Facebook WhatsApp: Disappearing Media. Really? Gone for Good?
September 28, 2020
Facebook is endlessly entertaining. On one tentacle, the octopus company seeks to lessen the competitive threats from next generation social media like TikTok-type videos. On another tentacle, Facebook suggests that those in the European Union can do without Facebook. DarkCyber thinks of this as “the take my ball and go home” tactic. Ten year olds with minimal physical coordination but a stock of high end athletic equipment have been known to trot out this argumentative chestnut. Another tentacle semi cooperates with government officials. Another tentacle balances on a knife edge in order to keep employees happy with the wonderful social environment within the helpful company’s digital walled garden. There are other tentacles too, but I want to focus your attention on “WhatsApp Expiring Media Feature Details Tipped via New Beta Version.” Keep in mind that “beta” does not mean something a thumbtyper will be able to use.
The write up explains:
WhatsApp 2.20.201.6 beta for Android has been released with further references for a new feature called “Expiring Media.” The feature, as its name suggests, would make media files such as images, videos, and GIFs sent to the recipient’s phone over WhatsApp disappear once they are viewed.
Interesting. Just one question:
If media are disappeared for users, are those data deleted from the Facebook servers?
One hopes not; otherwise, some investigations will be slowed or halted.
Stephen E Arnold, September 28, 2020
Silicon Valley CEOs Called Psychopaths
September 28, 2020
“Why Silicon Valley CEOs Are Such Raging Psychopaths?” calls Silicon Valley CEOs psychopaths. That’s not new, but the idea that these skilled managers are “raging” is a novel twist. The article states:
According to the Hare Psychopathy Checklist — the universally accepted diagnostic tool used to assess this disorder — a psychopathic personality includes traits such as a grandiose sense of self-worth, a lack of remorse or guilt, poor behavioral controls, pathological lying and a lack of empathy. These attributes aren’t just present “but celebrated in Silicon Valley,” says Gavet, who once held the position of executive vice-president of global operations for Priceline Group, among other roles.
The Gavet is, as if you did not know, is the author of a new book called “Trampled by Unicorns: Big Tech’s Empathy Problem and How to Fix It.” Maëlle Gavet worked at Priceline and tallied 15-years in Unicornville. The article states:
Research by the FBI found that companies managed by psychopaths tend to have decreased productivity and low employee morale. In fact, Silicon Valley’s psychopathic traits “trickle down through entire organizations,” says Gavet. “In effect creating psychopathic companies.” This is enabled by an “infantilized culture” at many start-up companies, where employees become accustomed to working in “hyper-privileged bubbles where their every whim is catered to and every need anticipated,” she writes.
Amazon takes a punch as well:
She sees evidence of it happening already. Tim Bray, a celebrated engineer at Amazon and their onetime vice president of Web Services, quit his job in May because of the “toxicity running through the company culture,” as he wrote in a blog post. “I choose neither to serve nor drink that poison,” he wrote.
DarkCyber notes that the publicist who nudged the New York Post to write an article and book marketing use case deserves a Google mouse pad. DarkCyber wonders if Rupert Murdoch’s other New York are property will provide similar dead tree coverage of the book?
Will Mr. Murdoch purchase a copy, or will the wiley John Wiley provide the esteemed publisher with a complimentary copy? This has been a tough year for trees. First Bolton, then Rage, and now the psychopath thing. Trees, be aware: There is Kindle to save you someday, maybe?
Stephen E Arnold, September 28, 2020
Nix on Those Ethics Classes: To the Cricket Ground
September 28, 2020
I read “Cambridge Analytica’s Ex-CEO Banned from Running Companies for 7 Years.” I immediately thought about the former top dog at Fast Search & Transfer. His dalliance with financials resulted in a two year jail sentence with one year suspended if the information in Global Investigations Review is on the money; that is, actual money, not the confections generated by the enterprise search system that could do more than Autonomy’s system. The CNet article quoted a legal eagle as saying:
Following an extensive investigation, our conclusions were clear that SCL Elections had repeatedly offered shady political services to potential clients over a number of years,” Mark Bruce, chief investigator for the UK government’s Insolvency Service, said in a release. “Alexander Nix’s actions did not meet the appropriate standard for a company director and his disqualification from managing limited companies for a significant amount of time is justified in the public interest.”
Which sentence was more appropriate? A year in jail for financial impropriety or generating outputs which may have altered outcomes of democratic elections?
Good question.
Now about those ethics classes at Eton? Nope, a student will learn how to promote understanding of relationships between humans, location and environment and incorporate technology to expand learning experiences. One plus of the Etonian’s education: Lots of practice with “trials.”
