IBM and some other firms are using at least a million of images they have gleaned from Flickr to help train a facial recognition system. Although the photos in question were shared under a Creative Commons license, many users say they never imagined their images would be used in this way. Furthermore, the people shown in the images didn't consent to anything. From a report: "This is the dirty little secret of AI training sets. Researchers often just grab whatever images are available in the wild," said NYU School of Law professor Jason Schultz. The latest company to enter this territory was IBM, which in January released a collection of nearly a million photos that were taken from the photo hosting site Flickr and coded to describe the subjects' appearance. IBM promoted the collection to researchers as a progressive step toward reducing bias in facial recognition. But some of the photographers whose images were included in IBM's dataset were surprised and disconcerted when NBC News told them that their photographs had been annotated with details including facial geometry and skin tone and may be used to develop facial recognition algorithms. (NBC News obtained IBM's dataset from a source after the company declined to share it, saying it could be used only by academic or corporate research groups.)

"None of the people I photographed had any idea their images were being used in this way," said Greg Peverill-Conti, a Boston-based public relations executive who has more than 700 photos in IBM's collection, known as a "training dataset." "It seems a little sketchy that IBM can use these pictures without saying anything to anybody," he said. John Smith, who oversees AI research at IBM, said that the company was committed to "protecting the privacy of individuals" and "will work with anyone who requests a URL to be removed from the dataset." Despite IBM's assurances that Flickr users can opt out of the database, NBC News discovered that it's almost impossible to get photos removed. IBM requires photographers to email links to photos they want removed, but the company has not publicly shared the list of Flickr users and photos included in the dataset, so there is no easy way of finding out whose photos are included. IBM did not respond to questions about this process.

The Linux Foundation today unveiled several major collaborative partnerships as it looks to cement the development of various open source projects that power much of the web. From a report: First off, the Node.js Foundation and the JS Foundation, which the Linux Foundation launched in 2016, are merging to form the OpenJS Foundation. The merger between the two chief organizations that focus on JavaScript comes six months after they publicly began to explore such a possibility with their communities. The OpenJS Foundation will focus on hosting and funding activities that support the growth of JavaScript and web technologies, the Linux Foundation said in a press release.

The OpenJS Foundation consists of 29 open source JavaScript projects including jQuery, Node.js, Appium, Dojo, and webpack. The merger is supported by 30 corporate and end user members including Google, Microsoft, IBM, PayPal, GoDaddy, and Joyent that recognize the "interconnected nature of the JavaScript ecosystem, and the importance of providing a neutral home for projects which represent significant shared value," the Linux Foundation said in a prepared statement. Also in the report: The Linux Foundation has created CHIPS Alliance, a project that aims to host and curate open source code relevant to design of chips that power mobile, IoT, and other consumer electronic devices; and the Continuous Delivery Foundation, which aims to serve as a platform for vendors, developers, and users to frequently engage and share insights and best practices to spur the development of open source projects.

It also announced that the GraphQL Foundation is collaborating with Joint Development Foundation to encourage "contributions, stewardship, and a shared investment from a broad group in vendor-neutral events, documentation, tools, and support for the data query language."

Ten days ago 66-year-old tech pundit Robert Cringely revealed the first of what may be his final set of annual predictions for the technology industry -- but he's not done yet. Thursday Cringely predicted that "the Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) solution based on Open Source using Linux will change the Internet-as-a-Service Cloudscape to VPC-only during 2019" -- and that there'll be an industry-wide shakeout.

Long-time Slashdot reader supremebob, a Connecticut-based sys-admin, writes: He seems to believe that IBM Cloud and Oracle Cloud and doomed to fail, and Alibaba will only survive because of its strong Chinese presence. These seem like safe predictions, but his comments on Google Cloud are somewhat controversial...
After AWS, Alibaba, and Microsoft, "All the others will eventually disappear," Cringely writes, adding "Remember you read it first here." Google's largest cloud customer will always be Google and that will inevitably lead to poorer service for outside customers. That's why I think of Google Cloud as half of a player. Feel free to prove me wrong by delighting customers, Google... I don't see the marketing effort to help clients migrate. Lots of handholding is needed that IBM and Microsoft are happy to provide. Google does not understand customers whose IQs are sub-200. As such, Google doesn't have (and likely won't) have a history of winning outside of search advertising.

