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IBM promised to back off facial recognition, then signed a $70M contract for it

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Re: IBM promised to back off facial recognition, then signed a $70M contract for it

#41

Post by jzb »

cjbgkagh wrote: post #11
2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I despise IBM but how is that grift?

The UK routinely buys software that doesn’t work for large amounts of money. The only reasonable explanation is corruption.

"The only reasonable explanation is corruption."

It's a reasonable explanation, but not the only one. You're taking a huge organization or organizations (UK government departments) that have a revolving door of top-level leadership, plus ever-evolving technology, plus another huge organization (IBM) with a huge cast of people constantly being shuffled around...

Incompetence, disorganization, bad management, bouts of good management trying to re-rail things, new leadership undoing old leadership decisions... I can think of lots of reasons why government projects fail that aren't directly tied to corruption. (And just because there's corruption in a deal doesn't mean the vendor won't deliver, the two aren't necessarily mutually exclusive.)

Re: IBM promised to back off facial recognition, then signed a $70M contract for it

#42

Post by cjbgkagh »

HPsquared wrote: post #21
cjbgkagh wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The UK routinely buys software that doesn’t work for large amounts of money. The only reasonable explanation is corruption.

Mostly apathy. "need to spend this year's budget"

No, it's corruption. The UK has a reputation as a low corruption state as it's pretty good with petty corruption. The corruption indices are based on corruption perception and the UK has historically been less corrupt so much of that perception is dated. The general public in the UK is not involved in the big ticket items so they tend not to see the machinations. It doesn't take much digging which is why it's ridiculous that the SFO abandons so many investigations due to 'insufficient evidence'.

Re: IBM promised to back off facial recognition, then signed a $70M contract for it

#43

Post by cjbgkagh »

jzb wrote: post #41
cjbgkagh wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The UK routinely buys software that doesn’t work for large amounts of money. The only reasonable explanation is corruption.

"The only reasonable explanation is corruption." It's a reasonable explanation, but not the only one. You're taking a huge organization or organizations (UK government departments) that have a revolving door of top-level leadership, plus ever-evolving technology, plus another huge organization (IBM) with a huge cast of people constantly being shuffled around... Incompetence, disorganization, bad management, bouts of…

Once corruption has set in the other explanations like 'apathy' and 'incompetence' are no longer reasonable as it is very much in the interest of someone to leverage that apathy and incompetence for corrupt reasons. The idea that people who professionally siphon off public money will let $70M slip by without getting a piece of that action does not hold water.

Re: IBM promised to back off facial recognition, then signed a $70M contract for it

#44

Post by renegade-otter »

paxys wrote: post #4

Who the hell is signing a large contract with IBM and expecting them to deliver working tech? > IBM signed a $69.8 million (£54.7 million) contract with the British government Ah, just good old fashioned grift. Nothing to be concerned about. The money is being spent on executive bonuses and government official kickbacks, not developing facial recognition.

No one ever gets fired for choosing IBM - the results do not matter.

Re: IBM promised to back off facial recognition, then signed a $70M contract for it

#45

Post by gumballindie »

freedomben wrote: post #34
gumballindie wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just tell folks on the right that ai is going to take their rights, freedoms and guns and let them run with it. I am not joking, the only way to "wake" people up is to leverage those that, oddly enough, have predicted many of the upcoming changes. The issues with their conspiracy theories are with the how, whom, and why. There's no cabal of folks injecting people with microcips to control them and covid wasn't it. It…

The only problem with that plan is that it's going to warp in ways that make us facepalm, especially because they like to have a named antagonist. Impossible to predict how it would go, but one thought might be that it will turn into "Bill Gates is investing in facial recognition so he can put us all in prison camps" or something. Unfortunately the damage from that will be severe and will probably make everyone on th…

That is a very real risk, but I suspect that's partially because these people have been contanstly berrated or ignored. Let's look at it this way. They felt something was wrong. Couldn't tell what but they felt it was (well some things were obious - massive job losses, ignored by the government and the media, etc). Heck even we, "highly paid" tech workers are now facing the same issues - housing is expensive, corporations want to squeeze every penny out of us, we are being manipulated, etc.

