How to verify the authenticity of the new Rs 500 and Rs 2000 currency notes

With several complaints and rumours about “fake new notes” of Rs 2,000 denomination, there is some wariness among the people as the notes come into wider circulation. Notes of Rs 500 denomination would be circulated soon by banks. However, the new notes not only have several security features difficult to counterfeit, there are many ways the users can verify if the notes are genuine.

The touch and feel of the notes can be used for this. The seven “bleed lines” on the side of the Rs 2,000 notes, and five lines on Rs 500 notes are in raised printing or intaglio. The security thread in both the notes changes colour from green to blue at different angles. Also, the numeral 500 and 2,000 on the right side also change colour when seen at different angles.

These can be easily identified by any user and are very hard to counterfeit, according to experts. The new notes have changed colours. While the Rs 2,000 note’s paper is in magenta, the Rs 500 note is in stone gray. The Rs 2,000 note is part of the Mahatma Gandhi (New) series, with a motif of Mars orbiter Mangalyaan on the reverse. Size is 66mm x 166 mm.

Other features of the new Rs 2,000 note are as follows:

Front side features

•  See through register where the numeral 2,000 can be seen when note is held up against light
•  Latent image of 2,000 can be seen when the note is tilted
•  Colour shift security thread with ‘RBI’ and ‘2,000’
•  Watermarks of Mahatma Gandhi and electrotype 2,000 numeral
• Number panel with numerals growing from small to big on top left and bottom right sides

Reverse side features

• Swachh Bharat logo
• Mangalayan motif and year of printing, 2016

The new Rs 500 note at 63mm x 150mm is smaller in size than previous one.

Front side features

• See through register in denomination numeral
• Orientation of Mahatma Gandhi’s portrait changed
• Portrait and electrotype watermarks
• Number panel with numerals growing from small to big on top left and bottom right sides
• Features for visually impaired like circle with Rs 500 in raised print on the right

Reverse side features

• Swachh Bharat logo
• Red Fort image with the Indian flag
• Circle with Rs 500 in Devnagari on the right

Apple may get into wearable business with glass headsets

Apple Inc is considering expanding into wearable glass headsets and has talked about the project with potential suppliers, Bloomberg reported citing people familiar with the matter. The wearable headset would show images, along with other information and may use augmented reality, according to the report.

Chief Executive Tim Cook, who has been struggling with a slowdown in iPhone sales in recent quarters, said earlier this year that the company would continue to invest a lot into augmented reality.

Apple, the world’s largest technology company, has ordered a small number of near-eye displays for testing but has not obtained enough for production on a larger scale, the report added. Apple declined to comment. The move would make Apple the latest tech company to venture into wearable glasses.

Alphabet Inc’s discontinued its own wearable glass headset, Google Glass, and closed the social media account linked to the device earlier this year, ending its attempt to popularize the expensive devices with consumers. The device received plenty of attention when it was launched in 2012, but quickly ran into problems with its awkward appearance and privacy concerns over video recording. Snap, an $18 billion company which makes the popular messaging app Snapchat, also launched its own video-camera sunglasses last week.

SETL and Deloitte teamup to create a contactless payment card based on blockchain

London-based fintech company SETL and global auditing firm Deloitte DLTE.UL have joined forces to produce a contactless card that enables retail payments to be processed and settled almost instantly by the means of blockchain technology.

The payment card, which has been successfully tested by 100 users and is expected to go into commercial production by the end of 2017, has been created for customers of FTSE 250-listed Metro Bank. The test-users used their cards to pay for cupcakes in sterling, with both customers’ and merchants’ bank balances updated in “live-time”.

“This is fiat currency, it’s real money,” said SETL CEO Peter Randall, who earlier co-founded equities exchange Chi-X. “It’s not a form of cryptocurrency or anything else; it’s money you can go and take out of the bank and spend.” Blockchain, which originated in the digital currency bitcoin, works as a web-based transaction processing and settlement system.

It creates a “golden record” of any given set of data that is automatically replicated for all parties in a secure network, eliminating any need for third-party verification, and allowing for payments to be settled in a matter of seconds.

Critics say blockchain technology has not yet proven its scalability; bitcoin’s blockchain at the moment processes fewer than 300,000 transactions per day. But SETL says it can process billions of transactions per day, or tens of thousands per second, allowing it to compete with the large card networks, which process around 2,000 to 3,000 transactions per second.

