Tag Archive for IBM

| June 11, 2020
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No More Facial Recognition From IBM

Updated 06/19/2020 – Redmond is reporting that the ACLU has uncovered evidence (PDF) that Microsoft was pursuing sales of its facial recognition technology after its vow to stop selling the software. The ACLU says Microsoft continued to pursue sales to the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) six days after the announcement. Microsoft president Brad Smith claimed the firm would stop selling facial recognition tech to U.S. police agencies until there is a national law in place that’s “grounded in human rights.”

The article calls MSFT’s Smith’s “stand” last week “as a bit hollow or misleadingly narrow” and “opaque transparency.”

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Updated 06/12/2020 – CNN is reporting that Microsoft has fallen in line with IBM and Amazon. It has announced it will not sell facial recognition technology to police departments in the United States, at least until there is a federal law to regulate the technology.

Following IBM’s stand, Amazon has announced it will stop providing its facial recognition technology to police forces for one year.  TechCrunch makes the point that the Amazon announcement did not say if the moratorium would apply to the federal government. Amazon also did not say in the statement what action it would take after the yearlong moratorium expires.

Both firms are calling for national regulation of the tech. As I predicted below.

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No More Facial Recognition From IBMIBM has made a step in the right direction in the fight against structural racism. IBM CEO Arvind Krishna sent a letter to the U.S. Congress citing concerns that artificial intelligence (AI) facial recognition software could be used for mass surveillance and racial profiling. As a result, IBM will no longer sell general-purpose facial recognition or analysis software.

IBM facial recognition changes

The company is not abandoning facial recognition. Reuters cites an IBM source that says, IBM will “no longer market, sell or update the products but will support clients as needed.” As Engadget points out, the move comes in the midst of protests over police brutality and discrimination capped by the apparent murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officers.

The use of AI and facial recognition has a history of privacy and bias problems. In 2019, Pew Research reported that  50% of U.S. adults said they did not trust tech companies to use facial recognition responsibly. 27% of the same group did not trust law enforcement agencies to use facial recognition responsibly. There are good reasons for the distrust of facial recognition. Many reports have found that facial recognition systems can be biased. They have systemic bias’ against non-whites and women. This is particularly true if the training data includes relatively few people from those groups. 

The Verge documents some of the defacto bias’ in facial recognition. In 2018, AI researchers Joy Buolamwini and Timnit Gebru, Gender Shades project was the first to reveal the extent to which many commercial facial recognition systems (including IBM’s) were biased. This work led to mainstream criticism of these algorithms and ongoing attempts to address bias.

Clearview AI Inc., facial recognition software identifies people by comparing their faces with 3 billion images many scraped from social media sites. Clearview took the images from Facebook, YouTube, and Venmo without notifying the people. The facial recognition tool is widely used by private sector companies and law enforcement agencies. Clearview has since been issued numerous cease and desist orders and is at the center of a number of privacy lawsuits. Facebook was also ordered in January 2020 to pay $550 million to settle a 2015 class-action lawsuit over its unlawful use of facial recognition technology.

The Verge points out that IBM is not without a share of the blame. IBM was found to be sharing a training data set of nearly one million photos in January 2019 taken from Flickr without the consent of the subjects. IBM told The Verge in a statement at the time that the data set would only be accessed by verified researchers and only included images that were publicly available. The company also said that individuals can opt out of the data set.

A December 2019 NIST study found:

empirical evidence for the existence of a wide range of accuracy across demographic differences in the majority of the current face recognition algorithms that were evaluated.”

 

Amazon’s facial recognition software 

Notably, NIST’s study did not include Amazon’s facial recognition software Rekognition. Rekognition, has also been criticized for its accuracy. In 2018, the ACLU found that Rekognition incorrectly matched 28 members of Congress to faces picked from 25,000 mugshots.

Despite Amazon’s system providing what the ACLU called a disproportionate number of false matches of congress embers of color, Amazon posted a statement expressing concern over the “inequitable and brutal treatment of Black people in our country.” But the richest man in the world Jeff Bezos and his company are part of the problem. Amazon is profiting off racial profiling of Black people by police.

Amazon has built a nationwide surveillance network. The surveillance network of our homes and communities uses Amazon Ring cameras and its Neighbors app. The company collects the images and then handed its data over to the police. 

