Grammar? You Must Be Joking!
June 5, 2020
Perhaps the set of rules many of us worked so hard to master have become but a quaint convention. Write to Edit discusses the question, “Does Grammar Even Matter Anymore?” Writing practices are changing so fast, it is a natural question to ponder. However, states writer Amelia Zimmerman, that very question misses the point. It is the old prescriptivism vs. descriptivism issue—is grammar a set of fixed rules to be adhered to or an evolving account of how language is used? Zimmerman writes:
“Neither side is entirely wrong. Although correct grammar is important for clarity and often determines your reputation on the page, language is an evolving thing, not a static rulebook. Things people said in Shakespeare’s day would hardly be said now; even the spelling and meaning of words changes over time (literally doesn’t mean literally anymore). Now, the internet, text messages and emojis are changing the English language faster than ever. But this divide focuses on the small-picture topic of grammar without addressing the big-picture idea which is meaning. Grammar is a tool that, when used correctly, creates clarity and delivers meaning. But that’s all it is — a tool. Whether grammar matters is the wrong question. The right question is whether meaning matters — whether clarity matters — and that answer will never change.”
Of course, the answer there is yes; clarity is the cardinal quality of any good editor. The article goes on to examine what grammar rules really are (most are more like guidelines, really) and when one might choose to break them. Sometimes breaking a convention makes the meaning clearer, other times doing so makes a sentence more appealing, persuasive, or succinct. Zimmerman concludes:
“Most grammar guidelines have been constructed and are adhered to in such a way that they do help transmit your meaning clearly. … But sometimes adhering too strictly to old notions of grammar can get in the way of comprehension, make your writing too long-winded or ridiculous, or restrict creative expression and poetic effect. That’s when a mix of common sense and your own gut should prevail.”
This descriptivist heartily concurs. Remember. The number is plural. A number is singular. None is a singular, so none is agreeing. Bummer.
Cynthia Murrell, June 6, 2020
Coveo Enterprise Search: A Pivot and a Double Flip from a 15 Year Old Startup
June 4, 2020
DarkCyber noted this story in a New Zealand online information service: “Xero Partners with Coveo to Empower Small Businesses with Machine Learning.” The write states:
Xero has partnered with Coveo to empower small businesses with new functionality on its app marketplace search, powered by machine learning.
Before taking a look at the direct quotes in the article, DarkCyber needs to answer two questions.
First, what’s Coveo? According to the firm’s Web site, the company:
Provide effortless tailored journeys with the Coveo Experience Intelligence Platform. Imagine the experiences you could deliver by embracing the cloud, data, and AI today.
Got that? Coveo was profiled in the first three editions of the Enterprise Search Report as a vendor of Microsoft-centric search and retrieval. Over the years, the company has evolved or at least changed. The firm offered its search system as a customer support component and now it has evolved into providing “tailored journeys”. Let’s call this enterprise search.
Second, what’s Xero? The company’s Web site explains:
Xero is the emerging global leader of online accounting software that connects small businesses to their advisors and other services. Xero provides business owners with real-time visibility of their financial position and performance in a way that’s simple, smart and secure. For accountants, Xero forges a trusted relationship with clients through online collaboration and gives accountants the opportunity to extend their services.
Okay, the company wants to offer an online “store” to sell licenses to companies looking for accounting software.
Now back to the write up. The article quotes an executive at Coveo as saying:
Coveo CEO and chairman Louis Tetu says, “Creating intelligent experiences like Xeros [sic] app marketplace and Xero Central are critical to compete in today’s experience economy. Digital leaders run on data and AI to create the relevant, unified experiences their customers expect – while adding real business value. Few companies understand that better than Xero. Whether a small business is looking to move sales online, coordinate staff or manage projects, Xero’s app marketplace features an array of third-party apps to help with their unique industry and business administration challenges.”
DarkCyber thinks that this means that Coveo will provide product search for Xero’s online store. It is easy to be mystified by words like “intelligence experiences,” “experience economy”, and AI (artificial intelligence). Yeah, jargon is one way to get around the fact that Coveo is providing search and retrieval. (SLI Systems — New Zealand eCommerce search system — is probably surprised by the lingo as well.)
How does Xero explain search? One of Xero’s managers says:
“We’ve seen a 50% increase in people searching for cash flow apps from February to April this year, so we know making it easy to access the right technology is more important than ever…. Tapping into smart insights through machine learning, not only improves the journey for time-poor small businesses, but enables us to consistently evolve our offering to provide beautiful experiences for our customers.
Okay, jargon like “machine learning,” “time poor”, and “beautiful experiences” seems to be a bit of frosting on a donut.
The Canadian company has licensed its search system to a New Zealand accounting centric company to provide search and retrieval for about 800 products.
