The Google: A Synonym for Punching Bag
August 28, 2018
Here in Harrod’s Creek, we love the Google. We do have to run some queries across a number of search and retrieval systems to locate the information we seek. For example, Bing, Qwant, and even Exalead Search have been helpful this week as we prepare the lectures for an upcoming conference in Washington, DC, in a few days.
We wanted to point out two stories which seem critical of the GOOG. We have no idea if these are accurate or if the stories are confections created to — wait for it — get on the first page of Google results. Ah, the irony.
The first story is from a UK newspaper which usually adopts a less contentious approach to Google and other US online services. The story which caught our attention was “Trump News: President Claims Google Is Rigging Search Results to Make Him Look Bad.”
We learned:
“Google search results for “Trump News” shows only the viewing/reporting of Fake New Media,” he [President Trump] wrote on Twitter. “In other words, they have it RIGGED, for me & others, so that almost all stories & news is BAD. Fake CNN is prominent. Republican/Conservative & Fair Media is shut out. Illegal?”
Reporting Twitter messages has become a vital part of “real” journalism. Beyond Search is not convinced that the contentious discussion about Foundem, French tax returns, and similar allegations are 100 percent accurate.
We think it is interesting that Google, like Amazon, has become an issue for a US president.
The second story was “The Boss of ‘Fortnite’ Spent Days Attacking Google for Scoring ‘Cheap PR Points’ by Exposing a Flaw in the Game’s Security.” We learned from that “real” news plus MBA type analysis:
Responding to people on Twitter, Sweeney [boss of Fortnite] spent the weekend and Monday pointing out that Google was irresponsible in how quickly it revealed the flaw.
The security flaw business is an interesting one. In some locations, revealing a flaw is good news. In others, pointing out vulnerabilities in code triggers an anti-fiesta.
Several observations:
- Twitter plays a part in getting the message out.
- High profile individuals are alleging behaviors which present information retouched, shaded, or enhanced in some way
- The theme in both “real” news stories is that Google is not what it seems.
Flash back to the halcyon days of 2001 before the push to monetize Google. People who knew about Google loved the firm.
Times appear to have changed. Except in Harrod’s Creek, of course.
Stephen E Arnold, August 28, 2018
Silicon Politics: Makes Sense on a Small Scale
August 28, 2018
The current incarnation of Silicon Valley has always prided itself on making products that make the world a better place. While tech companies rarely get political, this is changing and it’s making life a little more complicated for them and us. We discovered just how wide ranging this issue was going with a recent IT Pro Today story, “Google’s Brin Cops to Plan to Reclaim Lost Decade in China.”
According to the story:
“Sergey Brin — the very executive most closely associated with the decision in 2010 to pull out of China. It was a widely lauded move by Google managers, led by Brin, who argued that they’d rather leave than subject their search tool to China’s stringent rules that filter out politically sensitive results, such as the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre.”
Why the shift? Easy. With Apple being one of the few tech businesses thriving in China and also becoming the first trillion-dollar company, Google wants in on the action—revenue lost over 10 years may be a factor. Perhaps the only factor?
Patrick Roland, August 27, 2018
Is Artificial Intelligence a Bit of a Spoof?
August 28, 2018
It’s not shocking information, but we kind of wish it was. We Americans like finding the easy way out of a problem. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the tech world, namely in IT. A recent IT Wire story showed just how dependent we are on simple solutions, “Companies See AI, Machine Learning as Silver Bullet.”
According to their survey:
“American IT decision-makers were the most likely to be taken in by the claims made for AI and machine-learning, compared to their European counterparts – 82% as compared to 67% in the UK and 66% in Germany.
We also noted:
“Overall, 79% of respondents said AI and machine-learning would help their organizations detect and respond to threats faster, while 77% said the technologies would help solve a skills shortage.”