Then there come people like Jones, and fill in the void, and suddenly name the issue (naturally they name a false issue, but nonetheless it sounds plausible to the untrained), and they do so in terms easy to understand. Now if they do this for a decade or longer they've successfuly radicalised people and polarised society just like we have been radicalised into thinking that these folks are just idiots and have no value.

That's why we need patience, active listening to their concerns, and actual real solutions that take into account the needs of both sides.

> people think it was a conspiracy and Epstein didn't kill himself

The guy is not interesting nor is the gossip. What I am worried about is that there is a climate that can even lead to a conspiracy theory. It means a good chunk of people don't trust any of our institutions (EU/US/UK) - the police, the government, the media, the prison system, are all rightfully prone to being suspected of dubious acts. We haven't been therein that cell, and the revelations surrounding Epstein have shown that even people that once were considered to be trustworthy beying doubt are now less than 90% trustworthy. Us saying he did kill himself is as ridiculous as those saying he didn't. We simply don't know, we paid investigators to do their jobs with no room for doubt. Why aren't they doing it?

Re: IBM promised to back off facial recognition, then signed a $70M contract for it

#46

Post by mattmanser »

cjbgkagh wrote: post #11
2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I despise IBM but how is that grift?

The UK routinely buys software that doesn’t work for large amounts of money. The only reasonable explanation is corruption.

I've actually worked on a failed-ish (or at least put on pause) development for a government (no names!).

There's plenty of other explanations that don't include corruption.

Lack of scope, mismanagement, what's developed isn't what they wanted, the people who decided the specs aren't the people using it so it's useless, etc.

We actually ended up delivering the first phase of the project (well, the 2nd iteration as the first was completely fluffed up by other developers trying to make a really complicated SPA that wasn't needed), but declined to bid on the second as we actually lost money and it was by that stage obvious they wanted the moon on a stick for phase 2 for very little money.

One of the Big Four were looking over the architecture in the 2nd iteration to make sure it could "scale" appropriately. But they knew exactly the load the app would face. 120,000 applications every year in the space of two months. It would never increase significantly as it was a factor of the total population. And it was basically a glorified 10 page form (admittedly each page had some complicated question routes depending on answers).

The architecture, which included event-sourcing, API gateways, load balancing and an inexplicable use of the mediator pattern (didn't make the slightest bit of sense), was utterly pathetic. Yet signed off as "best practice" by two separate software architects in the big four.

Within weeks I was pointing out serious bottlenecks in the code plus violations of GDPR that the client had explicitly said to watch out for. Any time we had to add a new property to the most important classes we had to change about 30 odd files, it was "best practice" gone nuts.

All that crazy architecture when a simple, normal, sane, "monolith" web app could have handled that load easily on a small VM. For a lark I refactored the DB saving code to see how much simpler I could make it and think I got rid of 25 of the 30 files and thousands of lines of pointless code in a day or two. Of course, it wasn't signed off by the "architects" so I didn't bother trying to check it in.

Re: IBM promised to back off facial recognition, then signed a $70M contract for it

#48

Post by pizzaknife »

RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote: post #13

Actually this is a good thing. Knowing IBM’s consultancy track record, this will serve as a money and time honeytrap for any government interested in this while not actually delivering any useable tech.

as an eternal optimist, i hope this is how it shakes out

Re: IBM promised to back off facial recognition, then signed a $70M contract for it

#49

Post by cjbgkagh »

mattmanser wrote: post #46
cjbgkagh wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The UK routinely buys software that doesn’t work for large amounts of money. The only reasonable explanation is corruption.

I've actually worked on a failed-ish (or at least put on pause) development for a government (no names!). There's plenty of other explanations that don't include corruption. Lack of scope, mismanagement, what's developed isn't what they wanted, the people who decided the specs aren't the people using it so it's useless, etc. We actually ended up delivering the first phase of the project (well, the 2nd iteration as th…

I don't argue that they're not also incompetent but I would argue that that incompetence is a side effect of corruption that you're not privy to.
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