Announcements

This week, we proudly announced our new website! Go check it out!

We are also testing a new layout for the newsletter, where we send you just a summary of our weekly article and a link to the full text on our website.

In the next few hours we'll send you an email with instructions on how to create your account on the website to access the full text. Let us know how you like it!

Short updates

Platform regulation and Twitter's algorithm

Twitter has made its recommendation algorithm public, leading to a lot of activity on their Github repository. Many of them are criticisms targeted at Musk, but some people did try to analyze the algorithm. One odd thing that surfaced was that Twitter seemed to use labels to identify democrats, republicans, power users, and Elon Musk's personal account. According to comments in the code, those are used only for statistical purposes in A/B tests, but it is pretty hard to know for sure. If this turned out to be used to intentionally surge Musk's tweets' reach (as The Guardian reported in February), it could place Twitter outside of Section 230 protections, making Twitter liable for Musk's tweet content.

Fossil fuels in banking

In April 2021, Mark Carney launched the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero (GFANZ), a group of major financial institutions that aims to shift towards cleaner capitalism. One of GFANZ's subgroups, the Net Zero Banking Alliance (NZBA), is struggling to decide whether to cut off lending to oil and gas companies. NZBA proposed absolute carbon reduction targets, but no agreement has been reached yet. Most banks in Europe are already using absolute targets, but their US counterparts are not willing to commit to such a strict standard. According to the Financial Times, four in 10 global banks increased their lending to oil and gas companies last year, including some alliance members. In the absence of a global systemic approach to the issue, companies and financial institutions may have little incentive to make strong commitments on their own.

Carbon offsite market's revolving door

Meanwhile, carbon leakage is making the headlines with some impressive figures. The EU is cutting down carbon emission rights but many polluters may decide to move to less restrictive countries, defeating the ultimate goal, and putting the EU at a disadvantage. Some European countries are planning to allocate about 65 million euros to compensate for these companies' carbon offset costs. The issue highlights the importance of rethinking the carbon offset approach globally.

Extending Pix: An approach to offline Dynamic QR Code generation

The Pix Dynamic QR Code URI can be extended to allow for offline QR Code generation. The proposed solution involves generating URIs that can be used as a vehicle to transmit information from the client to the server, allowing the payee to generate their own URIs. The document also goes into detail about URI properties, encoding, and cryptography. The proposed design balances tradeoffs between the amount of data that can be transmitted and cryptographic guarantees, and uses commonly available cryptographic primitives to reduce implementation costs.

Read the full article

Twitter's algorithm, net-zero shortcomings, and how to generate Dynamic QR Codes offline