So, what is to be done? Well, for starters, we need a more logical way of measuring success of AI. Currently, it’s the Wild West in terms of measurable successes. That will help bring some clarity to whether or not your company actually can benefit from machine learning. We have a hunch that certain industries will have to have it but others will be surprised to discover that old fashioned elbow grease is the answer. Short cuts, like marketing, have a certain appeal.
Patrick Roland, August 28, 2018
DarkCyber for August 28, 2018, Now Available
August 28, 2018
DarkCyber for August 28, 2018, is now available at www.arnoldit.com/wordpress and on Vimeo at https://vimeo.com/286743860.
Stephen E Arnold’s DarkCyber is a weekly video news and analysis program about the Dark Web and lesser known Internet services.
This week’s program covers five Dark Web and security related stories.
The first story address Microsoft’s acquisition of Hyas, a Canadian cyber intelligence company. DarkCyber believes that Microsoft is making an effort to close the gap between its cloud capabilities and those of Amazon. Policeware appears to be a key strategic capability of Amazon, and Microsoft has found that more than in-house innovation may be necessary to close the gap. Stephen E Arnold, producer of DarkCyber and author of CyberOSINT (2017) said: Amazon’s policeware has helped the company make progress with its US government cloud services. Microsoft’s acquisition of Hyas adds an important cyber analytic capability to the Azure system.”
DarkCyber reports the newly-released details about two Dark Web operations. The Dutch police methods used to take down the Hansa contraband-focused ecommerce site complements new information about the arrest of eight individuals involved with the Rex Mundi hack-and-extort spin on ransomware. Both operations involved investigators from multiple countries, advanced analytics, and traditional investigative techniques. The success of these two operations makes clear that use of software to create hidden Internet sites and services is not as effective as some individuals believe.
DarkCyber reports that draft legislation in Australia may be a different way to force companies to provide decryption backdoors to messaging applications. The Australian government can request decryption assistance or decryption keys. If the company does not comply, the firm may be fined up to seven million dollars for each failure to cooperate. The proposed legislation is accepting public comments and further action will be taken on this proposal later this year.
The final DarkCyber report shares some findings from a yet-to-be-released report about the Asian Dark Web. The report is a work product of IntSights, a cyber intelligence firm. The key finding in the report is that each country takes a unique approach to the Dark Web. Cultural considerations require the use of the country’s language and the jargon used to prevent outsiders from making sense of the content.
Kenny Toth, August 28, 2018
High School Science Club Management Methods: August 27, 2018
August 27, 2018
I think I have spotted another example of HSSCM in action. Navigate to “Tech Workers Say Poor Leadership Is Number One Cause for Burnout.” I noted from this headline that the peer pressure, meeting expectations of customers, and a desire to do a good job were not mentioned.
I learned these factors were in play:
Number one is “poor leadership and unclear directory.” That strikes me as low. Only about one fifth of those in the sample perceived the management team as lousy. But somewhere along the line, I learned at if 15 percent of a group is disgruntled, that group is well on its way to destabilizing a team and maybe the company itself.
I noted that toxic culture affected 17.5 percent of those in the pool were negatively affected by a toxic culture. In my high school science club, I recall one person asking my best friend who obtained a PhD from Cornell University, “Didn’t get the top score on this week’s test, did you?” Sensitive observation, eh.
The survey report presents additional findings. But I was not sure what the relationship between burnout and a list of big name companies was. Perhaps these are the outfits that those in the sample perceive as having poor leadership.
My conclusion is that HSSCM methods are indeed a “thing.” I will open a file. Who knows? Perhaps HSSCM is The Peter Principle for the mobile, distracted generation.