Jail time? Obviously inappropriate. Just common courtesy, of course. Of course, old chum.
Stephen E Arnold, September 28, 2020
Quite an Emoji for 2020
September 28, 2020
DarkCyber does not use too many emojis. Sure, we put them in our DarkCyber video news program to add visual punctuation. Most days, words are okay or K in the lingo of the thumbtypers. One of the research team called attention to “These New Emojis Perfectly Sum Up This Dumpster Fire of a Year.” The image comes from an outfit called Emojipedia. We think this is the Oxford Dictionary updated for Gen X and Gen Y mobile messaging addicts.
Nifty and appropriate. Keep in mind that in about 12 weeks we can look back and reflect on the pandemic, economic erosion, social unrest, and the asteroid which will have collided with earth on or about the first week of November.
Does dumpster fire capture the spirit of this memorable year? The emoji does.
Stephen E Arnold, September 28, 2020
China: A Digital Currency Forecast
September 27, 2020
DarkCyber noted “‘One Day Everyone Will Use China’s Digital Currency.” If you have read Beyond Search/Dark Cyber before, you may know that words like “all,” “every,” and similar categorical affirmatives are irritants. We live in an era of “black swans” and words like “never” are tough to accept as characterizing the present datasphere. Nevertheless, we have an “everyone” from the Beeb.
The main idea is that Chinese digital currency will become the big dog. Hasta la vista dollares en efectivo. The Delphic statement comes from Chandler Guo, a “pioneer in cryuptocurrency.” The Chinese DCEP is coming. DCEP is the digital currency electronic payment, and it seems destined to become the way to pay.
The write up notes:
But many question whether it will succeed and there are concerns that it will be used by Beijing to spy on citizens.
And there is the Chinese spy thing.
The article includes an anonymous source, a now standard journalistic convention:
“The Chinese government believes that if some other countries can also use the Chinese currency it can break the United States’ monetary sovereignty. The United States has built the current global financial system and the instruments,” says an anonymous Chinese crypto currency observer known as Bitfool.
Are Guo and Bitfool correct? Sure, why not. It is 2020, the Year of the Black Swan.
Stephen E Arnold, September 27, 2020
Facebook: Fine Thinking
September 26, 2020
I read “Former Facebook Manager: We Took a Page from Big Tobacco’s Playbook.” The main idea is that a former Facebook professional revealed how the gears meshed within the Facebook distributed intelligence machine. For me, the allegedly truthful revelations add some color to my understanding of what I call high school science club thinking.
The write up quotes the actual factual testimony of Facebook’s former director of monetization (good title that), quoting a certain Tim Kendall as saying:
“We sought to mine as much attention as humanly possible… We took a page form Big Tobacco’s playbook, working to make our offering addictive at the outset.”
What’s interesting is the way in which Ars Technica approached the story. The article lets Mr. Kendall’s own words and some facts about Facebook’s fine manager-employee relations beef up the write up.
What’s interesting is the way in which Ars Technica approached the story. The article lets Mr. Kendall’s own words and some facts about Facebook’s fine manager-employee relations beef up the write up.
Facebook continues to capture the attention of the savvy US elected officials. The social media company opened for business in 2004. That works out to more than 15 years ago. Now after controversies with alleged “co-founders”, the pompous Etonian, and interactions with the clear-minded European union officials, Facebook is getting scrutinized by the US government.
What if Mr. Kendall is making Facebook look different like a reflection in a fun house mirror? What if Facebook is a happy, happy place? What if Facebook has contributed to social comity?
What if Facebook is the best thing one can say about 2020?
Stephen E Arnold, September 26, 2020
US Public Records: When Is Mail Mail?
September 25, 2020
DarkCyber operates from rural Kentucky. We do watch what other fly over states do. “Citizens Not Entitled to Receive Public Records by Email, Judge Rules” explains that in Oklahoma:
Custer County District Judge Jill Weedon ruled this summer, though, that the law does not entitle citizens to receive public records by email, upholding the county sheriff’s refusal to send a police report to a professor.
Like the song from “Oklahoma” says:
It’s a scandal, it’s an outrage!
Any farmer will tell you it’s true.
The article points out:
“The court … agrees that it would be more efficient to produce the requested documents electronically,” she said, “however [the act] does not require that the sheriff do so. The remedy … is in the Legislature, not the courts.”
The solution? Put on a mask and pick up the records in person maybe? That email stuff is progressive for Kentucky and obviously Oklahoma too.
