that key people in the Biden foreign policy and national security establishment have with Tigrian leaders who ruled Ethiopia for almost three decades.

to use both global resources to solve local problems and turn local experiences and expertise into shareable global resources.

global advocacy and a myriad of activities that help to maintain the city’s global identity.

Sister-cities flourished following the Second World War as a way to improve people-to-people relationships across country borders in order to make war less likely.

as Kitakyushu’s Initiative for a Clean Environment, Sendai’s Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction, and Minamata’s Convention on Mercury.

peace tourism, research on nuclear abolition

the Mayors for Peace organisation

moral authority on nuclear abolition and non-proliferation.

Japan’s Nagasaki is an important example of a city engaged in global activism and activity.

promoting digital transformations

an evaluation of Secretary-General Guterres’s Our Common Agenda report,

cyberspace

Diplomacy Reset: Ten Global Summits to Watch in 2022

expanding commitments to climate mitigation, strengthening multilateralism, and increasing the resiliency of democracies.

in the form of plurilateral agreements in areas such as e-commerce, investment facilitation, and services regulation.

to waive intellectual property rights for COVID-19 vaccines and treatments—and on fisheries subsidies by the end of February 2022.

Ministerials generally occur every two years, but by March it will have been five years since the last conference, leaving Director General Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala’s first ministerial with a long list of agenda items.

The sharing of data—and their use—may now be getting easier.

The use of PETs offers not only a means of bringing together data sets that cannot currently interact because of worries about privacy, but also a way for all sorts of organisations to collaborate securely across borders.

although American and Canadian records of the value of wood pulp traded between the two countries were basically the same, their data on the value of the clock trade differed by 80%.

The output is likewise statistically blurred, using differential privacy, before being sent back to the original inquirer.

For extra security, cryptographic hashes and digital signatures are applied, to prove that only authorised operations have taken place

a so-called “privacy budget”,

they cannot be reverse-engineered to reveal individual records

differential privacy.

That inquirer thus receives its answers, but never has access to the information on which those answers are based.

secure multiparty computation (SMPC)

The UN PETs Lab, which opened for business officially on January 25th, enables national statistics offices, academic researchers and companies to collaborate to carry out projects which will test various PETs, permitting technical and administrative hiccups to be identified and overcome.

privacy-enhancing technologies (PETs)