Technology TapsBrakes on Learning? Well, Well, Well
June 8, 2020
DarkCyber is often amused when friends and acquaintances explain that tablets, personal computers, and mobile phones make their children more intelligent. Living in a cloud of unknowing is a delightful mental condition. One can only imagine the disdain with which the information in “Harder to Learn about Science with Modern Technology – Astronomer Royal” will be greeted.
The person dubbed the Big Dog of Astronomy in the UK has some definite ideas; to wit:
“I think paradoxically our high-tech environments may actually be an impediment to sustaining useful enthusiasm in science,” Lord Rees said….
The gadgets that now pervade our lives, smartphones and such like, are baffling black boxes and pure magic to most people. “If you take them apart you find few clues to intricate miniaturize mechanisms and you certainly can’t put them together again. “So, the extreme sophistication of modern technology, wonderful though those benefits are, is ironically an impediment to engaging young people in the basics, with learning how things work.”
I think the summary is that dumbing down goes up as high-technology squeezes learning into an easily controlled digital experience.
This is a positive for some companies. Are you able to identify two or three?
Stephen E Arnold, June 8, 2020
Many Internets: Fragmentation Gains Momentum
June 8, 2020
The idea of one big digital ocean appealed to some. Now doubters are doing more than grousing at the bowling alley. GAIA-X which surfaced a couple of years ago is chugging along. Slow but steady is the catchphrase. “Legal Entity for Gaia-X Established, European Cloud Platform Now Official” explains:
The first steps to the creation of the European cloud computing platform Gaia-X have been taken, with the creation of a legal entity in Belgium. Set up to address Europe’s dependence on American or Chinese cloud providers, 22 French and German companies, with the backing of several countries, have agreed to launch the joint venture.
The US and some of its big cloudy monopolistic-oriented companies are not on the invitation list. The write up includes diplomatic-type statements. The intent is clear: Independence from US vendors and control of the cloud computing environment in Europe.
Now how does sending email work again? Eurocrats are not into the Wild West approach practiced out West it seems. The fancy talk may mean, “Tie that bronco up out back and wait until GAIA-X lets los americanos in the digital café.”
Stephen E Arnold, June 8, 2020
Degoogling: Yes, It Is a Thing
June 8, 2020
Can free and open source software “degoogle”? Probably not easily or quickly. Nevertheless Reddit user TheEvilSkely wants to try. You can dig through the details, explore the GitHub information, and follow the links at this link. The challenge is that most of the whippersnappers are just okay with the Google. Like Amazon, the service is just wonderful. Why make a change if everything is A-Okay?
News flash: Open source is not just tangled with Googzilla’s feathers (dinosaurs, according to modern research by thumbtypers, had feathers, bright ones too). The Redmond contingent is into open source. Imagine Linux in the really easy to update Windows environment. Amazon is driving its Bezos bulldozer through the thicket of new growth saplings like Elastic as I type this post. If you listen closely, you can hear the bulldozer shift into a lower gear to push annoying old growth software into the dirt. One doesn’t need to have an oracle to understand the earth moving concept.
Open source is a target for these reasons:
- Community software lowers certain coding costs and has enough bugs to make proprietary fixes a money maker
- Young developers learn open sourcey ways in college and arrive ready to earn and burn in their virtual frat and sorority duds when they become WFHers and on prem contractors
- Big companies love open source because they can devote resources to tweaking the software and have enough money to pay legions of certified advisers help out, license open source optimized cloud environments, and pay for proprietary widgets that don’t change the “no handcuffs” idea of non proprietary plumbing.
Worth monitoring, of course.
Stephen E Arnold, June 8, 2020
A Peek into Google and Palantir Contracts: The UK National Health Service Versions
June 8, 2020
Curious about the legalese, terms, and conditions of US companies licensing and servicing government entities in the United Kingdom require? Good news. You can (at least as of June 6, 2020 at 0600 US Eastern time) can read allegedly complete contracts for software and services.