What Amazon does with the data:

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Mr. Krishna should be applauded for his public stand. But call me cynical – this is also about business. Morgan Stanley predicts that AI and automation will be a one trillion dollar industry by 2050. Change is coming and big tech – IBM, MSFT, GOOG, FB are trying to get in front of it. The titans are pushing for reform – not abolition for two reasons.

First, they want to use new regulations as a barrier to entry into this market. They want to upstarts like Clearview AI and 45+ other small to multi-national firms who may have new ideas out of the $1T market.

Second – Big tech knows they can buy the politicians in DC cheaper than having to fight off regulations in 50 different states. Big business has done this time and again. they will sit in front of a congressional hearing – say mea culpa and maybe Congress will pass some lame regulation that the lobbyist wrote. Nothing will change because there is too much money on the table to do the right thing to stop the structural racism that led to George Floyd’s death.

Stay safe out there!

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Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers, and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.

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| March 28, 2020
Comments Off on Why CTRL + ALT + DELETE

Why CTRL + ALT + DELETE

Why CTRL + ALT + DELETEEvery PC user has given their computer the three-finger salute as it locked up – frequently at the most inopportune time. But why CTRL + ALT + DELETE? Turns out the three-finger salute was a 10-minute hack to make programmers life easier. The CTRL + ALT + DELETE was born at IBM (IBM) in the early 1980s.

IBM PCProject Acorn was the code name for the rush project to build IBM’s new personal computer – because Apple (AAPL) and RadioShack were already selling small stand-alone computers. David Bradley was part of the team working from the IBM offices in Boca Raton, FL on the IBM PC.

Mental Floss reports that the programmers’ working on the IBM PC had to manually restart the entire system whenever the computer encountered a coding glitch. This was a waste of time. Mr. Bradley told Mental Floss,  “Some days, you’d be rebooting every five minutes as you searched for the problem … The tedious tests made the coders want to pull their hair out.”

IBM logoMr. Bradley worked on everything from writing input/output programs to troubleshooting wire-wrap boards on Project Acorn. In order to placate the programmers, Mr. Bradley created a hack. His hack was a keyboard shortcut that triggered a system reset without memory tests.

To Mr. Bradley CTRL + ALT + DELETE, was just another item to tick off his to-do list. He says. “It was five minutes, 10 minutes of activity, and then I moved on to the next of the 100 things that needed to get done.”

The engineer chose the keys by location—with the DEL key across the keyboard from the other two, it seemed unlikely that all three would be accidentally pressed at the same time. Mr. Bradley never intended to make the shortcut available to customers, nor did he expect it to become a cultural icon. It was meant for his fellow coders, for whom every second counted.

Thank IBM for CTRL + ALT + DELETE

The IBM team managed to finish Acorn on schedule. In the fall of 1981, the IBM PC hit the market. It was a dull gray box beneath a green screen monitor. Marketers predicted that the company would sell less than 50,000 units a year. IBM execs thought that estimate was too optimistic. They were all wrong. Computing would never be the same.

Statista Percent of US households with a computer 1984 - 2016

As PC sales took off – few users were aware of Mr. Bradley’s shortcut hidden in their machines. That changed in the early 1990s when Microsoft’s (MSFT) Windows 3 took off. Now Microsoft’s Windows PCs were crashing and the infamous “blue screen of death” plagued Windows users. A quick fix to the BSOD spread by word of mouth (this was before the WWW) – CTRL + ALT + DELETE. Suddenly, Mr. Bradley’s quick hack was a big deal.

At an event celebrating the 20th anniversary of the IBM PC industry big-wigs gathered for a panel discussion. Mental Floss says that the first question to the panel bypassed Microsoft chairman Bill Gates and was for David Bradley. Mr. Bradley, who has always been surprised by how popular his CTRL + ALT + DELETE hack made him, was quick to deflect the glory. The programmer joked;

I have to share the credit, I may have invented it, but I think Bill made it famous.

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Bill Gates has publicly admitted that CTRL + ALT + DELETE was a mistake – but the company he founded continues to use Mr. Bradley’s hack. In Windows 10  the keyboard combination starts Windows Security, which lets you lock the computer, switch to a different user, log off, start Task Manager, or shut down/reboot the computer.

Stay safe out there!

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Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers, and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.

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| December 10, 2018
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Please Take Lotus Notes

Please Take Lotus NotesIn a move to free up some cash and make room for its $34 billion acquisition of Red Hat Inc. (RHT), IBM (IBM) is selling off its enterprise software business for $1.8 billion to HCL Technologies.

