China: Making Sales in a Booming Surveillance Market
January 22, 2020
China has an authoritarian government, so it is not surprising they are developing AI surveillance technology. What is surprising, however and yet not so much, is that China is exporting their AI surveillance technology to other countries. Japan Times reports how, “AI Surveillance Proliferating, With China Exporting Tech To Over To 60 Countries, Report Says.”
Among the countries China has sold the technology to are Venezuela, Myanmar, Iran, and Zimbabwe (all less than reputable places).
China uses facial recognition technology to monitor Muslim minorities, who have been imprisoned in concentration camps. The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace shared the news about China’s AI technology sales. The fears are that these authoritarian governments would use the technology to augment their dominance and share the data with China.
As China slowly gains more economic prominence, it is trying to encourage more countries to purchase its technology and other electronics. These include countries in Europe, Asia, and Africa. China is slowly making these countries rely on their technology:
“ ‘Chinese product pitches are often accompanied by soft loans to encourage governments to purchase their equipment,’ [the report] said. ‘This raises troubling questions about the extent to which the Chinese government is subsidizing the purchase of advanced repressive technology.’
China has come under international condemnation in the wake of an investigative report by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists on the country’s surveillance and predictive-policing system to oppress Uighurs and send them to internment camps.”
Democratic countries are also developing AI surveillance technology, but they are not controlling how the technology is used and how it could violate laws.
China has a powerful piece of police ware technology and are already using it to violate human rights. What will China do when the technology becomes more advanced?
Whitney Grace, January 22, 2020
Crypto Currencies In Japan
January 22, 2020
As one of the most highly technological nations in the world, Japan is a prime market for crypto currencies. Japanese law enforcement officials want to keep crypto currencies on the straight and narrow, so it is no wonder that crypto analytics companies recently hired Japanese CEOs and attracted more Japanese investors. The companies in question are the top three crypto analytics companies: Elliptic, Bitfury, and Chainalysis. Medium delves into the details behind crypto currencies in Japan with the article, “Crypto Investigates Tools In Japan-A Marketplace Analysis.”
Contrary to how it used to be, Bitcoin transactions are traceable, especially with Elliptic, Bitfury, and Chainalysis. Chainalysis appointed Kenji Sugawara as head of the Japanese division. The company’s main product lines are investigating software Reactor that traces blockchains, KYT (Know Your Transaction)-automated crypto currency monitoring software, and Kryptos vets new opportunities and risks in crypto currencies.
Elliptic placed Ken Yagami as head of its Japanese outlet and the company raised $23 million in Series B funding. The funding series was to expand into the Asian market. Elliptic’s main product is Discovery, which helps banks identify and assess risks posed by crypto currencies.
Bitfury hired Katsuya Konno as head of its Japanese operations. The advertising firm Dentsu invested in a 2018 funding round. Unlike the other crypto analytics companies, Bitfury makes hardware and software. Its hardware is designed to keep blockchains secure and its software Exonum-a private blockchain framework, uses its Crystal Blockchain, an advanced analytics platform.
While these are the top three crypto analytics companies in Asia, Merkle Science from Singapore and Uppsala Security with its Threat intelligence Platform called Sentinel Protocol are trying to win part of the markets. Asia is hard to crack:
“While the company appears to focus initially on the South East Asian markets, a Japan market entry does not seem too far-fetched, but obviously the “Big Three” have set the bar quite high in terms of organizational structure, local leadership and Japanese investor base.”
Asia is a hotbed for crypto currency activity, especially China. Japan has one of the strongest Asian economies and as a country heavily invested in advanced technology it needs to be monitor the crypto currencies.
Whitney Grace, January 15, 2020
Amazon: Wooden Shoes, Tulips, and Cheese. Oh, and Money. Yes, Money
January 21, 2020
Amazon is moving into the Netherlands. “Amazon Confirms Netherlands Expansion” states:
Amazon has said it plans to expand its Amazon.nl site by making physical product categories available to Dutch customers later this year. The e-commerce seller launched an e-book shop on Amazon.nl in 2014, but physical products have been offered via a Dutch language option on Amazon’s Germany country site. Netherlands-based customers have also been offered Prime membership since 2017. Amazon has also announced that third-party sellers in the Netherlands and around the world can now register their accounts in preparation for the launch.