The payment card uses Deloitte’s “Smart Identity” blockchain system, with customer identity records stored and certified by Deloitte and then sent to SETL to set up user credentials. “(This) underlines the importance, in the new distributed ledger world, of identity management,” said Deloitte partner David Myers.

SETL’s Randall said the payment card would allow merchants to offer payment services to their customers for a much lower cost than the card providers that currently dominate the market. “What this allows people to do is to effectively make a payment from their account to the merchant’s account, completely encrypted end-to-end, without having to go through all the existing very expensive legacy infrastructure,” he said.

SETL is part of the Financial Conduct Authority’s regulatory sandbox – an arena for start-ups to experiment with new technologies without incurring all the normal regulatory consequences of engaging in the activity in question – and has been issued with an e-money licence by the FCA.

“Retail payments have for too long been dominated by a few players to the detriment of customers,” said Metro Bank CEO Craig Donaldson. “Given all the potential that blockchain has to offer, we hope that the success of today’s test will play a key role in moving us a step closer to providing a more efficient and flexible service for customers.”

Google to bring new policy to restrict ads on faking news websites

Alphabet Inc’s Google said on Monday it is working on a policy change to prevent websites that misrepresent content from using its AdSense advertising network, a move aimed at halting the spread of “fake news” and other types of misinformation on the internet.

The shift comes as Google, Facebook Inc and Twitter Inc face a backlash over the role they played in the U.S. presidential election by allowing the spread of false and often malicious information that might have swayed voters toward Republican candidate Donald Trump.

The issue has provoked a fierce debate within Facebook especially, with Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg insisting twice in recent days that the site had no role in influencing the election.

Google’s move does not address the issue of fake news or hoaxes appearing in Google search results. That happened in the last few days, when a search for ‘final election count’ for a time took users to a fake news story saying Trump won the popular vote. Votes are still being counted, with Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton showing a slight lead.

Nor does it suggest that the company has moved to a mechanism for rating the accuracy of particular articles.

Rather, the change is aimed at assuring that publishers on the network are legitimate and eliminating the financial incentives that appear to have driven the production of much fake news.

“Moving forward, we will restrict ad serving on pages that misrepresent, misstate, or conceal information about the publisher, the publisher’s content, or the primary purpose of the web property,” Google said in a statement.

The company did not detail how it would implement or enforce the new policy.

AdSense, which allows advertisers to place text ads on the millions of websites that are part of Google’s network, is a major source of money for many publishers.

A report in BuzzFeed News last month showed how tiny publishers in Macedonia were creating websites with fake news – much of it denigrating Clinton – which were widely shared on Facebook.

That sharing in turn led people to click on links which brought them to the Macedonian websites, which could then make money on the traffic via AdSense.

Facebook has been widely blamed for allowing the spread of online misinformation, most of it pro-Trump, but Zuckerberg has rejected the notion that Facebook influenced the outcome of the election or that fake news is a major problem on the service.

“Of all the content on Facebook, more than 99 percent of what people see is authentic,” he wrote in a blog post on Saturday. “Only a very small amount is fake news and hoaxes.”

Google has long had rules for its AdSense program, barring ads from appearing next to pornography or violent content. Work on the policy update announced on Monday began before the election, a Google spokeswoman said.

The company uses a combination of humans and artificial intelligence to review sites that apply to be a part of AdSense, and sites continue to be monitored after they are accepted, a former Google employee who worked on ad systems said. Google’s artificial intelligence systems learn from sites that have been removed from the program, speeding the removal of similar sites.

The issue of fake news is critical for Google from a business standpoint, as many advertisers do not want their brands to be touted alongside dubious content. Google must constantly hone its systems to try to stay one step ahead of unscrupulous publishers, the former employee said.

Google has not said whether it believes its search algorithms, or its separate system for ranking results in the Google News service, also need to be modified to cope with the fake news issue.

Fil Menczer, a professor of informatics and computing at Indiana University who has studied the spread of misinformation on social media, said Google’s move with AdSense was a positive step.

“One of the incentives for a good portion of fake news is money,” he said. “This could cut the income that creates the incentive to create the fake news sites.”

However, he cautioned that detecting fake news sites was not easy. “What if it is a site with some real information and some fake news? It requires specialized knowledge and having humans (do it) doesn’t scale,” he said.

OnePlus 3T appears on retailer website with a $499 price tag

The OnePlus 3T indeed went from rumour to leaks in a short span of time. Soon enough, Qualcomm made things official, followed up by teasers by OnePlus about an exciting new product. While reports pointed to the price of the smartphone set at $480 (roughly Rs 32,488), the OnePlus 3T , just a day before launch, has now shown up on a famous retailer’s website with a higher price tag.