- The Google NHS agreement is at https://tinyurl.com/y88tzdqq
- The Microsoft NHS agreement is at https://tinyurl.com/y8vzj5ye
- The Palantir NHS agreement is at https://tinyurl.com/ybgdl82p
A contract from Faculty.ai is also available. Founded in 2014, Faculty.ai does not have the cachet of a Google. If you want to look at that contract, it is for now at https://tinyurl.com/ya3kzolw.
The deals are between these firms and an entity doing government business under the name of NHSX which seems to mean “a joint unit bringing together teams from the Department of Health and Social Care and NHS England and NHS Improvement to drive the digital transformation of care. COVID-19 Response.”
Are there some interesting details in these documents? Yep. Will these be shared in this blog post? Nope. You will learn some of the DarkCyber’s team insight if you attend our National Crime Conference presentation about investigative tools and systems.
Not invited? For fee briefings are still offered. Contact benkent2020 at yahoo dot com.
Stephen E Arnold, June 8, 2020
Mathematica Not Available? Give Penrose a Whirl
June 7, 2020
If you want to visualize mathematical procedures, you can use any number of tools. Wolfram Mathematica is a go to choice for some folks. However, Penrose, a new tool, is available. The system is described in “CMU’s ‘Penrose’ Turns Complex Math Notations Into Illustrative Diagrams.” The article reports:
The CMU team similarly designed Penrose to codify the best practices of mathematical illustrators in a way that is reusable and widely accessible. Ye says Penrose enables users to create diagrams by simply typing in mathematical expressions that describe relationships, whereupon “the tool automatically takes care of laying everything out.”
More information is available at this link.
Stephen E Arnold, June 7, 2020
Is It Facebookization or Goddellization? Either Way Zation Is a Thing
June 6, 2020
DarkCyber noted the article “Facebook’s Zuckerberg Vows to Review Content Policies.” Interesting. Mr. Zuckerberg, the supreme and respected Great Leader of Facebook, is doing backtracking with a red herring. A vow. Wow. Not an actual action but a vow, a promise, an assurance of rethink-ization. The write up reports in “real news” fashion:
Facebook Inc. Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg said the company will review content policies after employees blasted their leader for his decision to leave up controversial posts … The company will review policies on posts that promote or threaten state use of force or voter suppression techniques, and will also look into options for flagging or labeling posts that are a violation but shouldn’t necessarily be removed entirely, the CEO wrote on Facebook. He also pledged to study Facebook’s review structure “to make sure the right groups and voices are at the table.”
Facebook has been a stellar example of appropriate behavior for years. There have been some slips twixt the cup and the lip. Cambridge Analytica, the role of the firm’s Board of Directors, and testimony before the US Congress. No biggies.
A “zation” for sure. Facebookization appears to mean the act of emitting statements that semi-approach issues of governance and related matters. Change could be afoot. Baloney-ization remains a possibility.
Then there is the non technical Goodellization of mental frameworks. Walt Disney’s “real news” company published “NFL Players Spoke, and Roger Goodell Responded.” Now What? Here’s What We Know.” No mouse ears were included as illustrative touch points.
In a video message released Friday night (June 5, 2020) , NFL commissioner Roger Goodell responded to a video released Thursday night (June 4, 2020) by a collection of NFL stars, including Michael Thomas, Patrick Mahomes and Deshaun Watson. Goodell’s video included three specific statements the players in Thursday’s video asked the NFL to make about racism, social injustice and peaceful protests. “We, the National Football League, condemn racism and the systematic oppression of black people,” Goodell said. “We, the National Football League, admit we were wrong for not listening to NFL players earlier and encourage all players to speak out and peacefully protest. We, the National Football League, believe that black lives matter.”
The Goodellization of a contentious issue arrives with the timeliness and possibly the sincerity of the Facebookization event.