Please Take NotesHCL Technologies is global services company valued at $8 billion. India-based HCL operates out of 43 countries, serving the financial services, manufacturing, telecommunications, media, publishing, entertainment, retail, and other industries.

Lotus Notes

The sale includes most of IBM’s enterprise business, including Lotus Notes and Domino collaboration software, network management software Tivoli, and other titles. Lotus Notes was developed by Mitch Kapor in 1989 and was a pioneering enterprise software tool that swept the market with features such as email and collaboration workspaces, that we now take for granted.

Lotus 1-2-3 for DOSLotus, founded in 1982, rose to fame in 1983 with the Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheet, which drove the popularity of freshly minted IBM PC. IBM took over Lotus for the then astounding sum of $3.52 billion. IBM looked to the Lotus acquisition to change its white-shirt-and-tie culture to embrace the MTV age and the new Internet.

Lotus Notes and Domino ranked among the top client-server groupware and email systems in the 1990s, competing head-on against Microsoft Exchange. While Microsoft successfully migrated Exchange to Office 365 in the cloud, Notes and Domino largely missed the cloud era.

Lotus NotesBig Blue acquired Tivoli for $743 million in 1996. It ranked among the leading IT management software providers, competing against CA Technologies, BMC, and HP in the 1990s and early 2000s. Each of those companies stumbled in recent years — opening the door for ServiceNow to disrupt major portions of the market.

The IBM world-view

The HCL deal highlights IBM’s failure to navigate the shift from client-server to SaaS. Lotus Notes stayed a client-server system and lost business to Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform.

Now that the business has been lost, IBM is moving in a different direction. Older software like Lotus Notes and Domino don’t really play a role in the new IBM world-view. One IBM solution provider told CRN, “I can understand getting rid of Lotus Notes and Domino Microsoft Office 365 and Google Apps are killing the hell out of Lotus Notes. ”

In addition to Lotus Notes, Domino, and Tivoli, the IBM Software asset sale to HCL includes:

  • IBM Appscan, a security-focused application for identifying and managing vulnerabilities in mission-critical applications;
  • IBM BigFix endpoint management and security software;
  • IBM Unica, a cloud-based enterprise marketing automation software; and
  • IBM WebSphere Commerce, an omnichannel commerce platform for B2C and B2B organizations.

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While I am the PM on our move off of Notes to SaaS products like O365, every once in a while I find myself saying that Notes worked well. But then I remember that it is overly complex and proprietary. The client software is huge and bloated and lacks a simple client.

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Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers, and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.

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| September 15, 2018
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What is Quantum Computing?

What is Quantum Computing?The world of theoretical physics has been the domain of geniuses like Stephen Hawking and fictional characters such as The Big Bang Theory’s Sheldon Cooper. But now companies like Google (GOOG), IBM (IBM), and Intel (INTC) are building quantum computer systems, that may soon outperform even the fastest supercomputers in the world. So, it’s a good time to learn some basic quantum computing terms and concepts.

It’s physics

Quantum mechanicsQuantum Computing is based on Quantum Physics. Quantum Physics is the arm of modern physics that explains the nature and behavior of matter and energy on the atomic and subatomic levels. It is also called quantum theory and quantum mechanics. Quantum computers use quantum physics to compute.

Before quantum physics, “classical” physics explained the world around us (calculations of speeds, rotations, weights, forces …).  Then came Einstein who explained the “infinitely large”, the universe, time, big bang, black holes… But the classic mechanics did not explain everything and this is where quantum physics, steps in. The world of atoms, the infinitely small, does not work like the world that we, humans, see every day. The algebra story problems about a ball bouncing off a wall at 37 degrees and landing 43 feet away no longer apply in the world of quantum physics. Quantum computing devices use these newly discovered properties to perform computations using quantum bits, or qubits.

Classical computers

EinsteinPierre Pinna at IPFCOnline explains that the “classical” computer sitting on your desk, manipulates information (software, texts, pictures, videos, etc.). Inside your laptop, this information is made up of “1” and “0”. All computers have one (or more) micro-processors that manipulate the “0” and “1”, by applying the basic operations (addition, subtraction, multiplication) to “order” the 1’s and 0’s into software, texts, pictures, videos, etc.

The 1’s and 0’s are physically created by electric current inside transistors. Each transistor can be on or off, which indicates the 1 or 0 to be used to compute the next step in a program.

