DarkCyber for August 10, 2021 Now Available
August 10, 2021
The DarkCyber video for August 10, 2021 is now available at this link. The program includes a snapshot of NSO Group’s content marketing campaign, information about inherently insecure software, fine dining at the Central Intelligence Agency, and a sure fire way to phish with quite tasty bait. The drone story explains an autonomous drone. Just give it a goal and the drone figures out what to do. No human input required. Best of all, a swarm of drones can interact with other drones in the swarm to reach a decision about how to achieve an objective. DarkCyber is produced by Stephen E Arnold, publisher of Beyond Search. The DarkCyber videos are issued every two weeks and are available at www.arnoldit.com/wordpress as well as Youtube.
Kenny Toth, August 10, 2021
Google Search: An Intriguing Observation
August 9, 2021
I read “It’s Not SEO: Something Is Fundamentally Broken in Google Search.” I spotted this comment:
Many will remember how remarkably accurate searches were at initial release c. 2017; songs could be found by reciting lyrics, humming melodies, or vaguely describing the thematic or narrative thrust of the song. The picture is very different today. It’s almost impossible to get the system to return even slightly obscure tracks, even if one opens YouTube and reads the title verbatim.
The idea is that the issue resides within Google’s implementation of search and retrieval. I want to highlight this comment offered in the YCombinator Hacker News thread:
While the old guard in Google’s leadership had a genuine interest in developing a technically superior product, the current leaders are primarily concerned with making money. A well-functioning ranking algorithm is only one small part of the whole. As long as the search engine works well enough for the (money-making) main-stream searches, no one in Google’s leadership perceives a problem.
I have a different view of Google search. Let me offer a handful of observations from my shanty in rural Kentucky.
To begin, the original method for determining precision and recall is like a page of text photocopied with that copy then photocopied. After a couple of hundred photocopies, image of the page has degraded. Photocopy for a couple of decades and the document copy is less than helpful. Degradation in search subsystems is inevitable, and it takes place in search as layers or wrappers have been added around systems and methods.
Second, Google must generate revenue; otherwise, the machine will lose velocity, maybe suffer cash depravation. The recent spectacular financial payoffs are not directed at what I call “precision and recall search.” What’s happening, in my opinion, is that accelerated relaxation of queries makes it easier to “match” an ad. More — not necessarily more relevant — matching provides quicker depletion of the ad inventory, more revenue, more opportunities for Google sales partners to pitch ads, and more users believing Google results are the cat’s pajamas. To “go back” to antiquated ideas like precision and recall, relevance, and old-school Boolean breaks the money flow, adds costs, and a forces distasteful steps for those who want big paydays, bonuses, and the cash to solve death and other childish notions.
Third, this comment from Satellite2 is on the money:
Power users as a proportion of Internet’s total user count probably followed an inverted zipf distribution over time. At the begining 100%, then 99, 90%, 9% and now less than one percent. Assuming power users formulate search in ways that are irreconcilable from those of the average user, and assuming Google adapted their models, metrics to the average user and retrained them at each step,then, we are simply no longer a target market of Google.
I interpret this as implying that Google is no longer interested in delivering on point results. I now run the same query across a number of Web search systems and hunt for results which warrant direct inspection. I use, for example, iseek.com, swisscows.ch, yandex.ru, and a handful of other systems.
Net net: The degradation of Google began around 2005 and 2006. In the last 15 years, Google has become a golden goose for some stakeholders. The company’s search systems — where is that universal search baloney, please? — are going to be increasingly difficult to refine so that a user’s query is answered in a user-useful way.
Messrs. Brin and Page bailed, leaving a consultant-like management team. Was their a link between increased legal scrutiny, friskiness in the Google legal department, antics involving hard drugs and death on a Googler’s yacht, and “effciency oriented” applied technologies which have accelerated the cancer of relevance-free content. Facebook takes bullets for its high school management approach. Google, in my view, may be the pinnacle of the ethos of high school science club activities.
What’s the fix? Maybe a challenger from left field will displace the Google? Maybe a for-fee outfit like Infinity will make it to the big time? Maybe Chinese style censorship will put content squabbles in the basement? Maybe Google will simply become more frustrating to users?
