Net Work October 2023

This issue’s Net Work column examines advancements in AI-powered image processing and raises the prospect of ‘face payments’. There’s space news, and advice about dealing with old British paper banknotes.

Artificial intelligence is increasingly being used to help automate complex or high-volume tasks, or to add advanced functionality to something by interpreting and processing streaming data. A taste of things to come was offered by ANPR cameras at least 25 years ago; number plate recognition cameras suddenly arrived that actually extracted data from images of car license plates. Today ANPR cameras enable London authorities to penalise motorists for driving the wrong type of car in the wrong place at the wrong time, and the Police can be alerted when suspect vehicles trigger cameras, or they can check ANPR recorded data afterwards when searching for evidence of a crime.

At the time of writing, ANPR cameras are surrounding London intended to enforce the ciy’s deeply unpopular ULEZ (Ultra Low Emission Zone) anti-pollution road pricing scheme; they are being vandalised as quickly as they are erected.

Overwhelmed by the sheer volume of its material, Facebook now relies on AI systems to help moderate its contents. Google Street View AI detects car licence plates and faces and blurs them out of every image, a feat that no amount of human operators could ever achieve.

^ Google Street View uses AI to blur out licence plates and faces – most of them anyway. [Google / Corfe Castle, Dorset, England]

^ Street trials in London of facial recognition scanners stirred up some controversy over privacy last year.

Face recognition technology (FRT) has been trialled for decades but, due to the surrounding privacy issues in Britain, the uptake of FRT has been very restricted. According to the Comparitech web site, London is in the top 10 most surveilled cities outside of China (see https://www.comparitech.com/vpn-privacy/the-worlds-most-surveilled-cities/ – the others include Moscow, Singapore and Baghdad.

^  ‘Pay by face’ uses facial recognition scanners linked to an e-wallet, and is commonplace in China (China Global TV/ YouTube)

At the other end of the scale, in China the use of facial recognition payment (FRP) to pay for things is said to be very widespread. There are said to be half a billion users of FRP in China, and Face ID systems are also routinely used for age verification or at police stations, banks and railway stations. Today’s Internet generation would probably think FRP is a great idea, but those who value their privacy more would doubtless recoil from that suggestion.

There’s an app for that

Countless gadgets and appliances now depend on network or Bluetooth connectivity, and here at home I don’t have to look far for examples: my ‘smart’ bathroom weighscales made by Etekcity will ‘echo’ signals around one’s body mass and send to my tablet no less than 16 rather depressing statistics.  The weighscales are sold by Amazon UK*, see https://www.amazon.co.uk/Etekcity-Bathroom-Precision-Digital-Weighing/dp/B095YJW56C

* Note: Amazon web links are provided for interest only, and are affiliate-free. Neither the publishers nor the author receive any form of commission on click-throughs.

Many IoT devices can utilise AI to help manage your home, and using ‘skills’ on Amazon or Google smart speakers is an easy way of controlling sockets or lights using voice commands, an idea that we’ve quickly become used to. Amazon recently launched the latest version of their smart speaker, called the Echo Pop. It’s priced at a hefty £45 although I snapped one up for an introductory price of just £18. It works very well and, unlike other brands, is guaranteed to be updated by Amazon for four more years once sales are discontinued. See more at https://www.amazon.co.uk/echo-pop/dp/B09ZX9NP2W

^ Echo Pop is Amazon’s latest version of their smart speaker. Watch out for Black Friday sales later this year. * Note: web links are provided for interest only, and are affiliate-free. Neither the publishers nor the author receive any form of commission on click-throughs.

The digital Britcoin

Readers might have noticed that I’ve always steered completely clear of cryptocurrencies, Bitcoins (BTC), Ether (ETH) and the like, but some 10% of UK adults hold or have held cryptoassets, according to HM Revenue & Customs. Using cryptocurrencies is for the technically savvy (and wary) and involves engaging with privately run, volatile high-risk transactions that are ‘unbacked’, meaning there are no financial or physical assets behind them, let alone any form of stress-testing or regulation.

A recent cross-party UK Government committee stated that, given their price volatility and the risk of losses, trading in ‘unbacked’ crypto more closely resembles gambling than a financial service, and should be regulated as such. The government however disagrees, and intends to ‘tame’ retail crypto transactions for mainstream use by regulating them as financial services.

