A Russian System for Citizen Scanning
April 27, 2020
This may simply be propaganda, but it is interesting. Sputnik News tells us Russia is developing a new, frisk-less citizen search tool in its article, “Russian Engineers Working on Total Recall-Style Unobtrusive Screening System.” Under development at a subsidiary of defense contractor RTI Systems, the project should be completed by next year, we’re told. The tool would “discretely” scan people without having to stop them and use AI to recognize objects in real time. The article cites RTI’s Kirill Makarov as it relates:
“The scanning system is envisioned as a ten-meter corridor accommodating three inspection zones. Passing through these zones, a person can be examined remotely, with the computer determining what he or she is carrying or hiding. The system is expected to help authorities scan for carriers of illegal weapons, controlled substances, or other objects. According to the businessman, the institute tasked with creating the system is already in the process of receiving technical requirements from would-be customers, who see the complex’s unobtrusive nature and ability to work clandestinely as huge advantages. ‘At the moment such a thing is not being implemented anywhere else. Only Israel has something similar, but the low resolution with which they’re working does not allow for the use of neural networks for object recognition,’ Makarov boasted. Makarov also promised that between 85-90 percent of the system would be created using domestically-made components. As far as safety is concerned, the businessman pointed out that the complex will be based on non-ionizing radiation, making it safe for humans.
I suppose we’ll just have to take their word for that.
Cynthia Murrell, April 27, 2020
Google Cloud: A Fog Bank Persists
April 26, 2020
Protocol published “Google’s Thomas Kurian on COVID-19, Customers in Crisis and the Big Cloud Fight.”
Let’s look at one slice of this interview with Google’s stratocumulus of cloud computing. One interesting question and Thomas Kurian’s answer is:
Google has a reputation for closing down services that it believes aren’t being used in sufficient numbers. Among people I talk to, that sometimes raises a red flag when it comes to working with Google. As you work with these new customers who are in really, really severe difficulty right now, what kind of assurances are you giving them that, as they bet on these services from you, you’ll be there over the long haul?
Our cloud services are offered under a standard support agreement. For cloud services publicly, for example, all the GCP services are exactly the same as those from our competitors. So we give them assurances that we won’t deprecate a service without the proper notice period, and the notice periods are exactly the same as competitors.
DarkCyber noticed the word support in the write up five times in the 1900 word write up.
One wisp of condensed information wafted through the write up: “Google has struggled to win the trust of the enterprise buyer.” Why? Perhaps the list of discontinued services displayed on the Killed by Google Web site explains the challenge. With little or no warning, with little or no explanation, and with little or no interest in the users and “customers” relying on these services—more than 190 products and services have been disappeared. To make Google’s “strategy” more clear, Google Hangouts which was marked for death is now trying to be like Zoom.
The article is a showcase for Google to make clear that it really, really is committed to delivering commercial grade cloud services. Google was committed to Google Plus as well as the other 190 plus products and services dismissed with a Googley insouciance.
The write up is crafted to make clear that Google is an enterprise class service provider. The company made that pitch to the US Department of Defense, only to pull out of Project Maven because employees were not happy with the application of a Google technology to a US government need. And there are other examples of the words of the Google not matching the actions of the Google. One example: Search services for China. Yep, waffling.
What’s the challenge for the online advertising company? One clue is that according to the write up, Google’s cloud revenues for the fourth quarter of 2019-2020 was $2.9 billion. Compare that to Amazon AWS revenue of $9.9 billion. Google likes data. Well, that gap is a data point.
Is the Google Cloud going to approach the enterprise with the track record of Microsoft and its partners or the go-go roar of the Bezos bulldozer?
Google has the vocabulary for the task. The Googler uses two interesting words in his clarification of the Google approach. These words are re-pivot and re-platform. Those terms remind me that Google re-placed Diane Greene, the previous stratocumulus of cloud computing.
Did the interview convince DarkCyber that Google will stick with cloud computing? Sort of. You know like the fog comes in on little cat feet. It sits looking over harbor and city on silent haunches and then moves on.
Stephen E Arnold, April 26, 2020
Do Big Clouds Pay Forward?
April 26, 2020
This spring’s sudden increase in work- and school-from-home arrangements has been a huge boon for cloud providers. Many of their business clients, however, have suffered revenue losses of as much as 50 or 60 percent this season. You would be wrong if you thought the biggest providers would have mercy on their small-business customers. Taipei Times reports, “Amazon, Microsoft Offer Little Relief to Cloud Clients.” We’re told Google joins those two in their lack of compassion.
