What Has Amazon Caught? The Google Syndrome?
January 4, 2021
No, Google has not launched a virus infecting Amazon Web Services (although AWS has people capable of designing such a virus). Instead Google has infected AWS with its “shiny object syndrome” says Last Week In AWS in the article: “The Google Disease Afflicting AWS.”
Last Week In AWS refers to Google’s mind state as the “launch new service” mentality, where Google perpetually launches new projects, works on them for the headlines, then abandons them. Apparently it is the only way to advance in Google’s hierarchy. AWS, on the other hand, is starting a “launch new service” mentality when those new services should be features on preexisting projects.
AWS should be helping their customers, instead they are creating new and competing services. This mentality has harmed Google and will not do any favors for AWS. The majority of people agree:
“For a company that believes its team should Be Right a Lot, this is pretty clearly the wrong path—according to customers, analysts, random passersby, and employees with a penchant for honesty. It’s not good for anyone, and I firmly believe that you don’t Earn Trust from your customers by making even the most diligent cloud-watchers feel that the cloud is accelerating away from their ability to understand and contextualize what you’ve built.”
The article wonders why no one has pointed this out to AWS top brass. We do not know if anyone actually has, but common sense states that an employee must have reported the top heavy and poor customer service model. This common sense employee was probably reprimanded or fired for speaking the truth. Remember the child who said the emperor was naked?
Whitney Grace, January 4, 2021
Telecom Security: An Oxymoron?
January 4, 2021
Two ideas: First, an unanticipated suggestion for bad actors and a reminder that the telco pros at AT&T are more like the New York Jets than the A team at the old AT&T IBM facility in Piscataway.
I read “Nashville Bombing Froze Wireless Communications, Exposed Achilles’ Heel’ in Regional Network.” USA Today is not my go to source for high technology information. One of my research team was a technology columnist, and I recall his comments about those who reviewed his write ups. Those mentioned at lunch were different from the topics my team and I discussed. Remember those Dummy books from some rolling-in-dough dead tree publisher. My recollection is that the technology write ups were simpler, edited by the estimable Gannett to TV Digest readability. It seems that USA Today pushed its content barriers with this USA Today write up about the Nashville incident included some information of use to bad actors. Here are a couple of examples:
- An injury to one’s Achilles’ heel means crippling. To a pro football player like AT&T, that’s not good.
- Single-point-of-failure. For a professional telecom like AT&T, this means zero effective redundancy, fail over, or smart route arounds. (Was the pre Judge Green AT&T built this way?)
- Three feet of water pooled where the back up generators lived. Water and generators, water and batteries – quite a one-two combo like an ailing quarterback and an ineffective but expensive offensive line.
Okay, enough already.
What do these factoids say to a person struggling for an idea to impair a major US telco? Maybe six RVs at regional centers conveniently located near fiber rich interstates? What about pulling a Quinn in front of Nashville-type facilities simultaneously with a half dozen cheap RVs?
Sound like a working idea?
The USA Today makes the idea more appealing with the statement from an AT&T professional:
Our systems are not redundant enough.
No kidding. Is it necessary, dear Gannett, to provide a roadmap for bad actors? Let’s hope the write ups in USA Today are not crafted with an eye toward readers who are looking for info between the lines. That takes more thought than making something simple.
And for the pros at the AT&T practice field, why not up your game. Less direct marketing of a failing TV venture and more of the old fashioned Ma Bell?
Stephen E Arnold, January 4, 2020
Advertising on the Dark Web with Quo
January 1, 2021
Quo, a Dark Web search engine has appeared. According to “Cybercriminals Have Started Indexing the Dark Web”:
QUO is “a dark web, full-text search engine designed to create a continuously updated index of onion pages” in order to provide its users with a way to “explore the dark web quickly and anonymously, without logs, cookies and JavaScript”.
You can locate the service at this link, but keep in mind that Dark Web search engines come and go. The system was up and running on December 28, 2020, when the research team checked our links. You can run queries for the Dark Web go to topics like carding, contraband, and crime as a service. Search results look like this:
What’s interesting is that the service indexes “eight million pages from around 20,000 thousand sites including their URLs, titles, metadata, keywords and headings.” With any Dark Web search engine, the question is, “What percentage of these indexed pages are active?”
You can also advertise on the service. Navigate to this link and get the details.
Stephen E Arnold, January 1, 2021
Why Google Misses Opportunities: A Report Delivered by the Tweeter Thing
January 1, 2021
Here’s a Twitter thread from a Xoogler who appears to combine the best of the thumb typer generation with the bittersweet recognition of Google’s defective DNA. In the thread, the Xoogler allegedly a real person named Hemant Mohapatra reveals some nuggets about the high school science club approach to business on steroids; for example:
- Jargon. Did you know that GTM seems to mean either “global traffic management” or “Google tag manager” or Guatamala? Tip: Think global traffic management an a Google’s Achilles’ heel.
- Mature reaction when a competitor aced out the GOOG. The approach makes use of throwing chairs. Yep, high school behavior.
- Lots of firsts but a track record of not delivering what the customer wanted. Great at training, not so good in the actual game I concluded.
- Professionalism. A customer told the Google whiz kids: “You folks just throw code over the fence.” (There’s the “throw” word again.)