For IBM, their VPC roll-out is coming in the next month or two, but it's more marketing than an actual product. Big Blue simply has no capital to build out a unique offering. And Oracle? Well the new head of Google Cloud came from Oracle, where not enough was happening.
Cringely also predicts the U.S. government will try to force Amazon to spin-off its near-monopoly cloud business, noting that "the larger customers of AWS (those not operating on a credit card) generally hate Amazon because of its ruthless business behavior."

Lots of pressure will come to bear in this case from IBM, Microsoft, and Oracle, who are all suffering from a very specific database problem competing with AWS. Each of these companies sells their own database (DB2, SQL Server, and Oracle, respectively) that they've rolled into their cloud services. AWS's RDB, in contrast, is based on MySQL and costs Amazon almost nothing to support, giving the biggest cloud player a clear pricing advantage.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNBC: Fearing that China could be spying on them using power cords and plugs, several U.S. technology companies have asked their Taiwanese suppliers to shift production of some components out of the mainland, Nikkei Asian Review reported on Friday. The report cited unnamed executives from two Taiwanese companies: Lite-On Technology, a manufacturer of electronic parts, and Quanta Computer, a supplier of servers and data centers. Lite-On's clients include Dell EMC, Hewlett-Packard and IBM, while Quanta counts Google and Facebook among its customers, according to Nikkei. The executives told Nikkei that some of their American clients -- without specifying which companies -- asked them to move out of China partly because of cyberespionage and cybersecurity risks. The U.S. tech firms were worried that even mundane components such as power plugs could be tapped by Beijing to access sensitive data, according to the report. According to the report, Lite-On Technology is building a new factory in Taiwan to manufacture power components for servers due to China's cybersecurity concerns. Quanta has also shifted production out of mainland China to Taiwan due to similar concerns, as well as additional tariffs imposed by Washington as a result of the U.S.-China trade war.

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) today declared that the Web Authentication API (WebAuthn) is now an official web standard. From a report: First announced by the W3C and the FIDO Alliance in February 2016, WebAuthn is now an open standard for password-free logins on the web. It is supported by W3C contributors, including Airbnb, Alibaba, Apple, Google, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, Mozilla, PayPal, SoftBank, Tencent, and Yubico. The specification lets users log into online accounts using biometrics, mobile devices, and/or FIDO security keys. WebAuthn is supported by Android and Windows 10. On the browser side, Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, and Microsoft Edge all added support last year. Apple has supported WebAuthn in preview versions of Safari since December.

"Technology hasn't fallen short of its promise. Tech companies have," argues Evan Selinger, a philosophy professor at Rochester Institute of Technology, reporting on a new "collaborative video response to IBM's Dear Tech Ad" (which was aired during last week's telecast of the Oscar's). Earlier Selinger wrote: [IBM's] infantilizing ad depicts technology as if it were an autonomous person, a benevolent Santa Claus figure that can give great products to all the good little girls and boys if they ask politely.... It all sounds nice. But the message obscures the fact that technology hasn't fallen short of its promise. It's recalcitrant tech companies that need to change. That includes IBM....

IBM isn't alone in this sunny disingenuousness. Its competitors also give lip service to listening to our hopes and dreams while shutting down criticism that's voiced to make things better... A commercial like this one can't avoid being an empty marketing pitch when it represents a contested concept as a clear and unambiguous wish that technology can magically grant just as easily as Santa can satisfy a request for a new smartphone.
So a team of tech critics including Joy Buolamwini of the MIT Media Lab "created an alternative to IBM's ad. It's a provocative, line-by-line, video counterstatement" -- not "Dear Tech," but "Dear Tech Company."

Here are some of its more provocative quotes:

"A foreign power with possible unbridled access to Europe's data is causing alarm in the region. No, it's not China. It's the U.S.," writes Bloomberg (in an article shared by hackingbear).

"As the U.S. pushes ahead with the 'Cloud Act' it enacted about a year ago, Europe is scrambling to curb its reach." Under the act, all U.S. cloud service providers, from Microsoft and IBM to Amazon -- when ordered -- have to provide American authorities with data stored on their servers, regardless of where it's housed. With those providers controlling much of the cloud market in Europe, the act could potentially give the US the right to access information on large swaths of the region's people and companies.