The YouTube search case in the essay in Hacker News is spot on. But Google search — both basic and advanced search — is a service which poses risks to users. Where’s a date sort? A key word search? File type search? A federated search across blogs and news? What happened to file type search? Yada yada yada.
Like the long-dead dinosaurs, Googzilla is now watching the climate change. Snow is beginning to fall because the knowledge environment is changing. Hello, Darwin!
Stephen E Arnold, August 9, 2021
Spreadsheet Fever: It Is Easy to Catch
August 9, 2021
Regression is useful. I regress to my mean with every tick of my bio clock. I read “A Simple Regression Problem.” I like these explainer type of articles.
This write up contains a paragraph amplifying model fitting techniques, and I found this passage thought provoking. Here it is:
If you use Excel, you can try various types of trend lines to approximate the blue curve, and even compute the regression coefficients and the R-squared for each tested model. You will find very quickly that the power trend line is the best model by far, that is, An is very well approximated (for large values of n) by An = b n^c. Here n^c stands for n at power c; also, b and c are the regression coefficients. In other words, log An = log b + c log n (approximately).
The bold face indicates the words and phrases I found suggestive. With this encouraged twiddling, one can get a sense of how fancy match can be converted into a nifty array of numbers which flow. Even better, a graphic can be generated with a click.
What happens when data scientists and algorithm craftspeople assemble their confection of dozens, even hundreds, of similar procedures. Do you talk about Bayesian drift at the golf club? If yes, then toss in spreadsheet fever’s warning signs.
Stephen E Arnold, August 9, 2021
ECommerce to VCommerce the TikTok Way
August 9, 2021
TikTok is the most popular non-gaming app downloaded in the Western world. Amazingly it is owned by Chinese company ByteDance Limited. Trump attempted to ban it during his tenure, but failed. The Taipei Times published a Bloomberg Opinion entitled, “TikTok eyes E-Commerce, Gaming And Everything Else” about ByteDance’s future for TikTok. It is astounding how much TikTok has grown over the past year:
“TikTok’s growth and the level of its user engagement have been remarkable. According to Sensor Tower, the app was the most downloaded and highest-grossing non-game during the first half of this year, surpassing 3 billion total installs. Analysts expect TikTok to keep growing faster than its competitors, and industry tracker eMarketer projects that the app’s user base in the US would rise 18 percent this year, compared with a 1 percent increase for Facebook Inc and a 4 percent gain for Facebook’s Instagram.
Most impressive of all, TikTok users are growing more addicted to the short-video service. Research firm App Annie has said that the app has surpassed Google’s YouTube for average time spent per user in the US and the UK.”
TikTok’s competitors are ramping up their own game. Facebook will upgrade Instagram to also be a mobile video entertainment platform. YouTube and Snap Inc. started their own short-video services and are paying creators for content. TikTok is expected to remain the top short-video platform due to its popularity, continues to add new features, and creators do not need to go anywhere else.
TikTok’s current job listings have over one hundred listings for e-commerce positions and nearly ninety with the word “live.” ByteDance wants to become the one stop hub for live-streaming social commerce and they plan to focus on several industries: fashion, beauty, lifestyle, technology, and anything else that allows them to sell merchandise directly through the platform. ByteDance already does this with TikTok’s Chinese counterpart, Douyin.
TikTok could face regulatory action in the US, because it might pose a data-security risk. It could complicate TikTok’s initial public offering, but any advertising is good. Making TikTok “illegal” could make not all the more appealing.
Whitney Grace, August 9, 2021
Strong Sinequa Helps Out Hapless Microsoft with Enterprise Search
August 9, 2021
Microsoft has enlisted aid or French entrepreneurs have jumped on the opportunity to enhance the already stellar software system available from the SolarWinds and Exchange Server misstep outfit.
Business Wire reveals in a hard hitting write up “Sinequa Brings Intelligent Search to Microsoft Teams” an exciting development. Wait, doesn’t Microsoft search work? Apparently Sinequa’s platform works better. We learn:
“Sinequa for Teams enables organizations to unleash the power of Sinequa’s Intelligent Search platform right within Microsoft Teams. … Sinequa continues to recognize the need to make knowledge discoverable so employees can make better decisions, regardless of where and how they work. The Sinequa platform offers a single access point to surface relevant insights both from within and outside the Microsoft ecosystem. Built for Azure and Microsoft 365 customers with Teams, Sinequa has extended its powerful search technology to Teams to help enterprises elevate productivity and enable better decision-making all in one place.”