A hallmark of the cloud business model has been flexibility, where companies pay for what they use. However, big providers have been pushing long term contracts with minimum spending thresholds. Companies who could once cover these minimums with ease are now stretched thin, and many feel betrayed. While countless landlords and regulated utilities have offered relief programs, cloud providers are doing little to nothing of the sort. Perhaps they are too busy counting their growing piles of coin. Journalists Mark Bergen and Matthew Day report:
“By the middle of last month, John Lyotier’s travel software business Left Technologies Inc was cratering with the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic. Seeking to cut costs, he reached out to his office landlord, who offered rent relief. Then he contacted Amazon.com Inc, asking to ‘explore creative financing opportunities’ for his monthly cloud-computing bill. The response was succinct: ‘Nope, that’s the way it is.’ … With the economic devastation of COVID-19, entrepreneurs such as Lyotier feel that the fate of their businesses rests on the benevolence of their cloud provider. While Amazon Web Services (AWS) is restructuring some large contracts on a case-by-case basis, according to a person familiar with the decisions, smaller companies are not receiving the same flexibility. Half a dozen start-up executives said that recent appeals to these cloud companies have gone unanswered. While older technology providers, such as Cisco Systems Inc, are offering credits to customers, the major cloud companies have not made any public announcements about deferring or cutting bills for clients.”
As this pandemic and its economic repercussions continue, perhaps big tech will decide to extend some grace to its clientele. After all, one cannot make money off of customers who have gone out of business.
Cynthia Murrell, April 26, 2020
Another Low Profile, Specialized Services Firm Goes for Mad Ave Marketing
April 25, 2020
Investigative software firm ShadowDragon looks beyond traditional cyber-attacks in its latest podcast, “Cyber Cyber Bang Bang—Attacks Exploiting Risks Within the Physical and Cyber Universe.” The four-and-a-half-minute podcast is the fourth in a series that was launched on April second. The description tells us:
“Truly Advanced Persistent attacks where physical exploitation and even death are rarely discussed. We cover some of this along with security within the Healthcare and Government space. Security Within Healthcare and government is always hard. Tensions between information security and the business make this harder. Hospitals hit in fall of 2019 had a taste of exploitation. Similarly, state governments have had issues with cartel related attackers. CISO’s that enable assessment, and security design around systems that cannot be fully hardened can kill two birds with one stone. Weighing authority versus influence, FDA approved equipment, 0day discovery within applications. Designing security around systems is a must when unpatchable vulnerabilities exist.”
Hosts Daniel Clemens and Brian Dykstra begin by answering some questions from the previous podcast then catch up on industry developments. The get into security challenges for hospitals and government agencies not quite halfway through.
A company of fewer than 50 workers, ShadowDragon keeps a low profile. Created “by investigators for investigators,” its cyber security tools include AliasDB, MalNet, OIMonitor, SocialNet, and Spotter. The firm also supports their clients with training, integration, conversion, and customization. ShadowDragon was launched in 2015 and is based in Cheyenne, Wyoming.
Cynthia Murrell, April 13, 2020
Google and Its Cost Cutting: More Than Meets the Eye
April 24, 2020
DarkCyber is pleased that CNBC continues to write interesting news stories. In fact, this write up only mentions Covid twice, a new record for news associated with talking head video. “Google to Cut Marketing Budgets by As Much as Half, Directors Warned of Hiring Freezes” reports:
Google is slashing its marketing budgets by as much as half for the second half of the year, according to internal materials viewed by CNBC. One email about the cuts went out to marketing employees this week, noting the budget cuts and a new hiring freeze for full-time and contract employees.
The now standard unnamed sources and no picture of the “documents” the canny CNBC news sleuths were able to read.
Let’s assume that everything in the write is accurate. Let’s ask some questions which are not addressed in the scoop:
- What’s the connection between Google’s giving away free product listings in Google Shopping and this new austerity?
- What is the increase in data center and bandwidth in the last three years? Why has Google’s CFO been unable to trim or stabilize these costs?
- What will Google do to hold back or flatten the ad losses to Amazon and Facebook?
- What are the direct costs associated with Google’s new found sense of responsibility for problematic content in ads and in YouTube videos?
DarkCyber’s analyses suggest that Google is now suffering from more than two decades of mismanagement. My research team calls this style of running a company the high school science club management method of HSSCMM. The idea is that decisions made without context or sufficient wisdom have created a machine that devours available cash.