Stephen E Arnold, August 27, 2018
Internet Search Engines that Reach Past Bing or Google Search
August 27, 2018
An article at Kimallo shares a roster of their ten “Most Valuable Deep Web Search Engines.” Billed as a list of search engines that plumb depths not found in a Google or Bing search, this collection is indeed that. One could wish the Dark Web and the Deep Web were not conflated in the piece’s introduction, but anyone who is fuzzy on the difference can click here for clarification. The list is an assortment of search engines that tap into the Deep and/or Dark Web to different degrees in different ways. Only one, “not Evil,” uses Tor, about which we’re told:
“Unlike other Tor search engines, not Evil is not for profit. The cost to run not Evil is a contribution to what one hopes is a growing shield against the tyranny of an intolerant majority. Not Evil is another search engine in the Tor network. According to its functionality and quality it is highly competitive with the competitors. There is no advertising and tracking. Due to thoughtful and continuously updated algorithms of search it is easy to find the necessary goods, content or information. Using not Evil, you can save a lot of time and keep total anonymity. The user interface is highly intuitive. It should be noted that previously this project was widely known as TorSearch.”
The other nine entries include people-prying tools pipl and mylife; metasearch engines Yippy, Fazzle, and privacy-centric DuckDuckGo; SurfWax, which seeks to turn search into a “visual process”; StartPage, another platform emphasizing privacy; the Wayback Machine, an archive of open web pages; and Google Scholar, which can be configured to access the NSCU Libraries’ databases and journal subscriptions. I’ll add that Beyond Search pointed out Ichidan last autumn, a search engine designed to look up sites hosted through the Tor network. Though one should not rely on the Kimallo article to distinguish between these general Web classifications, anyone who would like to go beyond the reach of Bing or Google may want to explore these options.
One question: Do metasearch systems go “beyond” Google? Some here at Beyond Search believe metasearch engines are recyclers, not indexes which point to content not included in primary spidering and indexing systems.
Cynthia Murrell, August 27, 2018
Content Filtering Seeps Into Mainstream
August 27, 2018
Content filtering is a new trend. For those fearing fake news, or simply tired of bad news, Google is trying to brighten their day. Their home assistant will deliver just good news if you ask it, but is there a dark underbelly to such actions? We started wrestling with this topic after a Digital Trends story, “By Request, Google Assistant Makes it Easy to Find Good News.”
According to the story:
“Google sources the positive difference stories from the Solutions Journalism Network (SJN). The nonprofit, nonpartisan organization focuses on publishing stories about how people can make the world a better place — the practice is called “solutions journalism.” SJN gathers and summaries articles from a large and diverse range of media sources.”
While this seems like a cute news snippet, it is potentially dangerous. Take for example, the news of a EU official who penned an op-ed about the dangers of filtering copy written works. Of course, a bot simply filed a complaint of copyright infringement and got the story wiped from the internet. Google’s good news filter is far from this kind of deviousness, but it’s also not so far that one day we could all have important, yet unpleasant news stripped from our world.
Patrick Roland, August 27, 2018
Mathematical Recipes Revealed: Oh, Oh, Trouble
August 26, 2018
I don’t read the Times Literary Supplement. When I worked in London, I was able to flip through the printed version. In Harrod’s Creek, nope. I did spot a link to an essay with the snappy title “God Is in the Machine.” I took a look.
The write up belongs to the genre of non fiction essays which I call “Yep, that’s all there is.”
The focus is how algorithms work and why some are simple and others are complicated.
Think of the essay as explaining how math works to people who know right off the starting block who Eratosthenes was.
The main point of the first chunk of the write up is that algorithms are recipes, procedures which are implemented one at a time. The input yields an output.
The guts of the argument surface in this passage, attributed to a real algorithm wizard:
The researcher knew, of course, what data he’d fed into the process. He knew why he’d designed it, the problem it was trying to solve and the outputs that it produced. However, after he’d been trying to explain it for over an hour, he sat back in his chair, exhausted. “Yes, as you can see, the gap between input and output is difficult to understand,” he said. He’d flooded the algorithm with a huge amount of information, “a trend”, he said, because in the tech giant he could, and everyone did. But the amount of data meant it was hard to tell what the salient inputs within it were. “From a human perspective you’re not sure which of the inputs is significant; it’s hard to know what is actually driving the outputs. It’s hard to trace back, as a human, to know why a decision was made.”