That new price tag has been pegged at $499. The retailer is Oppomart, a famous online website for buying Chinese smartphones. Oppomart has currently listed the refreshed OnePlus smartphone as the 3T and even included the specifications that we had seen popping up in the rumour mill not too long ago. The important bit here is the price which is set at $499 (roughly Rs 33,774).

Indeed the listing seems like speculation, but one thing’s for sure, the new OnePlus 3T will be priced higher. Part of this reason would be the new Snapdragon 821 chipset. It is usually clocked at 2.15GHz, but OnePlus has been putting out teasers stating that its new smartphone will have a 821 chipset clocked at 2.35GHz instead.

Add the usual 6GB of RAM and a new 128GB internal storage option and the OnePlus 3T (minus instant software updates) stands a good chance against the Daydream VR-readyGoogle Pixel. Yes, by sticking to the older OnePlus 3 design and refreshing the internals, OnePlus could have a hit the sweet spot to rope in potential Nexus upgraders to switch to a VR-ready OnePlus 3T instead, minus the premium price tag.

While the details listed on the retailers website should be taken with a spoonful of salt, we will know within a day’s time what OnePlus has on offer as the launch takes place tonight.

Hotel search platform Trivago has filed for $400 million IPO

Trivago, the hotel search platform majority held by online travel firm Expedia Inc, filed with the U.S. regulators on Monday for an initial public offering of up to $400 million. Trivago said it planned to offer American depositary shares, representing Class A shares of its affiliate, travel B.V.

A portion of the ADSs will be issued and sold by the company and a portion by certain shareholders, the company said. The selling shareholders include Trivago’s founders. In 2012, Expedia paid 477 million euros ($531 million) for a 62 percent stake in Trivago. Expedia, which is not selling any ADSs, and its affiliates will hold Class B shares after the IPO, the company said.

Expedia Chief Executive Dara Khosrowshahi told investors in July that management and Trivago’s founding team had agreed to an IPO to value Trivago as a standalone company. Monday’s filing did not reveal how many shares the company planned to sell or their expected price. Trivago plans to list on the Nasdaq under the ticker symbol “TRVG.”

JPMorgan Securities LLC, Goldman Sachs & Co and Morgan Stanley & Co LLC are the underwriters to the offering. The amount of money a company says it plans to raise in its first IPO filings is used to calculate registration fees. The final size of the IPO could be different.

Trump win could result in increased domestic surveillance and spying, warns Snowden

Donald Trump’s election as U.S. president raises concern that Washington may increase the intrusiveness of domestic intelligence gathering, former U.S. spy agency contractor Edward Snowden said on Monday, warning that democratic checks and balances were losing ground to authoritarianism.

Snowden lives in Moscow under an asylum deal after he leaked classified information in 2013 that triggered an international furore over the reach of U.S. spy operations. He spoke at a teleconference hosted by Buenos Aires University’s law school.

“We are starting to substitute open government for sheer authoritarianism, a government based not upon the principle of informed consent granted by people who understand its activities but rather a trust in personalities, a trust in claims, a trust in the hope that they will do the right thing,” Snowden said.

Washington pledged not to engage in indiscriminate espionage following Snowden’s 2013 disclosures. But Snowden questioned if that policy could be modified by new officials “who have a very different set of values and can govern in the dark.”

“If government does actually win our trust, because they go for some years and they do operate in a way that we should support, what happens when it changes?” he asked. “This is kind of the challenge that we’re facing today in the United States with the result of the last election.”

Supporters see Snowden as a whistleblower who boldly exposed government excess. But the U.S. government has filed espionage charges against him for leaking intelligence information. Trump, who scored an upset win over Democrat Hillary Clinton in last Tuesday’s election, broke with many in his own Republican Party during the campaign and emphasized his success as a businessman and reality TV show star. He promised sweeping security measures to deal with the threat of attacks on the United States.

His election was greeted with concern from the American Civil Liberties Union over statements he made during the campaign supporting increased surveillance of U.S. Muslims, mass deportation of illegal immigrants, reauthorisation of waterboarding and changing libel laws to increase press restrictions.

Snowden, asked if he thought the election of Trump, who has praised Russian President Vladimir Putin as a strong leader, might increase chances of him being pardoned by the U.S. government, responded: “Who knows?”