Several observations:
- Employee push back now is more effective than an internal ethical compass for guiding a corporate construct. DarkCyber thought that fuzzy stuff like subjective data was irrelevant in today’s go go business world.
- No actual change has taken place in the isolated, self congratulating worlds of Facebook social media or the voracious maw of video.
- A threat to money and power is more effective than employees posting grumpies on an email system or fencing with attorney Mark Geragos, handwaving, and emulating Roman nobles.
Facebookization and Goddellization. New words. Maybe new behaviors in the online and video constructs?
We’ll see because this social media and TV sports watching produces money. A threat to the cash flow puts the cards on the table, the fingers on the buttons, and the thought processes of Big Wheels in a different gear. Money-ization?
Stephen E Arnold, June 6, 2020
Adulting at Facebook: Filtering Government Generated Content
June 5, 2020
Facebook may have realized that certain nation states are generating weaponized content. My goodness, what an insight, what a flash of brilliance, what a realization about the world of adults! DarkCyber noted “Facebook to Block Ads from State Controlled Media Entities in the U.S.” The write up reports:
Facebook said Thursday (June 5, 2020) it will begin blocking state-controlled media outlets from buying advertising in the U.S. this summer. It’s also rolling out a new set of labels to provide users with transparency around ads and posts from state-controlled outlets. Outlets that feel wrongly labeled can appeal the process.
Some government professionals in Sweden were hip to state actors using social media ads for state owned purposes about a decade ago. Facebook just got the memo maybe? The article adds:
The purpose of labeling these outlets is to give users transparency about any kind of potential bias a state-backed entity may have when providing information to U.S. users.
How many users of social media know that some content is “real,” and other content is “pay to play”? Not too many. DarkCyber has picked up hints that fewer than five percent of online content consumers can figure out provenance as a concept, let alone identify wonky information and data. Infographics? Hey, looks like real numbers, right?
The key point is that adulting is arriving a day late and a dollar short. Does anyone care? Sure, some people. But decades into the Wild West of weaponized content, information and data, slapping an index term on a content object is similar to watching the ocean liner sailing toward the horizon. Missing the boat? Yep.
Stephen E Arnold, June 6, 2020
Jack Benny Tropes Return: Tweets Are Making the Oooooold New Again
June 5, 2020
The Jack Benny Radio Show. A character tagged Frank Nelson, who says, “Yeeeeeesssss.” Funny, yep. When? A half century ago. So what?
Even with the breath of emojis, GIFs, videos, and other accoutrement it is hard to express emotional intent through text. Wired investigated the how and why emotions are expressed in the article, “Whoooaaa Duuuuude: Why We Stretch Words In Tweets And Texts.”
The University of Vermont researched Twitter tweets about why elongated words are used so much on the social media platform. They discovered that stretching a word is a linguistic device conveying a varied emotional range from excitement to sarcasm. Exclamation points are the old dead tree way to express anything from excitement to fear, but apparently they are old fashioned and it shows restraint not to use one. People turn to stretched words to add more meaning to their tweets.
The University of Vermont examined 10% of tweets sent between 2008-2016 for elongated words. Their research yielded interesting patterns, but the most obvious is how complex human emotion is for AI:
“Because stretched words can be embedded with so much extra meaning beyond the words themselves, understanding them is critical for artificial intelligences that analyze text, like chatbots. At the moment, a stretched word may be so perplexing for an AI that the program just skips over it entirely. We don’t want to have to bold or italicize words to emphasize them for the chatbot to parse—and even then, such formatting can’t replicate the range of emotions that stretched words convey.”
Studies like this help AI and machine learning understand the subtle nuances involved in human language. It will be decades before machines are entirely capable of understanding human language patterns, but they more data they have the closer they come.
Oh, Rochester, yessssss bossssss.
Whitney Grace, June 6, 2020
Apple: Search Still Missing from Its Core
June 5, 2020
How about that search function for the App Store? The “new” and “improved” baby iTunes?