Stephen E Arnold, September 25, 2020
Automated Databases: Data Sets for Sale
September 25, 2020
The word “scrape” refers to software. The code copies data from a Web site. The data are converted to a standard format. These data are gathered in a database. The key points are that the data can be accessed on a public Web site. Some scraping processes can log on and enter passwords. The result of “scraping” is the digital equivalent of an old-fashioned researcher’s note cards. Scrapehunt provides scraping as a service. The magic of Scrapehunt.com’s service is that you can purchase a set of scraped data created by the company. You can also use the service to generate a custom database. One example is the firm’s news database which can cost a couple of hundred dollars or less if there is a sale underway. The data can be used to provide grist for a machine learning mill. For more information, navigate to Scrapehunt’s Web site.
Stephen E Arnold, September 25, 2020
Sentiment Analysis with Feeling
September 25, 2020
As AI technology progresses, so too does the field of sentiment analysis. What could go wrong? Sinapticas explores “How Algorithms Discern Our Mood from What We Write Online.” Reporter Dana Mackenzie begins with an example we can truly relate to right now:
“Many people have declared 2020 the worst year ever. While such a description may seem hopelessly subjective, according to one measure, it’s true. That yardstick is the Hedonometer, a computerized way of assessing both our happiness and our despair. It runs day in and day out on computers at the University of Vermont (UVM), where it scrapes some 50 million tweets per day off Twitter and then gives a quick-and-dirty read of the public’s mood. According to the Hedonometer, 2020 has been by far the most horrible year since it began keeping track in 2008. The Hedonometer is a relatively recent incarnation of a task computer scientists have been working on for more than 50 years: using computers to assess words’ emotional tone. To build the Hedonometer, UVM computer scientist Chris Danforth had to teach a machine to understand the emotions behind those tweets — no human could possibly read them all. This process, called sentiment analysis, has made major advances in recent years and is finding more and more uses.”
The accompanying “Average Happiness for Twitter” graph is worth a gander, and well illustrates the concept (and the ride that has been 2020 thus far). The article is a good introduction to sentiment analysis. It contrasts lexicon-based with the more complex neural network approaches. We learn neural networks may never completely eclipse lexicon-based systems because of the immense computing power required for the latter. Hedonometer, for example, uses a lexicon.
Mackenzie also describes several applications of sentiment analysis, like predicting mental health, assessing prevailing attitudes on issues of the day, and, of course, supplying business intelligence. And the hedonism of the hedonometer, of course.
Cynthia Murrell, September 25, 2020
Microsoft Bing: Assertions Versus Actual Search Results
September 25, 2020
DarkCyber read “Introducing the Next Wave of AI at Scale innovations in Bing.” The write up explains a number of innovations. These enhancements will make finding information via Bing easier, better, faster, and generally more wonderful.
The main assertions DarkCyber noted are:
Smarter suggestions. The idea is that one does not know how to create a search query. Bing will know what the user wants.
More ideas. Bing will display questions other people (presumably just like me) ask. Bing keeps track and shows the popular questions. Yep, popular.
Translations. Send a query with mixed languages, and Bing will answer in your language. No more of that copying and pasting into Google Translate or Freetranslations.org.
Highlighting. This is Bing’s yellow marker. The system will highlight what you need to read. The method? “A zero-shot fashion.” No, DarkCyber does not know what this means. But one can ask Bing, right?
Let’s give Bing a whirl and run the same query against Googzilla.
Here’s a DarkCyber Bing query related to research we are now doing:
Black Sage open source
And here’s the result:
Black Sage is an integrator engaged in the development of counter unmanned aerial systems. The firm’s marketing collateral emphasizes that its platform is open. DarkCyber wants to know if the system uses open source methods for compromising a targeted UAS (drone). Bing focuses on a publishing company.
Now Google:
The first result from the Google is a pointer to the company. The remainder of the results are crazy and wacky like the sneakers Mr. Brin wore to Washington about a decade ago to meet elected officials. Crazy? Nope, Sillycon Valley.
DarkCyber uses both Bing and Google. Why did Google produce something sort of related to our query and Bing missed the corn hole entirely?
The answer is that Bing does not process a user’s search history as effectively as the Google. All the fancy words from Microsoft cannot alter a search result. DarkCyber is amused by Google and Microsoft. We are skeptical of each system.
Key points:
- Microsoft is chasing technology instead of looking for efficient ways to tailor results to a user.
- Microsoft wants to prove that its approach is more knowledge-centric. Google just wants to sell ads. Giving people something they have already seen is fine with Mother Google.
- Microsoft, like Google, has lost sight of the utility of providing “stupid mode” and “sophisticated mode” for users. Let users select how a query should be matched to the content in the index.
To sum up, Google has a global share of Web search in the 85 percent range. Bing is an also participated player. Perhaps a less academic approach, deeper index, and functional user controls would be helpful?
Stephen E Arnold, September 25, 2020
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