On the surface, Google is Googley. But beneath the surface are indications of stress. There are employee pushbacks. There is interesting management behavior in the legal department. There is a palpable sense of vulnerability to Amazon and Facebook.
Googzilla is starting to shiver because there are more innovative, aggressive predators sniffing around the happy campus in Mountain View.
The reaction? Innovation, happy employees, bug free services, relevant search results, easy to use products like Google Maps?
Nope.
Fire people in marketing. Once the lawyers were housed in trailers “off campus.” Now another non engineering group is sacrificed to feed the maw of tough to control technology costs. Sacrifice the marketers.
Stephen E Arnold, April 24, 2020
IBM: Respond to a Hungry Tiger with Deflection and Delay
April 24, 2020
I stumbled across an essay by a former IBM Watson professional writing in his new role at a real estate company. The career choice struck me as interesting, and I decided to read “How to Manage During A Crisis: Sort Everything Into “Now, Next, or Later“. The advice and opinion article appeared in Entrepreneur Magazine. I rarely associated IBM Watson, real estate, and entrepreneurial spirit. Time to learn I decided.
The write up states:
In normal times, every business should have a plan. But you can’t plan for contingencies when the business climate might change, when new laws and regulations are imminent, or, as in our current crisis, public health threats are in flux. At that point, planning is simply a waste of time. What to do instead? React fast.
Management with minimal thought strikes me as a fight or flight approach. The idea of figuring out how to avoid a hungry tiger is one thing, dealing with business challenges seem slightly different.
The desire to react fast may be why this individual abandoned the relative safety and security of IBM for the thrilling world of property management. As those renting properties close their offices, I imagine that property management is becoming slightly more thrilling than it was a few years ago.
This management advice strikes me as the type of thinking that does not match up with IBM. The essay notes:
The U.S. Air Force has a conceptual model for fighter pilots called OODA—or, “observe, orient, decide and act”—that might help you think about crisis management.
This is an updated version of the hungry tiger situation. Humans may be hard wired to get an adrenaline boost from OODA situations — if the enemy’s air to air missile is picked up by the aircraft’s defensive systems AND the systems react in the time available to neutralize the attack. Modern air warfare, if I understand the upside of the F 35 platform, is to never get into this surprise situation.
Are IBM’s problems a surprise like this tiger ruining a nice walk in the bush? Perhaps IBM embraces the hungry tiger as a way to buy time and create a plausible explanation for its revenue decrease and disappointing financial outlook?
What about IBM?
The author just mentions IBM Watson, so I think he is either proud of having worked on that outstanding collection of smart technology, he wants to bask in Watson’s halo effect, or he is making a distinction between the real estate way and the IBM way.
IBM has had its share of minor troubles: Litigation related to RIFFing workers, management turnover at the top, and financial disruptions.
“IBM Q1 2020 Earnings Call Highlights: Withdraws 2020 Outlook Amid Covid-19 Crisis” suggests that IBM is shifting into the adrenaline charged world of facing one or more hungry tigers.
The write up reports:
As the impact of COVID-19 intensified in March, [IBM] clients began to deprioritize some of their projects. In this environment, the company deployed its resources to engage customers virtually, modernize and migrate the applications to the cloud, empowering a remote workforce with cybersecurity and IT resiliency. The company expects its Global Business Services customers to continue to delay and replan some of their projects in the near term.
Okay, Covid was a surprise to almost everyone except the Chinese and BlueDot in Canada. Yes, the virus has created some economic pressure. But IBM’s issues began long before Covid became the alleged surprise.
IBM has bought back about $140 billion in its stock to put some shine on the Big Blue operation. The write up points out:
IBM withdrew its earlier profit outlook for the full-year 2020 given the uncertain environment in the wake of the COVID-19 crisis. The company said that with better clarity on the economic recovery it will reassess the situation and will give an update at the end of the second quarter of 2020. When IBM announced fourth-quarter 2019 results in January, it had projected GAAP EPS to be at least $10.57 and non-GAAP EPS to be at least $13.35 for fiscal 2020. The company expects the second quarter to be more challenging if the customers continue their same buying pattern.
The translation in my lexicon means, “We are losing revenue and costs remain a problem. Circle the wagons. Blame the virus.”
DarkCyber believes that IBM’s entrepreneurial behavior will mean more staff cutbacks, more wild and crazy marketing, and acquisitions which deliver a RedHat type of boost. Yep, fast, decisive action.
What does the former IBM Watson professional advise:
But when an extreme or unprecedented event takes place, those plans almost always come up short—because they’re geared toward maintaining business as usual, instead of coping with the kind of massive disruption that nobody could prepare for… Right now it’s better to ditch those five-year plans… and get ready for curve balls we know we can’t predict.