This is an important step for Amazon. The Netherlands is an ideal location for same day services. For merchants wanting to tap into the dense population centers serviced from Amazon’s Netherlands location, navigate to “Step-by-Step Guide: How to Sell in Europe with Amazon” for some useful information. To get a sense of the scope of Amazon’s international operations, you may find this map to be helpful:
The darker orange indicates regions served by Amazon via its ecommerce network.
Stephen E Arnold, January 21, 2020
Google: Cake, Ice Cream, and Presents. Outsiders Not Really Wanted
January 21, 2020
Sundar Pichai is generating some PR buzz. The topic is, on the surface, regulating artificial intelligence. News flash: Barn burned, horses gone, and a new data center has been constructed on the site. Google’s been doing the smart software thing for decades. The evidence is publicly available. Just read Google’s patent applications. There are smart “janitors.” There are intelligent advertising dashboards. There are the hundreds of “signals” processed to make sure that search results are just wonderfully useful. To whom? Well, to Google and maybe advertisers.
The write up “Google Boss Sundar Pichai Calls for AI Regulation” provides an interesting take on Google’s PR play. DarkCyber noted this statement in the Beeb’s article:
Writing in the Financial Times, Sundar Pichai said it was “too important not to” impose regulation but argued for “a sensible approach”. He said that individual areas of AI development, like self-driving cars and health tech, required tailored rules.
None of the examples provided in the first paragraph to this blog post are mentioned.
Why?
Google wants to have its cake, ice cream, and presents. The existing smart software is just fine. The future stuff which Google and others have not been able to convert to an online ad scale cash stream can be regulated. Autonomous weapons? Maybe?
The Beeb states:
Google launched its own independent ethics board in 2019, but shut it down less than two weeks later following controversy about who had been appointed to it.
Yeah, regulation. The Google way.
Stephen E Arnold, January 21, 2020
Technical Debt: Less Like Tetris, More Like Ignoring Rotting Foundations
January 21, 2020
Googlers were chattering about technical debt years ago. I can’t recall the specific service which triggered a discussion about investing, patching, ignoring, or shuttering a service due to “costs.” The online ad giant was not the first mover in MBA/bean counter thinking about the resources consumed maintaining, enhancing, and changing the oil in its massive online systems.
DarkCyber noted “Technical Debt Is like a Tetris Game.” The write up is interesting, and the comparison in some ways is apt. However, video games are set up so that “winning” is often elusive. Dealing with technical debt in an organization is a bit different. The erosion often takes time and may be caused by wrapping the core software in more code. How often are substantive changes made to Amazon, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft services. Amazon recommends books the DarkCyber team has already read. Why not look up recommendations in the user’s list of Kindle purchases? An expense for technical debt or managerial indifference? Facebook routinely purges false accounts, but DarkCyber’s mascot has a Facebook page and posts infrequently and then via a software script. The page is still alive and kicking. Why not match user activity to an account and dump the dogs? Pun intended. Technical rot, not technical debt and who wants to lose a “user”? Google delivers irrelevant search results for many queries. Why not fix up the clever PageRank thing? Technical debt or the lack of programmers who want to plunge their hands into the terracotta tiles of the Stanford Mycenaean’s? And Microsoft? Why not make numbering work in Word or document the known dependencies in the Pharonic Fast Search & Transfer code.
These are not game scenarios. These examples are conscious choices to avoid fiddling with software developed decades ago. The premise appears to be that “good enough” is indeed the path to riches. DarkCyber believes that a failure to invest in foundations means that the structure will sag over time. If the structure collapses, the problems are not the death of colorful digital creatures. The implosion will affect humans. Not a game.
There is not money, time, and skilled personnel to remediate what’s chugging along. Decades, not weeks or months. Decades.
Stephen E Arnold, January 21, 2020
Need a Specialized String Matcher for Tracking Entities?
January 21, 2020
Specialized services are available to track strings; for example, the name of an entity (person, place, event), an email handle, or any other string. These services may not be offered to the public. A potential customer has to locate a low profile operation, go through a weird series of interactions, and then work quite hard to get a demo of the super stealthy technology. Once the “I am a legitimate customer” drill is complete, the individual wanting to use the stealthy service has to pay hundreds, thousands, or even more per month. In our DarkCyber video program we have profiled some of these businesses.
No more.