This new AI-powered search platform targets a very specific audience. DEVONagent is tailor made for researchers who do their work on Macs, not PCs. It gathers search results from user-specified search engines and removes irrelevant results. Furthermore, it will check selected websites and notify the user when something new matches their query. The description reveals:
“DEVONagent filters everything on its own. Use advanced Boolean operators, proximity operators, and wildcards of unlimited complexity even when the search engines can’t handle them. DEVONagent finds, e.g., galleries or linked documents for you too. Its unique See Also list lets you dig deeper. Read a smart summary of the results, go through them one by one, or explore them with the topics map. Archive the good ones, discard the others. DEVONagent’s web browser, built for research, lets you extract images, news feeds, links, email addresses, even linked documents, with a single click and save them for reference or reuse. The searchable archive keeps your results for reference. Alternatively send them to DEVONthink or save them as files. DEVONagent exports your research in a variety of formats, from a simple list of bookmarks to comprehensive RTF digests and PDF reports. Save your search to continue later on or share it with your coworkers.”
There is a free version, called DEVONagent Lite, but the search assistant earns its keep through two paid versions: Pro ($49.95) and Express ($4.95). DEVONtechnologies uses AI to manage torrents of information; its other products include an app to manage documents and one to map connections between seemingly unrelated pieces of data. (Yes, those are also iOS-specific.) Based in Coeur D’alene, Idaho, the company was founded in 2002.
Cynthia Murrell, June 6, 2020
Amazon Grinds into Teams and Rolls Across Its Playground Cracking the Asphalt
June 5, 2020
Distracted by an inability to deliver packages quickly, Amazon has revved the engine of the Bezos bulldozer. The giant online bookstore and the world’s richest human being is punching the gas pedal and lurching forward. The objective? The Microsoft Teams’ playground. The bulldozer will crunch over the feet of the nimble Zoomers and shove the Google toward the shower room, but the big orange diesel leaves a visible pathway, small creatures unable to avoid the metal treads and assorted debris similar to the storefronts on Main Street USA.
The action is described in “Slack and Amazon partner to take on Microsoft Teams.” DarkCyber does not want to argue which wonky online organizational, communication, and squabbling service is better. Amazon has the technical infrastructure to make almost anything work and to bill people for taking data out of its giant cloud environment.
The write up states:
On Thursday (4 June), it emerged that Slack and Amazon have forged a multi-year agreement, allowing all Amazon employees to use Slack. The news comes at a time when Slack has seen increased competition from Microsoft Teams. In a recent SEC filing, the company said that the Microsoft platform is its “primary competitor”. This is despite the fact Microsoft’s main focus is video and voice calling, while Slack is primarily used for text-based workplace chat. As part of the deal with Amazon, Slack will deepen its partnership with AWS by migrating its voice and video calling functions to Amazon’s Chime platform, in a bid to strengthen its video and voice calling offerings.
DarkCyber thinks this development is important for three reasons:
- The deal makes it clear that Amazon, although late to the game, is going to be trying to be like Zoom on steroids. (A side consideration is that Amazon employees will have a more zippy way to organize the two pizza parties when a fail safe system falls over.)
- The tie up means that Slack is not going away. Amazon can include Slack functions in a wide array of services. Imagine how much easier it will be to chase down knock off product information using a reasonably functional Slack and Chime service? Well, maybe not too aggressively?
- The inclusion of Slack means that Amazon’s oft-ignored policeware services get a useful tool for enforcement and intelligence professionals. DarkCyber thinks this is important, and possibly someone will notice before Amazon jumps out of its hidey hole and reveals that it powers much of the policeware infrastructure for low profile companies.
Worth watching even though the write up is content to point out:
By using Chime technology to run Slack’s video and voice call features, the company hopes to add new features. Armstrong said that the company is looking at bringing video calling to the mobile version of Slack, as it currently does not have this feature. He also said that Slack is looking into transcription.
Hitting the small nail squarely? Yes.
Stephen E Arnold, June 6, 2020
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