Whoa, Nellie. I thought that IBM Watson made it possible to make sense of disparate information. Watson can process data and generate “answers.” What this former IBMer recommends and what IBM itslef is doing is rationalizing fear, uncertainty, and dread.
One would think that anyone injected with the Big Blue antiviral would do more than dodge reality. The problme is not a particular hungry tiger; the problem is the IBM systems and methods.
The IBM way has not worked well for years, and it is unlikely that the duck-and-delay approach will deliver what stakeholders expect: Growth, sustainable revenue, and a healthy bottom line.
Never fear, gentle IBM workers, there are opportunities in real estate or as management consultants.
Stephen E Arnold, April 24, 2020
The JEDI Spat: A Dead End?
April 24, 2020
An online publication called GoCurrent.com published “No Winner Likely In JEDI Court Battle; ‘Just Pull The Plug?’: Greenwalt.”
Neither Amazon nor Microsoft will find the observations in the article acceptable.
The principle for the article is Bill Greenwalt, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council. His thinking provides an interesting assessment of the JEDI spat.
Microsoft won the deal. Amazon protested. Now the can has been kicked down the road. The write up asserts:
… Because the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) program is suffering so many delays while technology forges ahead, it is being litigated into irrelevance. By effectively dragging out the trial, the latest legal developments only make that worse.
DarkCyber circled this passage as well:
JEDI, likewise, tried to bypass the usual acquisition bureaucracy to get new technology in at the speed of Silicon Valley. But trying to run government procurement more like a business runs afoul of a fundamental problem. No private company lets losing bidders force it to do business with them; the government sometimes does.
The way to have avoided a winner-take-all tussle might have been for a more progressive approach; to wit, a multi-cloud approach. The article states:
Now, the Pentagon insists it won’t split the JEDI contract because it already has too many clouds. The different armed services, defense agencies, and their subunits are all signing different contracts on different terms – over 500 of them…If the Pentagon had gone multi-cloud from the start, “it would have then been, for a change, ahead of the commercial market,” Greenwalt said. “It could have been experimenting with cloud providers and other solutions that manage multiple clouds for the last two years.”
With more legal thrashing ahead, the friction in the procurement processes becomes evident. One can smell the disc brakes screeching.
Stephen E Arnold, April 24, 2020
Palantir Technologies: Getting the NSO Treatment
April 24, 2020
Rupert Murdoch’s real news outfit published “Data Firm Palantir Saw Crisis Coming, Still Faces Pain.” If you want the online version, you will have to pay. The dead tree version of the story is on B5 of the April 22, 2020, edition of the WSJ which is sometimes delivered to me in rural Kentucky.
Enough about the real news outfit. I want to run down some of the assertions made about Palantir. Assertions, I wish to add, from anonymous sources or people close to the vendor of intelware, not verifiable sources.
I highlighted these factoids from the article:
First, Palantir does a lousy job of sharing its financial information. How does the Wall Street Journal get its revenue estimate from 2019? How does the WSJ know that $100 million in costs have be removed from the firm’s operating budget? Easy. People “close to the company” and two unnamed “investors.”
Second, Palantir is pulling back from its rumored initial public offering after the November elections. Palantir has pulled back or put off an IPO for many years. But now Covid enters the picture.
Third, Palantir is providing “a single source of truth about the rapidly evolving situation.” The situation is making sense of pandemic data and the individuals who are infected or infecting. This is a contentious issue. High profile publicity like that the NSO Group has experienced is not a sales booster in some cases.
There are some other factoid assertion like rumors in the write up, but I want to address the three points I selected from the WSJ write up.
- With regard to sharing its financial data, privately-held companies are not obligated to share financial data. Palantir does, but it may not be the data investors or employees want to see. Palantir is in the secrecy business, and it is tough for specialist firms to tell anyone anything. This is not something unique to Palantir. Write Blackdot for information. Let me know how that goes, please.
- The pullback from an IPO is nothing new. Palantir took shape in 2003. Let’s see. That’s almost 17 years ago. If the firm were in a position to crank out those facing IPO documents and go through the stellar Securities & Exchange Commission process and then hit the road to chat up the market makers, Palantir and its big money backers would have volunteered to drive the minivan from meeting to meeting. There’s a reason why the Palantir IPO is unlikely to happen. Hypothetically the company is concerned about revealing data. Another hypothetical is that companies selling policeware and intelware are not loved by some investors. Check out Verint, please. How much information does the company actually provide about its specialized services? Yeah, about as much as Siemens.