Interesting. DarkCyber assumes that the inclusion of the buzzwords and jargon is an attempt to make a fairly straightforward ecommerce service into something with a bit more zing. Did it work? You decide because eCommerce search features established options like Elasticsearch and new solutions from vendors like Luigis Box. Coveo was founded in 2005 as a spin off from Copernic desktop search. Luigis Box, on the other hand, was founded in 2017.
Stephen E Arnold, June 4, 2020
GoAccess: A Log Analyzer
June 4, 2020
We are updating our tools section of an upcoming National Crime Conference lecture. If you have access to a Web server and a log, you may want to take a look at GoAccess. The software
was designed to be a fast, terminal-based log analyzer. Its core idea is to quickly analyze and view web server statistics in real time without needing to use your browser.
“Analytics without Google” provides additional information about the software and includes helpful pointer. The article states:
What I further liked about GoAccess is I could run it on a separate machine, transferring logs from multiple servers into one place, then creating my necessary dashboards; this isn’t a specific feature of GoAccess, but a feature of the Unix philosophy. This flexibility works well with my seemingly ephemeral Digital Ocean Droplets, which don’t go kaboom on their own, but rather suffer from my own tendencies to erase and start from scratch. GoAccess reminded me how beautiful composable tools are. Its feature set is minimal and it plays nicely with the tools already available to us on a *nix platform. Do one thing and do it well — words of wisdom.
Worth a look.
Stephen E Arnold, June 4, 2020
Astronaut: Fly Blind into the Video Universe
June 4, 2020
Like unwatched videos? Have a short attention span? We have a suggestion.
Astronaut.io. The service is an intriguing, if potentially bewildering, time killer. The site asks users to imagine they are astronauts, peering on people’s fleeting moments through the window. Then, against a view of Earth from space, they stream random, obscure YouTube videos in 10-second bites until one’s serendipity meter is full. In Wired’s piece, “Watch a Surprisingly Touching Stream of Unwatched YouTube Videos,” writer Liz Stinson explains:
“Scenes from a high school weight lifting competition might follow a birthday party in Texas that follows a man in Russia repairing his motorbike. You never know what to expect, yet the videos share something in common. Andrew Wong and James Thompson created an algorithm that seeks videos fitting specific criteria: uploaded within the past week, with generic file names (IMG, MOV WMV) as titles, and zero views. The result is a fascinating glimpse at the mundane, perplexing, and oftentimes sweet events of everyday life. … One video seamlessly follows another with no buffering. Wong coded three players into the website, allowing two videos to buffer as the third played. This creates a smooth vignette effect where you glean just a bit of context about each clip. Videos last no more than 10 seconds and often change just as you begin to care (a button at the bottom of the page lets you linger on a video). That can be frustrating, but ephemerality was key.”
Wong compares the effect to glimpsing images out a train window just long enough to pique one’s curiosity. Stinson observes that most makers of these untitled, little-viewed videos probably never expected anyone but their nearest and dearest to see them. She writes:
“The tension between the uneasiness of this benign voyeurism and the sensation of feeling connected to a stranger is what makes Astronaut.io so wonderful.”
Perhaps. It can certainly capture the attention. Check it out, and see if the poetic effect is for you.
Cynthia Murrell, June 4, 2020
IBM Watson Is Versatile: Covid Economic Predictions
June 4, 2020
Ah, Watson, so versatile! Now IBM’s famous AI platform, in conjunction with marketing firm Wunderman Thompson, is helping communities cope with the repercussions of the covid-19 pandemic. SearchEnterpriseAI reports on “Using Data And IBM AI to Make Coronavirus Economic Predictions.” Writer Mark Labbe tells us about the Risk, Readiness, and Recovery map:
“The platform, released May 21, uses Wunderman Thompson’s data, as well as machine learning technology from IBM Watson, to predict state and local government COVID-19 preparedness and estimated economic recovery timetables for businesses and governments. … A global marketing subsidiary of British multinational communications firm WPP plc, Wunderman Thompson has collected thousands of data elements on 270 million people in the U.S, including transaction, demographic and health data. That data, which is anonymized, led the company to understand the potential economic impact of the coronavirus quickly.”
The firm has its own technology division, which developed the platform with Watson’s machine learning tech. The two companies had begun working together about this time last year. Labbe describes this latest collaboration:
“The platform, as the name suggests, focuses on three areas:
1. Risk. Health conditions, COVID-19 and census.
2. Readiness. Health support within communities.
3. Recovery. The impact of COVID-19 on the economy.
“Risk identifies how much a given local government organization or zip code area in the U.S. is at risk from COVID-19. Readiness, meanwhile, identifies how prepared an area is by looking at its hospital and intensive care unit availability, and Recovery identifies how economically affected local areas are, how fast they might recover and when they might return to normal.”