The U.S. says the act is aimed at aiding investigations. But some people are drawing parallels between the legislation and the National Intelligence Law that China put in place in 2017 requiring all its organisations and citizens to assist authorities with access to information. The Chinese law, which the US says is a tool for espionage, is cited by President Donald Trump's administration as a reason to avoid doing business with companies like Huawei Technologies. "I don't mean to compare US and Chinese laws, because obviously they aren't the same, but what we see is that on both sides, Chinese and American, there is clearly a push to have extraterritorial access to data," said Ms Laure de la Raudiere, a French lawmaker who co-heads a parliamentary cyber-security and sovereignty group. "This must be a wake up call for Europe to accelerate its own, sovereign offer in the data sector."

technology_dude writes: Google's DeepMind can predict wind patterns one day in advance. "Beginning last year, [Google and DeepMind] fed weather forecasts and existing turbine data into DeepMind's machine learning platform, which churned out wind power predictions 36 hours ahead of actual power generation," Engadget reports. "Google could then make supply commitments to power grids a full day before delivery." According to the report, this makes the energy generated by its wind turbines more valuable (by roughly 20%). Is this a blow to Big Blue who purchased The Weather Channel's Weather.com to showcase Watson, or is it news just because it's Google?

The Register: IBM has apologized after its recruitment webpages asked applicants whether their ethnicity was, among other options, the racial slurs Yellow and Mulatto. In online application forms for positions within the US tech giant, in among other questions ranging from military veteran status, and eligibility to work in America, a bizarre drop-down menu asked whether jobseekers were Caucasian, Black, or Indigenous, as well as the aforementioned insults. The Register was first alerted to the baffling error on Monday by an engineer who tried to apply for a technical role at IBM earlier this month, and was stunned by the slurs listed for a mandatory input field labeled: "Please state your ethnic group."

A new privacy survey from IBM's Institute for Business Value found that 81% of consumers say they've become more concerned about how companies use their data, while 87% think companies should be more heavily regulated on personal data management. Three-quarters of the people felt like they were less likely to trust companies with data and 89% said companies should be clearer about how their products use data. Given these findings, you'd think people would take actions in response to companies losing or misusing their data -- but they're not. Fortune reports: 71% said that they were willing to give up privacy to get access to what technology can offer. Only 45% have updated their privacy settings on products in response and 16% walked away from a company because of data misuse. It's already been clear that one reasons for big data leaks is because there is little financial risk to companies, as Motherboard reported. This new data suggests that companies have even less to worry about, as most people are willing to keep doing business with them.

A full 81% of consumers say that in the past year they've become more concerned with how companies are using their data, and 87% say they've come to believe companies that manage personal data should be more regulated, according to a survey out Monday by IBM's Institute for Business Value. From a report: They aren't totally convinced they should care about how their data is being used, and many aren't taking meaningful action after privacy breaches, according to the survey. Despite increasing data risks, 71% say it's worth sacrificing privacy given the benefits of technology. [...] Despite increasing awareness of privacy and security breaches, most consumers aren't taking consequential action to protect their personal data. Fewer than half (45%) report that they've updated privacy settings, and only 16% stopped doing business with an entity due to data misuse.

Bruce Perens co-founded the Open Source Initiative with Eric Raymond -- and he's also Slashdot reader #3872.

Bruce Perens writes: Here's the IBM ad used to open their Think 2019 conference, featuring Buzz Aldrin, Arianna Huffington, Janelle Monae, Miaym Bialik, and astonishingly: me. Interesting of IBM to have an ad including Open Source, security, and data rights as human rights!

Web version with subtitles. Version used to open the Think conference, on Youtube..
"I would like to make open source software the standard..." Perens says in the video, adding "Let's champion data rights as human rights," and asking "How do we bake security into everything we do?" But it's a montage of different speakers who each begin their comments by saying "Dear Tech," offering open letters with their hopes for the entire industry.

"Let's use blockchain to help reduce poverty."

"Let's use IoT to help victims of natural disasters."

"I feel like you have the potential to do so much more."

"Are you working for all of us, or just a few of us?"

IBM announced on Tuesday that some of its Watson AI services will now work on rival cloud computing providers as it seeks to win over customers that want greater flexibility in how they store and analyze data. From a report: The announcement builds on IBM's moves to position its services as compatible with nearly any form of computer infrastructure a customer wants to operate. Other efforts include a pending acquisition of open-source software company Red Hat for $34 billion. With the change, companies will be able to use Watson AI tools such as Watson Assistant, which can help them develop conversational services such as a virtual customer service agent, in mobile apps hosted on Amazon and Microsoft as well as IBM servers.