The complexity emerges when:
- Algorithms are stuck together
- Data (which may or may not be consistent, accurate, or timely) are stuffed into the numerical recipe as “inputs”
- Outputs which may or may not be what the user understands, wants, or can use.
The complexity is manageable if the creator or numerical poets are, what the essay calls, “rigorous.” Is rigor possible in Silicon Valley with professionals who focus on mobile phones, laptops, and lunch options?
Where’s this going?
Not surprisingly, I will have to read a forthcoming book called The Death of the Gods. Like other clarion calls to the use of numerical recipes to do what humans once thought they could do with sufficient education, experience, and judgment, numerical recipes can do—algorithms are the future.
Questions I want toss out when I meet with my research team next week: What if the algorithms are already in charge? Are search results objective? Can you explain why some data are not available from commercial sources? What control do you have over content when ads and “information” are freely mixed?
Perhaps the numerical recipe mechanisms are locked and loaded and firing millions of times a day? What if few hear, know, or understand that the big guns are blazing without sound or a flash? What if people do not care?
Stephen E Arnold, August 26, 2018
High School Science Club Management in Action, 8-25-18 Edition
August 25, 2018
I love it when high school science club management methods become news. Let me run down a handful of examples I noted on Saturday, August 25, 2018. Toss out those old MBA course notes. A new world has arrived:
Reflective decision making: Elon Musk no longer wants to take Tesla private. Agility is as important as self driving vehicles which work. Decision was announced via a Twitter message. Source: CTV News
Assessing obstacles: Google faces search and auto obstacles in China. Google’s 2010 China continue to ripple. Source: New York Times
Independent thinking: Reddit allegedly ignored disinformation alerts from Reddit employees. Source: NBC News and Facebook and Google follow suit. Source: Tom’s Hardware
Job satisfaction: Google wizard discovers that “happiness is within you.” Money, fancy cars, being smart will not deliver happiness. Age of the Google wizard: 51. Therefore, decisions made prior to realizing that happiness is within appear to have produced unhappiness. Deep thinking. Source: CNBC
Who will emerge as the Peter Drucker for the Silicon Valley era of management?
Stephen E Arnold, August 25, 2018
Natural Language Processing: Brittle and Spurious
August 24, 2018
I read “NLP’s Generalization Problem, and How Researchers Are Tackling It.” From my vantage point in rural Kentucky, the write up seems to say, “NLP does not work particularly well.”
For certain types of content in which terminology is constrained, NLP systems work okay. But, like clustering, the initial assignment of any object determines much about the system. Examples range from jargon, code words, phrases which are aliases, etc. NLP systems struggle in a single language system.
The write up provides interesting examples of NLP failure.
The fixes, alas, are not likely to deliver the bacon any time soon. Yep, “bacon” means a technical breakthrough. NLP systems struggle with this type of utterance. I refer to local restaurants as the nasty caballero, which is my way of saying “the local Mexican restaurant on the river.”
I like the suggestion that NLP systems should use common sense. Isn’t that the method that AskJeeves tried when it allegedly revolutionized NLP question answering? The problem, of course, was the humans had to craft rules and that took money, time, and even more money.
The suggestion to “Evaluate unseen distributions and unseen tasks.” That’s interesting as well. The challenge is the one that systems like IBM Watson face. Humans have to make decisions about dicey issues like clustering, then identify relevant training data, and index the text with metadata.
Same problem: Time and money.
For certain applications, NLP can be helpful. For other types of content comprehension, one ends up with the problem of getting Gertie (the NLP system) up and running. Then after a period of time (often a day or two), hooking Gertie to the next Star Trek innovation from Sillycon Valley.
How do you think NLP systems handle my writing style? Let’s ask some NLP systems? DR LINK? IBM Watson? Volunteers?
Stephen E Arnold, August 24, 2018
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