A free version of the platform is available, while the full product is being sold to governments and enterprises. The key selling point is the localized predictions which, we’re told, will vary widely even from one county to the next. Was Watson consulted to determine the economic impact of IBM’s recent round of terminations?
Cynthia Murrell, June 4, 2020
AI Enables Cyber Attacks
June 4, 2020
Is it not wonderful that technology has advanced so much that we are closer to AI led cyberattacks? It is true that bad actor hackers already rely on AI to augment their nasty actions, but their AI is not on par with human intelligence yet. Verdict warns that AI powered cyberattacks will be on the rise in the future: “Leveling Up: How Offensive AI Will Augment Cyberattacks.”
A 2020 Forrester report stated that 88% of security leaders believe AI will be used in cyberattacks and over half thought an attack could occur sometime in the next twelve months. Cyber security professionals are already arming their systems with AI to combat bad actors using the same technology, but they cannot predict everything.
Bad actor hackers want AI capabilities, because it scales their operations, increases their profitability, provides an understanding of context, and makes attribution and detection harder. Verdict’s article breaks down a bad actor hacker’s attack strategy.
The first step would be reconnaissance, where chatbots interact with employees with AI generated photos. Once the chatbots gained the victims’ trust, CAPTCHA breakers are used for automated reconnaissance on the public Web site. The next step would be intrusion with spear-phishing attacks targeted at key employees.
Part three would follow with an attacker hacking the enterprise framework and blending in with regular business operations. The next phases would collect passwords another privileges as the hacker moved laterally to gather more targeted information while avoiding detection. The final phase would be where the AI shows its chops by pre-selecting information to steal instead of sifting through an entire system. The AI would get it, download the targeted data, and then get out, most likely without a trace.
“Offensive AI will make detecting and responding to cyberattacks far more difficult. Open-source research and projects exist today which can be leveraged to augment every phase of the attack lifecycle. This means that the speed, scale, and contextualization of attacks will exponentially increase. Traditional security controls are already struggling to detect attacks that have never been seen before in the wild – be it malware without known signatures, new command and control domains, or individualized spear-phishing emails. There is no chance that traditional tools will be able to cope with future attacks as this becomes the norm and easier to realize than ever before.”
The human element is still the surprise factor.
Whitney Grace, June 4, 2020
Google Search: Clutching at Elephant Parts?
June 3, 2020
The DarkCyber research team finds Google search endlessly fascinating. The group is less interested in the relevance of the results and increasingly interested in the manipulations of data. The line between objective results and weaponized results is a thin one. Figuring out what is occurring, the intent of changes in data presentation, and the actions of stakeholders like SEO (search engine optimization) professionals is similar to the behaviors we documented in our Dark Web research. (We summarized some of our data in “Dark Web Notebook. Information about that monograph is available at this link.) Our radar beeped when one of the team identified a certified SEO expert who identified himself as a “hustler.” This is street jargon for a person with behaviors which may be perceived as illegal or quasi illegal.
Consider this Reddit post from Antihero. The focus of Antihero’s attention was a search for mattress. The result returned about 761 million results. However, the first page of search results — that is the one that 95 percent of those using Google view — is entirely ads. To support the argument, Antihero includes a screen shot of the page which indeed is entirely “pay to play” content. Yep, ads, infomercials in text form, carnival barkers who get that prime real estate by paying off the entertainment company managing the event. To sum up, Google is not good.
Now consider this post from a company which depends on Google for indexing and pointing to its content. “Panda and the Death of SEO PR” explains that Google is doing an outstanding job of filtering certain content from its search results. The idea is that bogus news releases which can be output after registering for free news release services is filtered. Plus the changes in search since 2013 have made it more difficult for outputters to put certain content on Web pages which are then indexed by Google and made available to the world. To sum up, Google is good.
Let’s step back. Google is in the business of selling ads. The ad business is different from those halcyon days when Google was furiously litigating with Yahoo about certain similarities between Google’s fledgling ad service and Yahoo’s ad system and method. Google ended up inking a deal; Yahoo went back into its purple jack in the box; and the pay to play approach to “objective” search become the de facto standard in the US and then elsewhere.
When a Web site is not indexed, the webmaster or 23 year old political science major reinvented while living in mom and dad’s basement needs traffic. What are the choices?
- Create content and hope that tweets, Facebook posts, and links in LinkedIn generate hundreds of thousands of page views. Google’s algorithms and ad sales professionals monitor such traffic anomalies. A spike could mean a customer with money to spend. With more than 35 billion Web pages in the online indexes, generating a spike is possible, but it is difficult to achieve. That path is called “organic search.” The idea is that clicks flow from the video, the content, or the image posted. Organic search operates on the magnet principle. Good content pulls traffic. Yes, that happens.
