Plus a short note on facial recognition technology which is enabled by the cloud
2 February 2020 (Lille, France) – Over the last three years I have modified my conference schedule a bit, hanging out a few extra days in my hotel to organize my notes, the business cards I collected, and to write about the event while it is still fresh. I also catch-up with the week’s news having missed much of it while scurrying around the event.
This year at the International Cybersecurity Forum here in Lille ( the event commonly referred to as “Le FIC” ), there was much talk about the cloud. I attended a “Master Class” (there is a huge educational component at Le FIC) on supply chain vulnerabilities. It included an analysis of inside attackers, intentional flaws and backdoors in hardware and software, as well as companies’ partners and suppliers whose security may not by up to par, and thus, allow attackers to access their targets’ cloud resources via their suppliers’ networks.
So it was appropriate this week that the world’s major technology firms announced results quarterly results, and three things stood out. They tell us where we are in the tech cycle:
1. phones are done
2. cloud is just getting started
3. consumer subscriptions matter
In brief:
• Amazon and Microsoft are winning the battle for cloud computing. AWS, Amazon’s cloud business, hit a $40 billion run rate. It is a high margin business, and represents two-thirds of Amazon’s overall income. Microsoft’s Azure cloud business grew 62 per cent, and is at a $20 billion clip. Cloud computing infrastructure will be the substrate of the exponential age in some sense, like controlling the power plants, roads, and factories, for the economy – while also having the deepest insights on which parts of the economy are doing well, and which aren’t.
• Amazon’s Prime subscription business : it cantered through the 150 million-member milestone.
• Apple did very well. It had sales of a whopping $92 billion for the December quarter, a rise of 9 per cent. iPhones contributed half and did well, against the odds. Perhaps the iPhone 11, with its better camera, is sufficient a draw. Phone sales still grew below the firm’s overall growth rate. Its services business (that is, recurring revenues for things like cloud storage and video) has nearly trebled in size since 2015. For my reasons why it defies gravity, earlier this week I wrote a few thoughts here.
One other point ..
In performing face recognition, the systems needs to perform several stages starting from face detection, feature extraction, then doing face recognition. These stages require adequate and available hardware resources at all times. If you want to use a local device, it will take a very long time. Therefore the common approach is to employ face recognition in a cloud computing environment. I will have more on this next week as I roll out my pre-Mobile World Congress briefing notes.
There are, of course, huge issues at play. We have become obsessed with automated facial-recognition technology. Facial recognition is only the beginning of the collision of personal, state and corporate interests. There is something about the capacity to remotely identify and track a person through space that piques terror within us.
But with the continuing development of computer vision and video analytics, facial recognition may ultimately turn out to be one of the more benign applications of camera surveillance. Put another way, facial recognition is just part of a much larger program of surveillance – equipped with higher scale and granularity – associated with cameras, microphones, and the multitude of sensors in modern smart phones.
Because physical spaces are becoming cyber-physical spaces. Computer vision is especially meaningful for its ability to translate the “real world,” and the people within it, into numbers for statistical analysis and automated decision-making. These cyber-physical systems can be constantly and pervasively monitored but, more importantly, computationally interpreted and understood. In the cyber-physical world, the computational sentinels that manage access to public spaces, sporting events, shops, public transport, and whatever else will have a great deal of information on which to base their decisions, including who you are, what kind of person you are, and what you are doing.
I will begin to address these issue tomorrow in a series of pieces “Privacy is dead (ok, we killed it), and surveillance capitalism is born: how we got there”. It is because I am repulsed that “data privacy experts” takes refuge in the infantile disorder of imagining there is still privacy anymore. An after this week, many still hold an equally infantile disorder of imagining: that the American justice system still exists.
I will leave you with this video which we produced last year for one of my technology clients: