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Georgia is actively working on the introduction of a digital national currency

The National Bank of Georgia is working on the introduction of the digital lari. The vice-president of the central bank, Papuna Lezhava, said that the pilot program is planned to be launched in 2022.

“85% of the world's central banks are already working on a digital currency, some are in the research stage, some are testing, some have already implemented, including China and the Bahamas. We also want to be at the forefront of this trend,” he told reporters on Tuesday.

“Digital currency is not a cryptocurrency, but the evolution of cash. It will most likely also be based on the blockchain, and will also be a fast and cheap payment method. However, unlike modern cryptocurrencies, there will be no mining. The National Bank will be the only issuer of digital currency,” noted Mr. Lezhava.

According to him, the digital lari will be able to compete with cryptocurrencies in some services, but will not have the character of speculative accumulation.

At the initial stage, the digital lari is planned to be introduced for retail sales.

The National Bank believes that the digital currency will help to increase the efficiency of the payment system and financial accessibility.

"Digital lari will become a faster and cheaper means of payment than traditional means. It will work 24 hours a day. All transactions do not require an Internet connection. But the main advantage is that it will be technologically open to other types of technologies and as compatible as possible. Today, neither paper lari nor other means of payment have such luxury," the Vice President of the Central Bank added.

Earlier, CySecurity News was reported that the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine has adopted a law on the legalization of cryptocurrencies, which will allow using cryptocurrency for settlement transaction.

Bot that helps hackers write code

 The Copilot service developed by Microsoft and GitHub specialists, designed to simplify the work of programmers, can be used by hackers to create malicious software

Copilot, created by GitHub based on artificial intelligence, acts like keyboards on mobile devices.

GitHub introduced this service at the end of June, and its development required the help of OpenAI. Copilot is expected to make life easier for developers.

So, during the development of the service, specialists trained it on billions of lines of code. And now, when a developer writes code, GitHub Copilot gives suggestions that can be used for more productive coding.

Russian cybersecurity experts believe that innovation of GitHub may be useful not only for software developers, but also for cybercriminals.

According to experts, the new program may make it easier for hackers to write code, and they will be able to do it faster. Consequently, the number of authors of such code may increase.

Denis Legezo, a senior cybersecurity expert with Kaspersky Lab, noted that any technology, including Copilot, cannot be good or bad in itself. It is important for what purposes a person uses it. The expert did not rule out that the new program, as a convenient and accessible development tool, can also be used by cybercriminals.

The GIS expert Nikolay Nashivochnikov told about the danger of using a new bot for programmers by hackers.

"As we can see, new services simplify the life of not only white hat hackers, but also black hat. If the hackers manage to introduce a dangerous design into the Copilot system, and it starts offering developers to insert this vulnerability into their code, as a result, we can get a more widespread vulnerability," said Mr. Nashivochnikov.

Experts also talk about the possibility of banal theft of someone else's code. In about 0.1% of cases, the code will be literally taken from the training sample. In the remaining 99.9% of cases, the service uses a training sample as a basis for synthesizing something new.


How Artificial Intelligence is Changing Healthcare

Over the past couple of years, modern technology has been actively implemented in medicine. AI helps to assess the degree of lung damage, identify malignant tumors, and is used in the development of new drugs.

Similar technologies are being used in Russia. For example, the Russian platform Botkin.AI allows detecting lung cancer through the analysis of medical images using artificial intelligence technologies in the Microsoft Azure cloud. The solution has already been successfully implemented in several regions of the country. Russia also has a digital histological laboratory UNIM, which examines histological materials using a neural network to make a correct diagnosis.

According to the development director of the Webiomed project, Alexander Gusev, the biggest competition in Russia is in the fields of image processing, especially in the analysis of lung tomograms for COVID diagnosis. The second popular field is speech recognition and information synthesis.

One of the main problems with AI is that market participants often do not understand how much a particular development might cost in everyday medical practice.

Another problem is the legislation. Russian law defines that AI software is a medical device and must undergo a long and expensive registration.

It should be noted that now there are only six AI systems in Russia that have been registered as medical software devices.

According to the general opinion of experts, doctors do not easily agree to the introduction of AI. 

"When we ask about the attitude of doctors to innovation, they are just happy and express a desire to work with AI. However, about 2.5-5% of managers and doctors use AI products all the time," Mr. Gusev added.

At the same time, it does not take much time to understand the technology. AI development is often similar to a conventional computer program interface.

Co-founder of Qiwi Solonin provided Durov a loan of $17 million


Sergey Solonin, one of the founders of the Russian payment service Qiwi Group, decided to re-loan his investment in the blockchain project of Pavel Durov, the founder of Telegram and Vk, Telegram Open Network (TON), giving him a loan. In 2018, he invested $17 million in this project.

Recall that in 2018, the co-founder of Qiwi invested $17 million in TON. At that time, 175 investors participated in the project, who invested a total of $1.7 billion. The founder of the blockchain project stated that any project based on TON developments or using this name will not be related to Telegram.

On May 12, Durov announced the closure of the TON blockchain platform project and the Gram cryptocurrency blaming the American court. The TON blockchain platform was supposed to start working in October 2019, but then the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) initiated legal proceedings, demanding to recognize that the Gram cryptocurrency is securities, and therefore could not be registered in a simplified form, according to American law. Due to litigation, the launch of TON was postponed several times.

Before closing the project, Durov offered investors based outside the United States two options for choosing: to withdraw 72% of the funds invested in TON and Gram or to receive 110% of the originally invested amount by April 30, 2021. Only one option was offered to US residents - to return 72% of investments.

"Most of the investors with whom I spoke will take 72% of the initial investment," said Durov.
"I decided to re-loan his investment. Pavel has a smart team, I hope they will come up with something," said Mr. Solonin.

Solonin expects that the Telegram founder will be able to find new sources of income or a way to finance the company further within a year.

The Russian State Duma adopted a law on remote voting


The State Duma adopted in the second and third readings amendments of deputies of United Russia that simplify the organization of elections in the context of a pandemic. Both postal voting and remote electronic voting will now be possible for all levels of elections.

Recall that the beginning of the pandemic of coronavirus infection served as a kind of trigger for the introduction of remote voting. This was stated by the political party United Russia. For this purpose, an electronic voting system based on blockchain technology has been developed.

First Deputy Chairman of the State Duma Committee on state construction and legislation Vyacheslav Lysakov stated that the bill adopted by the State Duma is due to technological progress and digitalization of many areas of life.

"Taking into account modern realities, it is extremely important to modernize and promote processes, including voting. I think this is an absolutely normal step. We are moving towards reducing the paper document flow," explained the parliamentarian.

However, experts say that it is difficult to control voting in such an election.

"This is a very dangerous initiative in the conditions of general distrust of our electoral system. It is simply impossible to check that everything went correctly. Civil Control over this form of voting is reduced to a minimum," said Grigory Melkonyants, co-chair of the movement Voice for the protection rights of voters.

The expert added that it is impossible to verify that the voter votes personally, that the secrecy of the vote is respected. In addition, you cannot be sure that all votes will be correctly considered.
Earlier, E Hacking News reported that electronic voting in Russia is safe.