- Third, Palantir pitches the single source of truth idea. But that’s marketing, and it is not a tagline that makes potential buyers say, “Hey, I get it.” To make a Palantir-type sales takes time. The reason is that there are not as many customers for these specialized products as some people like high-flying investors assume. Palantir is more than 15 years old, and Herzliya, Israel is chock-a-block with start ups that are spry, hungry, and equipped with better-faster-cheaper specialized solutions. The sales problem is baked into the specialized software sector. Not even IBM can keep some cyber intelligence sheep in line. South Africa selected an intelware vendor from Poland, not the once proud nation of Big Blue.
So what?
From DarkCyber’s point of view, the Wall Street Journal could dive into more substantive aspects of Palantir and actually identify where the information originates. Even middle school students have to provide a footnote even if it is to Wikipedia. That may garner a C. But no verifiable sources? That’s nosing into the murky land of failure.
Stephen E Arnold, April 24, 2020
Homeland Security Wants To Make Most of Its Data
April 24, 2020
The US Department of Homeland Security gathers terabytes of data relating to national security. One of the department’s biggest quandaries is figuring out how to share that information across all law enforcement agencies. FedTech explains how Homeland Security discovered a solution in the article, “DHS’ CDM Program Focuses On Shared Services Dashboard.”
The project for sharing data is officially from the Department of Homeland Security and is called Continuous Diagnostics and Mitigation program. The Continuous Diagnostics and Mitigation program is a dashboard that gives IT leaders keener insights into cybersecurity vulnerabilities and how IT security compares to other agencies. From April 2020 to September 2020 (the end of the fiscal year), the Department of Homeland Security will pilot the dashboard. The Continuous Diagnostics and Mitigation program uses Elasticsearch to power its enterprise search, metrics, and business analytics.
Kevin Cox is the manager for the Continuous Diagnostics and Mitigation program. Cox states that the program will be expanded beyond regular law enforcement agency:
“DHS is also focused on bringing in more agencies that were not originally participating in the CDM program, Cox tells Federal News Network. DHS needed to make sure they had asset management capabilities, awareness of the devices connected to their networks and identity and access management capabilities, according to Cox.
For 34 smaller, non-CFO Act agencies, DHS has provided them with a common shared service platform to serve as their CDM dashboard, although each small agency can see its own data individually as well, which is summarized in the larger federal dashboard.
Cox notes that this process has not been easy, and DHS benefits when it has flexibility to meet each individual agency’s cybersecurity data needs.”
One of the program’s goals is to see if the tool meets the desired requirements. Cox wants the data to be recorded, utilized on the dashboard, insights are found, and shared with agencies across the dashboard. It sounds like the Continuous Diagnostics and Mitigation program is a social media platform that specializes in cybersecurity threats.
Whitney Grace, April 24, 2020
Google Helps Make A Big Digital Library
April 24, 2020
As a technology company, Google claims that it operates for the betterment of humankind. Google’s main purpose is to make a buck, but when not chasing profit the search engine giant does do other things. Google operates on the edge of cutting technology, because the company is constantly investing and inventing new ideas. It also focuses on projects that preserve the past. In a manner similar to the Internet Archive and historical institutions, Google is working with the “City Of Antwerp And Google To Digitize 100,000 Books.”
While the blog post claims that book publishing is limited to the “dignified and highbrow” society, the true publishing industry has more in common with its sixteenth century predecessor:
“But it was a different story in the 16th century, about a hundred years after the invention of the printing press. Publishing was a high-risk, high-reward proposition: With the right backing and enough capital investment, an entrepreneur could become wildly successful. But publishing the wrong thing in the wrong place could be disastrous—even fatal, with governments and religious authorities taking a very severe view of what content was fit to print.”
During the sixteenth century, Christophe Plantin established his own publishing house in Antwerp, Belgium. He dealt wit religious persecution, but that did not prevent him from becoming a printing powerhouse that continued for generations. Plantin’s house is now an UNESCO World Heritage Site, a museum, and houses 25,000 early printed books. Google and Antwerp have teamed up to digitize over 32,000 books from the museum and 60,000 more from the Hendrik Conscience Heritage Library.
The partnership will result in more than 100,000 books from the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries being digitized and accessed freely through Google Books and the libraries’ catalogues. The books are in the public domain and will contain full text search. The digitization project starts in 2021. Before that Antwerp and Google are sorting out the logistics.
Whitney Grace, April 24, 2020
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