When the transistor is open, the electric current does not pass through the transistor and we say that we are in the state “0” and conversely if the transistor is closed, the electrical current can pass through it, we are in state “1”. The transistors inside the CPU can be combined into logic gates to perform logic operations like “OR”, “XOR”, “AND.” The classical computers 1’s and 0’s are called “bits.”

Quantum computers

Quantum bitsQuantum computers also handle “1” and “0” just like your laptop. But the information is no longer manipulated by transistors but by atomic and subatomic particles (electrons, protons, ions, photons, neutrons, etc.). You know, the stuff they taught in Mr. Birchmeier’s high school science class. Quantum computers don’t use bits; they use quantum bits (qubits). And that’s where quantum computing gets interesting – the subatomic world does not work like the physical world we live in.  Quantum physics explains how the subatomic world works.

Tristan Greene at TNW writes that qubits have extra functions that bits don’t. Instead of only being represented as a 1 or 0, qubits can actually be both at the same time. Mr. Greene writes that qubits, when unobserved, are considered to be “spinning.” Instead of referring to these types of “spin qubits” using ones or zeros, they’re measured in states of “up,” “down,” and “both.”

This lab at IBM houses quantum machines connected to the cloud.

The IPFCOnline article explains that to better understand all of this, we must see each particle as a wave and not a single physical element. The particles are then characterized by their “spin” to create a state called superposition.

Mr. Greene at TNW writes that quantum superposition in qubits can be explained by flipping a coin. We know that the coin will land in one of two states: heads or tails. This is how classical computers think. While the coin is still spinning in the air, the coin is actually in both states at the same time. Essentially until the coin lands, it has to be considered both heads and tails simultaneously.

Quantum computing use superposition

Observation theorySuperposition is based on Observation theory. Observation theory basically says the universe acts one way when we’re looking, another way when we aren’t. Mr. Pinna at IPFCOnline writes that with superposition, while we do not know what the state of any object is, it is actually in all possible states simultaneously, as long as we don’t look to check. To illustrate this theory, we can use the famous and somewhat cruel analogy of Schrodinger’s Cat using a cat in a box as being both alive and dead at the same time.

All of these sub-atomic activities make the quantum computer very sensitive to disturbances from the outside world. When quantum computers are disturbed they become unstable, and revert to “classical computers.” In order to keep the quantum properties of the system, it must be protected from the outside world. According to the article, this is typically done by cooling the quantum computer to temperatures very close to absolute zero (-273.145°C – colder than in space). Another factor when working with qubits is noise. The more qubits a system has, the more errors you get.

All of these factors make working with qubits incredibly difficult. These challenges are made worse by the unsustainable amount of electricity currently needed to generate quantum computing results. Reports are that one quantum computer burns about 20 megawatts of electricity — enough to power 20,000 households.

Therefore, the current state-of-the-art quantum computing theoretical speed gain is limited by the cost, size, and instability of the system. Right now, quantum computers aren’t worth the trouble and money they take to build and operate. A quantum computer is not going to run MS Word on your desktop.

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Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers, and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.

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| June 20, 2017
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Whats Up With Cisco?

Whats Up With Cisco?What is up with Cisco? Their fiscal results for 2017 Q3 showed revenue of $11.9 billion, a 1% decline in revenue, compared to last year. This is the 6th consecutive down quarter. The networking goliath also issued downward guidance for 2017 Q4. They estimated a revenue declines of 4-6% year-over-year.

Cisco logoOn the earnings call, Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins blamed several factors for the lower guidance. He cited:

  • “A pretty significant stall right now” in the U.S. federal public sector.
  • Service provider revenues were down in Mexico.
  • United Kingdom business is being dampened by currency issues.
  • Middle East, there is “pressure… relative to oil prices.”

Cisco layoffs

Then there are the layoffs. Cisco buried the announcement in a footnote in the company’s SEC 8-K report that 1,100 more layoffs are coming. That is on top of the 5,500 announced in August 2016.

In May 2017, we extended the restructuring plan to include an additional 1,100 employees with $150 million of estimated additional pretax charges.

Cisco layoffs

According to SDXCentral, the Cisco CEO stressed several times on the earnings call, that the company is transitioning to more software and subscription-based business. He declared,

I am pleased with the progress we are making on the multi-year transformation of our business.

These weak financial results and the move to a subscription-based business have fed speculation about the future Cisco business model. TechTarget speculates that Cisco may go so far as to separate the Network Operating System (NOS) from the hardware. They contend the move would be a dramatic departure from Cisco’s traditional business model of bundling high-margin hardware with its NOS. The author believes that market trends will likely force the vendor to release an open NOS.

