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From RealPlayer To Toshiba, Tech Companies Cash in on the Facial Recognition Gold Rush (medium.com) 29

Posted by msmash from the closer-look dept.
At least 45 companies now advertise real-time facial recognition. From a report: More than a decade before Spotify, and years before iTunes, there was RealPlayer, the first mainstream solution to playing and streaming media to a PC. Launched in 1995, within five years RealPlayer claimed a staggering 95 million users. [...] RealPlayer is still very much alive. Now called RealNetworks, a vast majority of its revenue still comes from licensing media software. But the company has also begun dabbling in an industry that's suddenly attracting hundreds of firms, most of which operate outside public scrutiny: facial recognition. Through a startup subsidiary called SAFR, RealNetworks now offers facial recognition for everything from K-12 schools to military drones. The company even claims to have launched a surveillance project in Sao Paulo, Brazil that analyzes video from 2,500 cameras. SAFR has also licensed its technology to Wolfcom, a body camera company that is currently building real-time facial recognition into its products. As first reported by OneZero, Wolfcom's push to bring live facial recognition to hundreds of police departments represents the first such effort within the United States.

Though RealNetworks' earnings reports say SAFR doesn't generate significant revenue yet, RealPlayer's evolution is part of a trend of both large global tech companies and small upstart firms becoming key players in the sprawling facial recognition industrial complex. Over the last decade, Japanese tech firm NEC grew a burgeoning division focused on biometrics, alongside its 100-year-old hardware business. Toshiba, best known for making PCs, claims to be running more than 1,000 facial recognition projects around the world, including identity verification systems at security checkpoints in Russia and for law enforcement in Southeast Asia. Even software contractor Microfocus, one of a handful of companies keeping the aging COBOL language alive, is working on making facial recognition that can scale to thousands of CCTV cameras. While many of these companies sell facial recognition technology to verify people's identities in an app, an increasing number are investing in a burgeoning subset of the industry: real-time surveillance, or the ability to recognize individuals in live video footage. Such systems are being sold for law enforcement, military, and security purposes. Many of these companies operate in obscurity, and have never been profiled or scrutinized before.
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From RealPlayer To Toshiba, Tech Companies Cash in on the Facial Recognition Gold Rush More

From RealPlayer To Toshiba, Tech Companies Cash in on the Facial Recognition Gold Rush

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  • RealPlayer? (Score:3)

    by bill_mcgonigle ( 4333 ) * on Wednesday June 03, 2020 @03:08PM (#60141916) Homepage Journal

    Now there's a name I've not heard in a long time...a long time.

  • More like Dark Pattern Recognition (Score:5, Informative)

    by Presence Eternal ( 56763 ) on Wednesday June 03, 2020 @03:09PM (#60141924)

    Ah RealPlayer. One of the true pioneers. Of bundling spyware into a previously good product.

    • Right!?

      Actually I hadn't thought about RealPlayer in a long time, but my first experience with it was mind blowing.

      But legitimately didn't think they still existed.

    • Re:More like Dark Pattern Recognition (Score:4)

      by kackle ( 910159 ) on Wednesday June 03, 2020 @03:56PM (#60142138)
      Amen. I think it promptly took over your file associations too, without asking. Wasn't it also one of those products that nagged to upgrade itself all the time, even though half of us were sporting only dial-up Internet? Man, I hated that scenario (I even worked at such a place): The developer was so removed from the average user's experience--they had a relatively super-fast Internet connection and never bothered seeing how their code worked on/over something slower.

      • I think the only thing I've ever installed that nagged to update more often, almost to a point of comedy is JRE. I guess arguably windows updates too.

        Admitedly, JRE has gotten a lot better that way in recent years.

        For me I was ok being on dialup, I hadn't experienced broadvand prior to that, it was that every install seemed to want me to reboot my machine. I think the first machine I ever used real player on was a pentium 75, a reboot to just use the computer felt like a chore.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by xlsior ( 524145 )
        The realplayer installer was definitely deceptive -- as far back as the late 90s, during installation it gave you a long scrolldown list of video channels you could sign up for. All of the visible ones (and the next 100 or so in the scroll-down list) were all unchecked, except for the last 4 or 5. A cursory glance or a quick scroll down and a good chance you didn't even notice you just signed up for any.

    • Good news is - it's not in real time because. All their customers see is "Buffering.... Buffering...."

    • 'Good' may be pushing the definition of the word. It was more like "The best of a steaming pile of options that was 'free' (unlike Quicktime Pro), didn't crash your computer every time you tried to run it (ahem, Quicktime for Windows), or required Apple computer (Quicktime that actually worked).'

  • Why do these companies seem hellbent on ushering a new era of 1984-like dystopia, with no room for privacy? WTF?

    • Though many of us wish corporations had some form of moral compass to keep them from doing truly evil shit, the reality is that they were designed to be sociopathic generators of cash at any social cost in order to maximize the profits of banks, politicians, and billionaires. In order to make sure that profit generation was maximized, they limited the legal liability of the executives in order to make them all but immune to prosecution to committing crimes in the name of profit so that they would not have

      • It feels like some corporations want to make the world into a Paul Verhoeven film, only without the fun.

    • You would think that facial recognition wouldn't be all that popular right now due to all of the people outside wearing masks. Perhaps voiceprint or iris verification would work better now?

  • Why does that sound fami[BUFFERING]

  • Companies Try to Cash In on the Virtue Signaling Gold Rush.
  • Thousands CCTV running COBOL. I fool 'em I betcha.

    • There would be no buffer overflows to corrupt them with.

      (Cobol does not have buffer overflows, multiple frees, pointers to local variables or any of C's other ills. It was a properly designed language, for its time.)

  • Back in the early 2000s, real player got 'caught' sending data to real on what you were playing (even your local playing CD music). I cannot find the article... to old.

  • When they eventually become intelligent enough that they can program themselves and no longer need us around.

    Hide in the jungle? Fat chance.

  • Fuck this world. Fuck it all to Hell
  • Ah, RealPlayer, back from the dead to torment us again. This time in your latest incarnation as RealSlayer, with the singular resolve to obliterate privacy once and for all! Finally, we will have the intrusion from governments and corporations we've always wanted. You have my eternal gratitude in doing your bit against the privacy menace.

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