The subject under debate was whether the government should subsidize preschools. But the real question was whether a machine called IBM Debater could out-argue a top-ranked human debater. The answer, on Monday night, was no. CNET: Harish Natarajan, the grand finalist at the 2016 World Debating Championships, swayed more among an audience of hundreds toward his point of view than the AI-powered IBM Debater did toward its. Humans, at least those equipped with with degrees from Oxford and Cambridge universities, can still prevail when it comes to the subtleties of knowledge, persuasion and argument. It wasn't a momentous headline victory like we saw when IBM's Deep Blue computers beat the best human chess player in 1997 or Google's AlphaGo vanquish the world's best human players of the ancient game of Go in 2017. But IBM still showed that artificial intelligence can be useful in situations where there's ambiguity and debate, not just a simple score to judge who won a game. "What really struck me is the potential value of IBM Debater when [combined] with a human being," Natarajan said after the debate. IBM's AI was able to dig through mountains of information and offer useful context for that knowledge, he said.

IBM recently completed a trial of blockchain technology to track a shipment of mandarin oranges from China to Singapore. From a report: Announced last week, 28 tons of mandarin oranges, or 3,000 cartons containing approximately 108,000 fruits, were delivered ahead of Chinese New Year celebration on Feb. 5 (mandarin oranges are a symbol of prosperity, IBM explained). The main shipping document, the bill of lading, was recorded on a blockchain. This document serves as a proof of ownership of goods, as a receipt of goods and a contract of the shipment, and normally it's mailed to all parties involved in the shipment, including banks providing trade financing.

For the pilot, IBM created an electronic bill of lading, or e-BL, which helped reduce and speed up administrative processes "to just one second" as the document flow is automated, the company claims -- while the standard paper-based procedure takes five to seven days. "By using the e-BL, we have seen how the entire shipment process can be simplified and made more transparent with considerable cost savings," Tay Khiam Back, the chairman and CEO of fruit importer Hupco, said in a press release.

After 130 years, it can be hard to come up with new flavors, so the world's largest spice company is becoming the latest food producer to turn to artificial intelligence for help. From a report: McCormick -- the maker of Old Bay and other seasonings, spices and condiments -- hopes the technology can help it tantalize taste buds. It worked with IBM Research to build an AI system trained on decades worth of data about spices and flavors to come up with new flavor combinations. The Baltimore, Maryland-based company plans to bring its first batch of AI-assisted products to market later this year. The line of seasoning mixes, called One, for making one-dish meals, includes flavors such as Tuscan Chicken and Bourbon Pork Tenderloin. Hamed Faridi, McCormick's chief science officer, told CNN Business that using AI cuts down product development time, and that the company plans to use the technology to help develop all new products by the end of 2021.

China and the United States are ahead of the global competition to dominate artificial intelligence (AI), according to a study by the U.N. World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) published on Thursday. From a report: The study found U.S. tech giant IBM had by far the biggest AI patent portfolio, with 8,920 patents, ahead of Microsoft with 5,930 and a group of mainly Japanese tech conglomerates. China accounted for 17 of the top 20 academic institutions involved in patenting AI and was particularly strong in the fast growing area of "deep learning" - a machine-learning technique that includes speech recognition systems.

"The U.S. and China obviously have stolen a lead. They're out in front in this area, in terms of numbers of applications, and in scientific publications," WIPO Director-General Francis Gurry told a news conference. U.S. President Donald Trump has accused China of stealing American innovations and technology and has slapped trade tariffs on $234 billion of Chinese goods to punish Beijing.

