Nope, I needed to send some ID and utility bills. The process was fairly simple, I took a photo of my phone bill, my AmEx report and both sides of my National ID. In the Paypal documentation they say a phone bill is not ok, but since my apartment is not on my name I don’t pay bills per se. Nevertheless, I sent these all off.

After some mucking about (the form was not the best), Paypal accepted these documents and this, as a lot of government and verification processes puzzles me a bit. I mean I could’ve Photoshopped all that right? Unless they actually checked with my government and bank and carrier service, which I’m sure they didn’t, they replied in like 2 days, they can’t be really sure.

My reasoning is that someone like me would have to go to more trouble to prove his identity and location truthfully, than a money launderer would have to go to to forge this stuff. If I didn’t have a camera I would’ve had to spend about $30 to photocopy, print, scan and so on. A money launderer may have to pay $1,000 for a good forgery, but hey, he has a printing press right, money comes easily.

The point is, that all I proved is that I have an internet connection and probably an ID. Is this a process that is supposed to deter people on the wrong side of the law? I doubt if it does, it did deter me though, my account was even frozen for a while!

Paypal anti-laundering safety regulations

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Wall Street had a pretty bloody session today. Dow was down almost 700 points which amounts to a drop of almost 7.7%, that’s just massacre for a single day. Was it because of the MarketWatch report which officially declared that the US economy is now in recession or has the market suddenly discovered something else.

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The Government officials tell us that they don’t want to call a recession a recession unless its really one. But what would you say if they call a recession half year down the road ? Well I would call it betrayal and out right lies. Just think of it, they are telling us about it when every Tom and Harry on the street knows about it. According to a report published in MarketWatch today, the US economy actually entered a recession in December 2007:

Democrats on Capitol Hill said the news was hardly surprising and reiterated calls for an economic stimulus package. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nevada, said he and other Democrats will send a package to the White House as soon as possible after President-elect Barack Obama takes office in January.

“The announcement simply makes official what we have long known - with rising costs of living, rising unemployment, record foreclosures and depleted savings, we must do more to help families make ends meet,” Reid said in a statement. He said a recovery package must create good-paying jobs in the U.S., cut middle class taxes and instill confidence to stabilize the market.

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The alleged problem: The new transmission method uses a channel currently only employed by a handful of applications, like gaming and VoiP. With P2P traffic flooding that transmission line, users' Skype calls or World of Warcraft sessions could get interrupted amidst the P2P noise, the Register supposes.

Hogwash, says BitTorrent. The company tells the Industry Standard it's trying to implement a "performance neutral" change intended to reduce network congestion. (You can follow the technical debate in greater detail at Slashdot.)

So what will happen? Internet providers don't have the option of blocking BitTorrent traffic: Comcast (CMCSA) tried that once and the FCC pressured them to stop. (And the incoming Obama administration seems even less disposed to Internet filtering/blocking than the current one.) That leaves another option: more download caps for bandwidth hogs, which Comcast has already rolled out, and other providers are testing.

See Also:
Comcast's Diet For Bandwidth Hogs: A 20-Minute Timeout
Comcast, Slapped By FCC, Expands Testing New Tech To Slow Down Your Internet

Although much is said about the economic conditions in the US, it seems that UK might be even worst off as British media companies could cut tens of thousands of jobs in the coming years due to economic turmoil. According to a Reuters report half of all UK media jobs will become history by 2013:

Claire Enders, founder of independent consultancy group Enders Analysis, told Reuters she expected about half of all UK media jobs to go by 2013 under current economic conditions.

“We calculated the total jobs in the media in the UK at about 400,000, that includes newspapers, radio, TV, production companies, advertising and so on, at the end of 2007.

“Between the beginning of 2008 and 2013 we’re expecting half of those jobs to go. The big employers are the regional press, magazines, local advertising sales. Real numbers are in print.”

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Though Apple didn’t offer discount this holiday on its prime products the iPhone, iPod Touch and iMac, it however managed to score better sales. The survey was carried out by Piper Jaffray’s team under Gene Munster  who counted the sales of Mac and the iPhone for ten hours in five Apple stores on Friday and reported the sales were up to the expectations. The report stated the sales for Mac averaged 13 per hour while those of iPhone averaged 3.4 pieces per hour. With sales not falling prey to the current crisis Apple joins the ranks of Walmart and Amazon for seeing the slumping holidays sales through, successfully.

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So this unsourced report in the Daily Mail makes sense to us -- SCi is in the middle of takeover talks, with Electrionic Arts (ERTS), French gaming company Ubisoft, and Time Warner (TWX) -- which already has a 16% stake in the company -- all named as possible players in a deal. But it's still worth taking such reports with a grain of salt -- SCi has been long been the subject of takeover rumors, none of which have come to fruition.

A source familiar with matter said discussions are at an 'early- stage' and that SCi received approaches from two separate firms within the past few weeks.

The first is understood to have come from America's Electronic Arts, the world's second biggest computer games company.

It has always featured strongly in bid chatter that has surrounded SCi.

But it faces competition for SCi from France's Ubisoft, which the source says has also made an approach.

EA owns a 25 per cent stake in Ubisoft but they act independently.

Renewed interest in SCi has been sparked by the dramatic fall in value of the company.

From a peak of 1billion at the height of the dotcom boom it is worth just 50million today.

See Also:
'Tomb Raider' Maker Rejects Buyout Bid
"Tomb Raider" Game Shop SCI On The Ropes

Pentagon is hiring experts to help them create the perfect iRobots of the future – machines that kill for a purpose and have some sort of laws embedded in their DNA’s to not commit war crimes like humans do. USA has hired Colin Allen, a scientific philosopher at Indiana University, who is the author of a recent book titled Moral Machines: Teaching Robots Right From Wrong. Dr Allen would be advising US military on a $4 billion research program aiming to create smart “autonomous systems” for US military.

According to The Daily Telegraph:

He [Colin Allen] told The Daily Telegraph: “The question they want answered is whether we can build automated weapons that would conform to the laws of war. Can we use ethical theory to help design these machines?”

Pentagon chiefs are concerned by studies of combat stress in Iraq that show high proportions of frontline troops supporting torture and retribution against enemy combatants.

Ronald Arkin, a computer scientist at Georgia Tech university, who is working on software for the US Army has written a report which concludes robots, while not “perfectly ethical in the battlefield” can “perform more ethically than human soldiers.”

He says that robots “do not need to protect themselves” and “they can be designed without emotions that cloud their judgment or result in anger and frustration with ongoing battlefield events”.

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