- Chaotic branding. (It’s good to know even Googlers do not know what the name of a product or service is. So when a poobah from Google testifies and says, “I don’t know” in response to a question, that may be a truthful statement.
Did the Xoogler take some learnings from the Google experience? Sure did. Here’s the key tweeter thing message:
My google exp reinforced a few learnings for me: (1) consumers buy products; enterprises buy platforms. (2) distribution advantages overtake product / tech advantages and (3) companies that reach PMF & then under-invest in S&M risk staying niche players or worse: get taken down.
The smartest people in the world? Sure, just losing out to Amazon and Microsoft now. What’s this tell us. Maybe bad genes, messed up DNA, a failure to leave the mentality of the high school science club behind?
Stephen E Arnold, January 1, 2021
About Those Insider Threat Security Systems
January 1, 2021
Fortinet published a report about insider threats. You can get a copy at this link. The document reveals the trends and challenges facing organizations from insider threats; that is, someone inside an organization helps a bad actor access off-limits systems and services. One statistic jumped out at me: About 70 percent of the companies in the 2019 survey “feel moderately to extremely vulnerable to insider attacks.”
What about 2020? The Hollywood trade publication Variety published “Ticketmaster Will Pay $10 Million Fine to Settle Federal Charges It Hacked Rival’s System.” Hollywood. Companies brokering tickets in the time of Covid. I learned:
Ticketmaster agreed to pay a $10 million criminal fine to avoid prosecution over charges that it illegally accessed systems of a startup rival to steal proprietary info in an attempt to “choke off” the smaller company’s business, federal authorities said.
How did Ticketmaster compromise the target? Hacking, crimeware as a service, Fancy Dan penetration testing tools?
The answer? Read it for yourself:
A former employee of ticketing firm CrowdSurge (which later merged with Songkick) who had joined Live Nation shared URLs with Ticketmaster employees that provided access to draft ticketing web pages that Songkick had built in an attempt to “steal back” one of Songkick’s top artist clients, federal prosecutors said. Ticketmaster, owned by Live Nation Entertainment, said in a statement that in 2017 it fired both Zeeshan Zaidi, former head of Ticketmaster’s artist services division, and the former CrowdSurge exec, Stephen Mead, “after their conduct came to light.”
How do AI infused insider trading systems work? It seems that hiring an employee from a company with interesting ways of dealing with former employees’ access rights is simple.
Companies create their own insider threat issues. No software smart or dumb can prevent problems caused by lazy, incompetent, or distracted organizations’ staff.
Stephen E Arnold, January 1, 2021
Backscratching: No Big Deal, Of Course, Among Science Club Members
January 1, 2021
I read “Facebook : Inside the Google-Facebook Ad Deal at the Heart of a Price-Fixing Lawsuit.” The write up is interesting because it reveals how high school science club thinking operates. I learned:
Header bidding helped website publishers circumvent Google’s exchanges for buying and selling ads across the web. The exchange auctions ad space to the highest bidder during the split second it takes a webpage to load. Header bidding allowed the publishers to directly solicit bids from multiple ad exchanges at once, leading to more favorable prices for publishers. By 2016, about 70% of major publishers used the tool, according to the states’ lawsuit. Google worried a big rival might embrace header bidding, such as the Facebook Audience Network ad service, or FAN, cracking Google’s profitable monopoly over ad tools, the states allege. The Facebook service said it paid publishers $1.5 billion in 2018, the last time it provided such details on its financial payouts.
This seems to boil down to a slick way to ensure that maximum money rolls in from certain types of advertisers.
Here’s the swizzle:
the states allege in the final suit, Google gave Facebook special treatment. Among other things, it allowed Facebook to send bids directly into Google’s widely used software, known as an ad server, the draft lawsuit says. Typically, bidders go through an exchange, which sends the winner on to Google’s server. By circumventing the middleman, Facebook could face less competition and save money. Google charged Facebook 5% to 10% on each transaction compared with the standard fee on Google’s exchange of around 20%, and it barred Facebook from discussing pricing terms publicly, according to the draft lawsuit.
What’s up? Nothing. Think of the deal as the lunch at one of those College Bowl type of competitions for science club members.
No big deal, of course.
Stephen E Arnold, December 31, 2020
Amazon Top Dog Video: A Minor Omission
January 1, 2021
If you are an Amazon watcher, you will enjoy the production values and some of the examples in the video “How Amazon Became the Top Dog in Artificial Intelligence: Tech Video.” On the plus side, the producer has pumped some bucks into visuals intended to represent the way Amazon’s technology functions. Keep in mind that the program is a video, and not a white board in an Amazon tech center. There is one downside or what I call a “minor omission” in the program. The oversight is probably irrelevant because Amazon itself goes out of its way to choke off the flows of information about one of its more interesting businesses: Policeware. Amazon is the plumbing for some of the most widely used policeware vendors who specialize in aggregating and analyzing information to solve crimes. Plus Amazon has a pride of lion hearted entrepreneurs who are developing next generation policeware for their government customers. Also, Amazon has some “interesting” partners who match up products, services, features, and functions for government projects. Are you watching Dubai’s use of AWS? Ah, well, there’s 2021 to dive into that topic. The policeware angle is not to be found in the video. Oversight? Amazon’s influence? Cutting room floor?
Stephen E Arnold, January 1, 2021
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