The technology and possibly a massive expansion of monitoring is poised to make tools reserved for government agencies available to anyone with an Internet connection and a credit card. Brandchirps.com provides:
Online reputation management monitoring. The idea is that when the string entered in the standing query service appears, the user will be modified. The company says:
We allow you to input your brand, your name, or other data so you make sure your reputation stays up to date.
The service tracks competitors too. The service is easy to use:
Simply enter your competitor’s names and keep track of what they are doing right, or doing wrong!
How much does the service cost? Are we talking a letter verifying that you are working for law enforcement or an intelligence agency? A six figure budget? A staff of technologists.
Nope.
The cost of the service (as of January 20, 2020) is:
- $7 per month for five keywords
- $16 per month for 20 keywords
Several observations:
- The cost for this service which allegedly monitors the Web and social media is very low. Government organizations strapped for cash are likely to check out this service.
- The system does not cover the Dark Web and other “interesting” content, but that could be changed by licensing data sets from specialists, assuming legal and financial requirements of the Dark Web content aggregators can be negotiated by Brandchirps.
- It is not clear at this time if the service monitors metadata on images and videos, podcast titles, descriptions, and metadata, or other high-value content.
- The world of secret monitoring and alerts has become more accessible which can inspire innovators to make use of this tool in novel ways.
Net net: Brandchirps is one more example of a technique once removed from general public access that has lost its mantle of secrecy. Will this type of service force the hand of specialized vendors? Yep.
Stephen E Arnold, January 21, 2020
Calling Out Search: Too Little, Too Late
January 20, 2020
The write up’s title is going to be censored in DarkCyber. We are not shrinking violets, but we think that stop word lists do exist. Problem? Buzz your favorite ad supported search vendor and voice your complaints.
The write is “How Is Search So #%&! Bad? A ‘Case Study’.” The author appears to be frustrated with the outputs of ad supported and probably other types of seemingly “free” search systems providing links to Web content. This is what some people call “open source intelligence online”. There are other information resources available, but most of the consumer oriented, eyeball hungry vendors ignore i2p, forums with minimal traffic, what some experts call the Dark Web, and even some government information services. How many people pay any attention to the US National Archives? Be honest in your assessment.
Here’s a passage we noted:
Google Search is ridiculously, utterly bad.
This seems clear.
The write up provides some examples, but I anticipate that some other people have found that the connection between a user’s query and the Google search outputs is tenuous at best. One criticism DarkCyber has of the write up is that it mentions Google, shifts to Reddit, and then to metadata. The key point for us was the focus on time.
Now time is an interesting issue in indexing. Years ago I did a research project on the “meaning” of “real time” in online services. I think my research team identified five or six different types of time. I will skip the nuances we identified and focus only on the data or freshness of an item in a results list.
Let’s by sympathetic to the indexing company. Here’s why:
First, many documents do not provide an explicit date in the text of the article. In Beyond Search and DarkCyber, you will notice that we provide the author’s name and a day and data at which the article was posted. Many write ups on the open Web don’t bother. In fact, there will be no easy way to date the time the author posted the story within the content displayed in a browser. Don’t you love news releases which do not include a date, time, and time zone?
Second, many write ups include dates and times in the text of an article. For example, the reference to Day 2 of the recent CES trade show may include the explicit date January 8, 2020, for a product announcement. The approach is similar to using CES without spelling out “Consumer Electronics Show.” Buy, hey, these folks are busy, and everyone in the know understands the what and when, right?
Third, auto-assigned dates by operating systems may be “correct” when a file or content object is created. But what happens when a file or drive is restored? The original dates and metadata may be replaced with the time stamp of the restore. What about date last accessed or date last changed? Too much detail. Yada yada.
Fourth, time sorting is possible. Google invested in Recorded Future (now part of Insight). I had heard that someone at the GOOG thought Recorded Future’s time functions were nifty. Guess not. Google did not implement more sophisticated time functions in any service other than those related to advertising. For the great unwashed masses of those who don’t work at Google, tough luck I supposed.
Fifth, when was the content first indexed. More significantly, when was the content last updated. Important? May be, gentle reader. May be.
There are several other conditions as well. For the purposes of a blog post, I want to make clear: The person who is annoyed with search should have been annoyed decades ago. These time problems are not new, and they are persistent.
