Yet another company that signed on as a partner in Facebook’s proposed cryptocurrency known as Libra has backed out of the association. The British telecommunications operator Vodafone announced its departure from Facebook’s Libra Association on Tuesday, Coindesk reports. In total, eight companies have now backed out of the Libra partnership.
“We can confirm that Vodafone is no longer a member of the Libra Association. Although the makeup of the Association members may change over time, the design of Libra’s governance and technology ensures the Libra payment system will remain resilient,” the Libra Association said in a statement. “The Association is continuing the work to achieve a safe, transparent, and consumer-friendly implementation of the Libra payment system.”
Vodafone operates in 26 countries and offers mobile, broadband, and TV services, as well as cloud and security products. It joins other companies like PayPal, Visa, Mastercard, eBay, Stripe, and Argentine e-commerce giant Mercado Pago that had already pulled out of the project.
Vodafone has yet to respond to our request for comment on its departure from Libra.
Facebook’s Libra was announced last June and was projected to be ready by this year. However, the program has been met with much criticism.
Lawmakers have largely come out against the cryptocurrency, arguing that Facebook has been irresponsible with user data and shouldn’t be allowed to have its own currency. President Donald Trump has also attacked the plan, saying he’s not a fan of the idea.
One of the main criticisms of Facebook’s proposed Libra system is related to privacy issues, which the social media network had its fair share of those in the past.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg testified before Congress in October about Libra, defending the idea but acknowledging the struggles left to overcome.
“I understand we’re not the ideal messenger right now. We’ve faced a lot of issues over the past few years, and I’m sure people wish it was anyone but Facebook putting this idea forward,” he said in his testimony.
Digital Trends reached out to Facebook to comment on Vodafone’s departure, and what the next steps are for Libra, including a launch date. We’ll update this story once we hear back.
San Francisco startup Dimensional advertised for people to walk robot dogs through city streets. The New York Times reported that the job could include carrying a roughly 33-pound robot back to the office if it overheated. A lift home is an awkward requirement for a labor-saving machine.
Keeping the hardware running is only one challenge. Anthropic's robotics tests found that language models mostly failed when controlling joints directly, but did better when directing trained controllers. Giving an AI agent a body doesn't teach it to handle ordinary household objects.
Soon, a mattress protector may be more than a bed cover. Australian medtech company Sleeptite and researchers at RMIT University have received a US patent for FlexiSense, a smart bedding technology that tracks body position and posture to help caregivers identify when older residents may be at risk of falling.
The technology is being developed for Sleeptite’s in-bed monitoring system, REMi, and was recently on display at The MedTech Conference in Boston. A peer-reviewed study in Flexible and Printed Electronics says the sensors can also be made at scale without sacrificing performance or durability.
AI companies spend enormous amounts of time convincing us their technology is safe and secure. But what happens when those same companies become targets of increasingly sophisticated AI-powered attacks? Anthropic, the company behind Claude, is now facing that question. According to a Washington Post report, cybersecurity startup Cathedral discovered vulnerabilities that let its researchers access sensitive information in Anthropic's internal systems.
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