The tailored Teams platform promises to improve data findability and analysis while bolstering collaboration and workflows. Sinequa is proud of its ability to provide enterprise search to large and complex organizations. Founded in 2002, the company is based in Paris, France.
Excellence knows no bounds.
Cynthia Murrell, August 9, 2021
Who Phoned Home Those Research Results?
August 9, 2021
A routine at universities with grant hungry tenure surfers works like this: Recruit smart grad students, gin up a magnetic research project, chase grants, and publish in a “respected” peer reviewed journal. A bonus is a TED Talk. Winner, right?
I read “A Tweet Cost Him His Doctorate: The Extent of China’s Influence on Swiss Universities.” The write up points out as allegedly really true:
Education is a key aspect of China’s global power strategy. The Chinese government wants to control the country’s image throughout the world. To this end, it exerts influence abroad, and has no compunction about engaging in repressive actions.
I am not affiliated with any university. I don’t do academic anything. I do pay attention, however, to what probably are irrelevant and minor factoids; for example:
ITEM: The participation of Chinese nationals in assorted University of Tennessee activities; for example, research associated with fission and fusion with field trips to interesting places
ITEM: The number of Chinese professionals’ names appearing on papers related to smart software with possible relevance to autonomous systems
ITEM: The confluence of a research center and a PhD student writing tweets someone in the Middle Kingdom does not appreciate.
Important items or not, the fate of a student in a Swiss university is sealed. The write up states:
Only a few people in Switzerland have sought to disclose and criticize Chinese attempts to influence universities here… Cooperation between Chinese and Swiss universities has expanded in recent years. The University of St. Gallen has 15 such agreements, almost twice as many as ETH Zurich. For the last eight years, St. Gallen has also been home to a «China Competence Center,» the aim of which is to «strengthen and deepen productive relations with China».
The article points out:
Today, Gerber says starting to tweet was a mistake. The fact that he could lose three years of research work because of this still leaves him stunned. Yes, he was publicly critical of China, and once shared a cartoon that he would not share today. «But I didn’t do anything wrong,» he said. Gerber has now given up pursuit of his doctorate. «I don’t want to have to censor myself, certainly not in Switzerland,» he said. In the meantime, he has found a job that has nothing to do with China.
One question: What about American universities or a tour of ORNL?
Stephen E Arnold, August 9, 2021
Another Perturbation of the Intelware Market: Apple Cores Forbidden Fruit
August 6, 2021
It may be tempting for some to view Apple’s decision to implement a classic man-in-the-middle process. If the information in “Apple Plans to Scan US iPhones for Child Abuse Imagery” is correct, the maker of the iPhone has encroached on the intelware service firms’ bailiwick. The paywalled newspaper reports:
Apple intends to install software on American iPhones to scan for child abuse imagery
The approach — dubbed ‘neuralMatch’ — is on the iPhone device, thus providing functionality substantially similar to other intelware vendors’ methods for obtaining data about a user’s actions.
The article concludes:
According to people briefed on the plans, every photo uploaded to iCloud in the US will be given a “safety voucher” saying whether it is suspect or not. Once a certain number of photos are marked as suspect, Apple will enable all the suspect photos to be decrypted and, if apparently illegal, passed on to the relevant authorities.
Observations:
- The idea allows Apple to provide a function likely to be of interest to law enforcement and intelligence professionals; for example, requesting a report about a phone with filtered and flagged data are metadata
- Specialized software companies may have an opportunity to refine existing intelware or develop a new category of specialized services to make sense of data about on-phone actions
- The proposal, if implemented, would create a PR opportunity for either Apple or its critics to try to leverage
- Legal issues about the on-phone filtering and metadata (if any) would add friction to some legal matters.
One question: How similar is this proposed Apple service to the operation of intelware like that allegedly available from the Hacking Team, NSO Group, and other vendors? Another question: Is this monitoring a trial balloon or has the system and method been implemented in test locations; for example, China or an Eastern European country?