Open NOS

Cisco 3750 switchTechTarget cites reports from The Information that a hardware-independent NOS called Lindt is coming. Reportedly Lindt will run on a white box powered by merchant silicon. According to the article, a number of market trends are driving the move to a hardware-independent NOS.

The first market trend forcing Cisco’s hand is the company’s declining dominance of the Ethernet switch market. Since 2011, the company’s share has dropped from 75% to less than 60% last year, according to the financial research site Trefis. The decline is important to Cisco’s bottom line. Switches accounted for 40% of Cisco’s product sales in 2016, 30% of net revenues, and 20% of the company’s $162 billion valuation.

Infrastructure as a ServiceCisco’s weakening performance in switching is tied to the second market trend forcing Cisco to release a hardware-independent NOS. Its customers are turning to public cloud providers, Amazon (AMZN) Web Services, Microsoft (MSFT) Azure, and IBM (IBM) SoftLayer, for their IT infrastructure. The more enterprises subscribe to infrastructure as a service, the less networking gear they need in their data centers.

Cloud computing

The shift to cloud providers is found in the latest numbers from Synergy Research Group. Revenue from public cloud infrastructure services is growing at almost 50% a year. In the fourth quarter of last year, revenues topped $7 billion.

cloud providers are building open networking hardware and softwareThe third market trend forcing Cisco to a hardware-independent NOS is enterprises that were Cisco’s largest customers are now competitors. Enterprises and cloud providers are building open networking hardware and software to replace inflexible proprietary systems that lock them in. Those companies include large financial institutions, like Bank of America, Goldman Sachs, and Fidelity Investments. As well as communication service providers, AT&T (T), Deutsche Telekom, and Verizon (VZ).

The technology shift is driving an enormous amount of spending on IT infrastructure. Worldwide spending on public and private cloud environments will increase 15% this year from 2016 to $42 billion, according to IDC. Meanwhile, spending in Cisco’s core market of traditional infrastructure for non-cloud data centers will fall by 5%.

White boxes

Arista NetworksWhile Cisco is ignoring the trend away from proprietary hardware, the article says Cisco’s rivals are embracing it. Juniper (JNPR) and Arista (ANET) have released versions of their NOS for white boxes favored by cloud providers and large enterprises. Both companies reported year-to-year revenue growth in switching last year. Even Cisco’s patent lawsuit against upstart Arista was set back by the courts.

Rohit Mehra, an analyst at IDC hypothesized that Cisco’s resistance to change is likely due to fear that giving customers other hardware options would accelerate declining sales in switching. “There would be potentially some risk of cannibalization in the enterprise space,” he added.

Cisco insists its customers are not interested in buying networking software that’s separate from the underlying switch. The Cisco spokesperson told TechTarget:

TCisco insists its customers are not interestedhe vast majority of our customers see tremendous value in the power and efficiency of Cisco’s integrated network platforms, and the tight integration of hardware and software will continue to be the basis of the networking solutions we offer our customers

TechTarget adds that Cisco doesn’t say the article is wrong. Instead, the company falls back on a corporate cliché for refusing to discuss a media report. “We don’t comment on rumor or speculation,” a Cisco spokesperson said.

The networking market is evolving away from the hardware that Cisco depends on for much of its valuation. Cisco will resist changing its market approach for as long as possible. But in the end, the company will have to become a part of the trend with an open NOS capable of running on whatever hardware the customer chooses.

Cisco’s own problems

Rather than change its model for selling networking gear, Cisco has spent billions of dollars on acquisitions over the last few years to create software and subscription-based businesses in security and analytics. But Cisco’s software push has yet to pay off with 5 conservative down quarters.

Finally, Cisco just recently patched a flaw in IOS software that affected more than 300 models of its switches. Despite issuing an advisory on March 17, Cisco did not release the patch for this vulnerability until May 8, 2017. The Cisco vulnerability was part of the Vault 7 WikiLeaks dump of alleged CIA hacking tools.

Alleged CIA hacking toolsThe vulnerability, rated a critical 9.8 out of 10 by the Common Vulnerability Scoring System, is in the Cluster Management Protocol, or CMP. could allow a remote, unauthenticated attacker to reload devices or execute code with elevated privileges. This vulnerability can be exploited during Telnet session negotiation over either IPv4 or IPv6.

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Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers, and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.

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