- Buy ads. This approach does work. Amazon, Facebook, Google, and others operate search systems and match ads to user interests. For product traffic, Amazon is emerging as the big dog running in front of the Bezos bulldozer to chase small animals off the trail. Facebook — despite its somewhat unstable political and social position — can deliver person centric ads. Google is the champion of free Web search on the desktop and on mobile devices. If you want traffic, you buy and ad. The ad produces traffic. There is chatter that buying ads has other upsides as well, but those are a subject for a future post.
Now back to the Reddit post. Those who buy ads for content related to mattresses and pay the most appear on the results page in Antihero’s online article.
And what about the eRelease “Google is wonderful” post? It is valid, particularly for Google partners and organizations which have an opportunity to participate in the Google ecosystem.
Net net: When organic traffic doesn’t work, one can work with a Google partner who can provide content distribution and a glide path for ad sales. When one grabs part of an elephant, even when one has one’s eyes open and one is wearing rubber boots and a rubber apron, it is difficult to see what you near.
Stephen E Arnold, June 3, 2020
Command E: A Cross App Search Tool?
June 3, 2020
There are two ways to search on a devices: using a search engine or the device’s search function. As of now, a tool does not exist that searches across an entire device. TechCrunch shares that searching might change with, “Command E Raises $4.3 Million To Build The Ultimate Cross-App Search Tool.” Command E is a San Francisco based tech startup that has worked on unified desktop search tool for the past two years. The tool is designed to search across every app loaded on a device.
Command E was founded by Tom Uebel and Ben Standefer with the goal to address new enterprise problems have arisen, particularly the need for across the board communication between all devices and application. Standefer and Uebel discovered multiple problems with software integration and it inspired them to develop a universal enterprise search solution.
Uebel said:
“ ‘Enterprise search has traditionally been this big bulky IT integration, we’ve changed it to where you can download it and have all your accounts connected and your data synced in five minutes,’ CEO Tom Uebel tells TechCrunch. ‘As the costs of building purpose-built tools keeps coming down, I think you’re going to see a lot of really great software continue to proliferate. Part of our thesis is that you’re going to need a layer to glue them all together in a nice way.’”
Command E’s nice layer of glue raised $4.3 billion in seed funding. The company plans on using the money to hire more team members.
Command E wants their search tool to be available as a simple keyboard shortcut that seamlessly connects and searches every enterprise service. Data integration is not Command E’s only trouble, they also are working on data encryption with the search tool.
If Command E is successful will they sell their tool to enterprise system developers or as a separate extension that is not part of the bigger package?
Whitney Grace, June 3, 2020
Bookmarks and the Dynamic Web: Yes, Still a Problem
June 3, 2020
Apparently, bookmarks are a thing. Again. Memex from WorldBrain.io is an open source browser extension that allows users to annotate, search, and organize online information locally. The offline functionality supports both privacy and data ownership. It is available for Chrome, Firefox, and Brave browsers, and now offers a mobile app called Memex Go. The product page lists these features:
Full Text History Search: Automatically indexes websites you visit. Instantly recover anything you’ve seen without upfront work.
Highlights & Annotations: Keep your thoughts organized with their original context.
Tags, Lists & Bookmarks: Quickly organize content via the sidebar or keyboard shortcuts.
Quickly save & organize content on the go: Encrypted sync between your computer, iOS and Android devices.
Your Data and Attention are yours: Memex is offline first & WorldBrain.io introduced a cap on investor returns so we don’t exploit your attention and data to maximize investor profits.
The page illustrates each feature with a dynamic screen shot, so check it out for more details. You can also click here to learn more about their financial philosophy. The Basic version of Memex is free, while the Pro version costs € 2 per month or € 20 per year (after the 14-day free trial). WorldBrain.io hopes its software will contribute to a “well-informed and less polarized global society.” Based in Berlin, the company was founded in 2017.
Cynthia Murrell, June 3, 2020
The Presumed JEDI Contract Winner Knows How to Catch Attention
June 3, 2020
Yep, Microsoft. If “Microsoft Puts Windows 10 May 2020 Update on Hold for Most Devices” is accurate, the creators of Bob and Vista are matching their previous technical achievements. DarkCyber highlighted this passage:
Microsoft’s latest May 2020 update is on hold for most devices as the company works to resolve a raft of issues… The company even added a prominent warning in Windows Update over the weekend. If you’re on the previous version looking to get the May 2020 Update (Build 2004), Windows Update will remind you that your device “isn’t quite ready for it.”
What happens if Department of Defense personnel require a stable version of Windows. Sometimes, not always, it is life and death for the user of a computing device, a laptop, or a cloud service.
Updating that kills a user’s system may have other — wait for it — consequences. Ah, Microsoft. Good enough even when it isn’t.
Stephen E Arnold, June 3, 2020
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