Stephen E Arnold, August 6, 2021
Thailand Does Not Want Frightening Content
August 6, 2021
The prime minister of Thailand is Prayut Chan-o-cha. He is a retired Royal Thai Army officer, and he is not into scary content. What’s the fix? “PM Orders Internet Blocked For Anyone Spreading Info That Might Frighten People” reported:
Prime Minister Prayut Chan-o-cha has ordered internet service providers to immediately block the internet access of anyone who propagates information that may frighten people. The order, issued under the emergency situation decree, was published in the Royal Gazette on Thursday night and takes effect on Friday. It prohibits anyone from “reporting news or disseminating information that may frighten people or intentionally distorting information to cause a misunderstanding about the emergency situation, which may eventually affect state security, order or good morality of the people.”
So what’s “frightening?” I for one find the idea of having access to the Internet blocked. Why not just put the creator of frightening content in one of Thailand’s exemplary and humane prisons? These, as I understand the situation, feature ample space, generous prisoner care services, and healthful food. With an occupancy level of 300 percent, what’s not to like?
Frightening so take PrisonStudies.org offline I guess.
Stephen E Arnold, August 6, 2021
Facebook, Booze, Youngsters, and Australia: Shaken and Stirred
August 6, 2021
Quite a mixologist’s concoction: Facebook, booze, young people, and the Australian government. The country seems to be uncomfortable with some of Facebook’s alleged practices. I would assume that some Australian citizens who hold shares in the social media outfit are pleased as punch with the company’s financial results.
Others are not amused. “Facebook to Limit Ads Children See after revelations Australian Alcohol Companies Can Reach Teens” reports:
Facebook will impose more control on the types of ads that children as young as 13 are exposed to on Instagram and other platforms, as new research finds Australian alcohol companies are not restricting their social media content from reaching younger users.
How many companies targeted the youngsters down under? The write up asserts:
The paper examined the use of social media age-restriction controls by 195 leading alcohol brands on Instagram and Facebook, and found large numbers were not shielding their content from children. The 195 brands were owned by nine companies, and the research identified 153 Facebook accounts, including 84 based in Australia, and 151 Instagram accounts, of which 77 were Australian-based. The authors found 28% of the Instagram accounts and 5% of Facebook accounts had not activated age-restriction controls.
I did spot a quote attributed to one of the experts doing the research about Facebook, Booze, Youngsters, and Australia; to wit:
it was clear that companies were not complying with the code. “The alcohol industry has demonstrated that it is unable to effectively control its own marketing…
Shocking that about self regulation. Has anyone alerted the US financial sector?
Stephen E Arnold, August 6, 2021
Deteching: Not Possible, Muchachos
August 6, 2021
“Don’t become an Enterprise/IT Architect…” contains a small truth and a Brobdingnagian baby.
The small truth is, according to the article:
…there are two speeds in IT: change is slow, growth is fast(-ish). Even if upper management (and many others, but the focus of this post is directed at the gap between ‘top’ and ‘bottom’) thinks they understand the complexity and effects, in reality, most of the time they have no clue as to the actual scale of the problem…
The idea is that there is a permanent break in the cable linking the suits with the people who have desks littered with usb keys, scraps of paper, and technical flotsam and jetsam.
Now for the Big Boy truth:
The frustration is that it will become harder to explain the ‘top’ what is going on and it will be particularly difficult to convince. This is especially true if that top has no interest in actually paying attention, because then it will be even harder as the first difficult step is to get them to hear you out.
What’s this mean for little problems like the SolarWinds’ misstep? What’s this mean for making informed decisions about cloud versus on premises or hybrid versus cloud, etc.? What’s this mean for making deteriorating systems actually work; for example, monopoly provided services which experience continuous and apparently unfixable flaws?
Big and small appear to be forcing a shift to a detech world; that is, one in which users (people or entities) have no choice but to go back to the methods which can be understood and which work. A good example is a paper calendar, not a zippy do, automated kitchen sink solution which is useless when one of the niggling issues causes problems.
As I said, SolarWinds: A misstep. Cyber security solutions that don’t secure anything. Printing modules which don’t print.
Detech. No choice, muchachos.
Stephen E Arnold, August 6, 2021
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