The author with a penchant for tardy profanity stated:
Part of the issue in this specific case is that they’ve started ignoring settings for displaying results from specific time periods. It’s definitely not the whole issue though, and not something new or specific to phone searches. Now, I’ve always been biased towards the new – books, tech, everything, but I can’t help but feel that a lot of things which were done pretty well before are done worse today. We do have better technology, yet we somehow build inferior solutions with it all too often. Further, if they had the same bias of showing me only recent results I’ll understand it better, but that’s not even the case. And yes, I get that the incentives of users and providers don’t align perfectly, that Google isn’t your friend, etc. But what is DDG’s excuse? As for the Case Study part, and me saying this isn’t simply a rant – I lied, hence the quotation marks in the title. Don’t trust everything you read, especially the goddamn dates on your search results.
The write up omits a few other minor problems with modern search and retrieval systems. Yep, this includes Reddit, LinkedIn, and a bunch of others. Let me provide a few dot points:
- Poorly implemented Boolean search
- Zero information about what’s in an index
- Zero information about what’s excluded from and index and why
- Minimal auto linking to information about an “author” or the “source” of the content
- No data to make a precision or recall calculation possible and reproducible
- No data to make it possible to determine overlap among Web indexes. Analyses must be brute forced. Due to the volatility, latency, and editorial vagaries of ad supported Web search systems, data are mostly suggestive.
Why? Why are none of these dot points operative?
Answer: Too expensive, too hard, not appropriate for our customers, and “What are you talking about? We never heard of half these issues you identified.”
Net net: Years ago I wrote an article for Searcher Magazine, edited at the time by Barbara Quint, a bit of an expert in online information retrieval. She worked at RAND for a number of years as an information expert. She said, “Do you really want me to use the title ‘Search Sucks’ on your article.” I told her, use whatever title you want. But if you agree with me, go with “sucks.” She used “sucks”. Let’s see that was a couple of decades ago.
Did anyone care? Nope. Does anyone care today? Nope. There you go.
Stephen E Arnold, January 20, 2020
European Commission Facial Recognition White Paper
January 20, 2020
The EC is trying to herd ducks. The facial recognition issue may become less of a backburner issue and more of a mass of congealed spaghetti. A white paper, allegedly the real deal, of course, has surfaced. You can download the document from this link: https://www.euractiv.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2020/01/AI-white-paper-EURACTIV.pdf. If it is not available, DarkCyber doesn’t have any bright ideas. The document has no title and is dated “12/12”. As you know, none of the Web search engines are very good when it comes to traditional bibliographic metadata.
Stephen E Arnold, January 19, 2020
The Clearview Write Up: A Great Quote
January 20, 2020
DarkCyber does not want to join in the hand waving about the facial recognition company called Clearview. Instead, we want to point out that the article is available without a pay wall from this link: https://bit.ly/2TO26H1
Also, the write up contains a great quote about technology like facial recognition. Here it is:
It’s creepy what they’re doing, but there will be many more of these companies. There is no monopoly on math.—Al Gidari, a privacy professor at Stanford Law School
DarkCyber wants to point out that a number of companies have gathered collections of images from a wide range of sources. The write up points to investors who may or may not be the power grid behind this particular technology application.
The inventor fits a stereotype: College drop out, long hair, etc.
The write up also identifies officers who allegedly found the database of images and the services helpful.
The New York Times continues to report on specialized technology. There are upsides and downsides to the information. One upside is that the write ups inform people about technology and its utility. The downside is that the information presented may generate a situation in which individuals can be put at risk or a negative tint given to something that is applied math and publicly accessible data.
It is interesting to consider combining services; for example, brand monitoring and image search. Perhaps that is another story for the New York Times?
Stephen E Arnold, January 20, 2020
Answering This Question: What Does Country X Export? Now Easy
January 20, 2020
Economic complexity is not the bane of college fresh persons. Nope. Investors, New Age snake oil vendors, and quick-buck artists need to answer questions like “What does Peru export?” Answering the question requires work, including interacting with the wonderful resources of online government agencies and non governmental organizations. Now you can answer the Peru question as well as exports by any other country with a mouse click. Head over to the tree map visualization tool from the Observatory of Economic Complexity. You will find the Web system at this link. Data are not real time, but, for now, the reports are free. Hours of fun, just like those cram sessions at university for the Econ 101 mid term.
Stephen E Arnold, January 20, 2020
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