On Thursday, Tim Cook took to Twitter to celebrate the 35th anniversary of the Macintosh, recalling how it changed the world. "35 years ago, Macintosh said hello. It changed the way we think about computers and went on to change the world. We love the Mac, and today weâ(TM)re proud that more people than ever are using it to follow their passions and create the future," Cook tweeted. The Register provides a brief history lesson on how the Mac changed how users interact with computers. Here is an excerpt from the report: After the disastrous debut of the Lisa, and the abject failure of the Apple III, it was down to the Steve Jobs-led Macintosh project to save the day for the troubled computer manufacturer. Rival IBM had launched the Personal Computer XT just under a year earlier, in March 1983, with up to 640KB of RAM and a mighty Intel 8088 CPU. It also included PC-DOS 2, which would go on to underpin Microsoft's operating system efforts in subsequent decades. IBM had started to rule the PC industry, but what the IBM PC XT did not have was a graphical user interface, sticking instead with the sober command line of DOS. The Macintosh, on the other hand, had a GUI lifted from Apple's ill-fated Lisa project, except (and unusually, as things would turn out) retailed at a lower price of $2,495 (just over $6,000 in today's money). It ran faster than the Lisa too, with its Motorola 68000 CPU clocked at 7.8MHz.

The good news ended there. The machine shipped with a woeful 128KB of RAM, which was shared with the black and white 512 x 342 pixel display built into the box. That 128KB was resolutely not upgradable, and fans would have to wait until September for Apple to unleash a 512KB version for another $300. The only storage provided was a single 400KB 3 1/2;-inch disk, an improvement over the 360KB 5¼-inch floppies of IBM's PC XT and the nature of the box meant that any extra storage would have to be external. Users became quickly accustomed to swapping floppies in order to do what little useful work the pitiful 128K would afford. Third parties eventually launched hard drives for the machines, which had to be attached via the serial port. Apple would make a 20MB drive in the form of the Hard Disk 20 available in September 1985 for the 512KB Mac at a cost of $1,495. Owners of the original 128K Mac, however, needed not apply. The limited RAM made the new Hierarchical File System a non-starter.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The New York Times: Over the last two years, Amazon has aggressively marketed its facial recognition technology to police departments and federal agencies as a service to help law enforcement identify suspects more quickly. Now a new study from researchers at the M.I.T. Media Lab has found that Amazon's system, Rekognition, had much more difficulty in telling the gender of female faces and of darker-skinned faces in photos than similar services from IBM and Microsoft. The results raise questions about potential bias that could hamper Amazon's drive to popularize the technology.

In the study, published Thursday, Rekognition made no errors in recognizing the gender of lighter-skinned men. But it misclassified women as men 19 percent of the time, the researchers said, and mistook darker-skinned women for men 31 percent of the time. Microsoft's technology mistook darker-skinned women for men just 1.5 percent of the time. For the latest study, [co-author of the study, Ms. Buolamwini, said] she sent a letter with some preliminary results to Amazon seven months ago. But she said that she hadn't heard back from Amazon, and that when she and a co-author retested the company's product a couple of months later, it had not improved. "It's not possible to draw a conclusion on the accuracy of facial recognition for any use case -- including law enforcement -- based on results obtained using facial analysis," Matt Wood, general manager of AI at Amazon Web Services, said. He added that the researchers had not tested the latest version of Rekognition, which was updated in November.

"Amazon said that in recent internal tests using an updated version of its service, the company found no difference in accuracy in classifying gender across all ethnicities," the NYT reports. The new study is scheduled to be presented Monday at an artificial intelligence and ethics conference in Honolulu.

What does the future of getting a job in the tech industry look like? According to the CEO of IBM, Ginni Rometty, it's important that tech companies focus on hiring people with valuable skills, not just people with college degrees. From a report: Rometty made the comments yesterday at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. The CEO said that technology's fast-moving pace here in the 21st century makes it harder for people to find jobs and has led to disillusionment with the future. "With the new technologies that are out there, I think there is a huge inclusion problem, meaning there's a large part of society that does not feel this is going to be good for their future," Rometty said. "Forget about whether it is or it isn't or what we believe. Therefore they feel very disenfranchised."

[...] "So when it comes to education and skills, I think the government can't solve it alone," Rometty said. "I think businesses have to believe I'll hire for skills, not just their degrees or their diplomas. Because otherwise we'll never bridge this gap." "All of us are full of companies with university degrees, PhDs, you've got to make room for everyone in society in these jobs," Rometty said as other business leaders on the panel nodded their heads. She added, "We have a very serious duty about this. Because these technologies are changing faster with times than their skills are going to change. So it is causing this skill crisis. [...] We have to have a new paradigm. You would have to have new pathways that don't all include college education and you would have to have respect for that job -- not blue collar or white collar, I call it new collar."