For now, the Bank of England and HM Treasury are looking at creating a Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) or a ‘digital pound’. It is known that Britain’s current Prime Minister Rishi Sunak is a ‘Treasury man’ and is all in favour of having a digital currency, perhaps even a ‘Britcoin’. The digital pound would see consumers owning a ‘digital wallet’ into which digital currency could be paid from a bank account. The Bank of England claims that it would exist alongside, and be easily exchangeable with, cash and bank deposits. Read more at the Bank of England web site at https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/the-digital-pound

Cashing in again

Meanwhile, back on the subject of good old-fashioned cash, some UK readers might like to be reminded that old paper bank notes are no longer legal tender, having been replaced by polymer (plastic) notes from 2016. British bank notes are effectively cast-iron IOUs that carry the statement ‘I promise to pay the bearer on demand the sum of…’  Some UK banks will still accept old, withdrawn paper notes and pay them into your account, otherwise they can only be cashed in at the Bank of England in London (the position in Scotland differs), which guarantees to pay against any bank notes ever circulated. The Bank of England offers a mail-in postal form at https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/banknotes/exchanging-old-banknotes. [It took about a month for my own withdrawn £10 paper notes to be credited to my checking account when exchanged this way.]

Clearly cash is becoming anathema to every part of the financial sector, the HM Treasury and tax authorities everywhere. Pushing back against this relentless drive towards digital currency and cashless transactions, the UK TV news channel GB News recently launched an online e-petition headed ‘Don’t Kill Cash’, claiming that five million people still rely on it, adding that there are ‘strong vested interests pushing for cash to be replaced by debit and credit cards’. Remarkably it has already reached 312,000 signatures, and supporters can add their own name at https://www.gbnews.com/cash .

Incidentally, any British citizen can start a petition using the process found at https://petition.parliament.uk/help.

Long Distance Voyager

^ Still going strong: the Voyager 2 satellite, seen here being worked on by NASA engineers in 1977, has travelled more than 12 billion miles from Earth (Image: NASA/ JPl-Caltech)

NASA technicians have re-established contact with Voyager 2, the plucky and venerable interstellar satellite that is now 46 years old. Launched in 1977, Voyager 2’s mission was to fly by Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune before heading out into interstellar space. The remarkable efforts of NASA to make contact with Voyager 2 are described at https://www.nasa.gov/feature/jpl/nasa-mission-update-voyager-2-communications-pause and there’s a treat of a website dedicated to Voyager at https://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov .

^ The Golden Record cover shown with its extraterrestrial instructions. Credit: NASA/JPL

Should it ever encounter alien life, then Voyager carries a 12-inch gold-plated phonograph disk containing sounds and images portraying life and culture here on Earth. You can read all about it at https://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/golden-record/ A record stylus is also included with Voyager 2, just in case!

^ BT and OneWeb, in partnership with the UK government, are now delivering high-speed, low-latency internet connectivity to Lundy Island, North Devon.

Britain’s BT has announced successful early trials of a satellite-based Internet link provided to a community on the island of Lundy (population 28) in the Bristol Channel (see https://www.landmarktrust.org.uk/lundyisland/). The Internet feed was supplied by OneWeb, the LEO satellite network operator that is expected to merge with France’s Eutelsat.

^ Skyrora tests its new 3D-printed orbital engine in readiness for commercial launches.

At the other end of the country, Saxa Vord, the UK’s most northerly spaceport, is gearing up for its first vertical rocket launch later this year, subject to licensing approvals. Demand for launch slots far exceeds global supply, I learned, but as part of its steep learning curve the Saxa Vord team cheerfully exclaims that they won’t mind if its first rocket actually blows up. Meantime, Scotland-based Skyrora is trialling its 3D-printed rocket engine and is also doing excellent work in enthusing youngsters – tomorrow’s engineers – about space technology and engineering.

More ‘China Export’ baloney!

Lastly this month, surfing around an electronics group recently, I saw the topic of fake CE marks had cropped up once again but, worryingly, some people still bought into the total fallacy that this (fake CE) mark is an authentic logo meaning ‘China Export’, as though it’s a thing.

^ The genuine CE mark. The so-called ‘China Export’ lookalike logo is completely worthless. It sometimes appears on sloppy Chinese goods of therefore dubious quality.

I covered this topic back in the October 2021 issue: the only difference between genuine CE logos and fake ones was that the bogus ‘C’ and ‘E’ letters were closer together (as shown above). Unfortunately, Google returns search results for some important-looking but totally misleading websites that I feel should really be taken down altogether. Don’t be taken in by this CE mark baloney – you can learn more at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CE_marking#%22China_Export%22. (Readers might care to note that I was also formerly an ISO9002 Quality Manager in industry, a topic that I’ll write about in next month’s column.)