@ #HPDiscover Barcelona uncovered “The Machine”. The Machine has been re-architected bottom-up, which means all this stupid business of using different types of memory in order to optimise speed, yet offer as close as is possible given the limitations of the architecture, the stability of persistent memory, will be a thing of the past. The Machine will have the advantages of fast memory, yet the stability of persistent memory. This is just one technical rework in The Machine, there is loads more. I’m not an expert on hardware, but I understood enough to appreciate the enormity of this innovation.
http://youtu.be/QPQ1AheNro8
But what does this mean? What they demoed is how quick it will be to find similar pictures in a big data archive containing millions of pictures. Imagine what this means from crime prevention viewpoint, imagine how this can be used to protect children against sexual predators? Imagine the speed at which biometrics will work, imagine, imagine the possibilities….
On the other side of the coin we can speculate the impact on our personal privacy. The ease and speed of shifting through millions of graphics, data, whatever, means that everything about each one of us will be available to governments, secret agencies, and criminal organisations. This includes everything you share online, your location data, your photos, all pictures of you captured on the millions of surveillance cameras worldwide. With The Machine everything that is public will be instantly available.
So what should you do? Well you need to take control of your identity, your PII (Personal Identifying Information) and your digital footprint. In order to make this possible, how identities are managed today needs to be re-architected bottom-up, exactly as what HP have done with The Machine. Existing identity management architectures are not scalable, and even with federation you are not in control, whatever the supporters of federation may claim.
The only way forward is that you control your identity, hence own your identity, and your digital footprint. You should have absolute traceability on your identity. You control, and encrypt everything you do, every digital interaction if you share is done under your conditions. This is only possible by strengthening your digital identity with the use of reference sources, so that it mirrors how your identity works in the physical world. However just as with The Machine, it is early days, yet the first step is possible…. which means that you have the chance to be one of the first to take control of what belongs to you, your identity and your digital footprint. Check the video below.