TikTok: Privacy Spotlight
September 15, 2021
There is nothing like rapid EU response to privacy matters. “TikTok Faces Privacy Investigations by EU Watchdog” states:
The watchdog is looking into its processing of children’s personal data, and whether TikTok is in line with EU laws about transferring personal data to other countries, such as China.
The data hoovering capabilities of a TikTok-type app have been known for what — a day or two or a decade? My hunch is that we are leaning toward the multi-year awareness side of the privacy fence. The write up points out:
TikTok said privacy was “our highest priority”.
Plus about a year ago an EU affiliated unit poked into the TikTok privacy matter.
However, the write up fails to reference a brilliant statement by a Swisher-type of thinker. My recollection is that the gist of the analysis of the TikTok privacy issue in the US was, “Hey, no big deal.”
We’ll see. I wait for a report on this topic. Perhaps a TikTok indifferent journalist will make a TikTok summary of the report findings.
Stephen E Arnold, September 15, 2021
Triggering the Turtle Response: A Cyber Security Misstep?
September 15, 2021
One noble idea is to ask each and every organization to report a cyber attack and data breach. How are noble ideas like this greeted by commercial organizations or government bureaucrats with one eye on SES and one on retirement on a full pension? My hunch is that certain noble ideas are going to be ignored, sidestepped, or bulldozed under legal briefs.
I read “Exclusive: Wide-Ranging SolarWinds Probe Sparks Fear in Corporate America.” The trustworthy outfit Thomson Reuters says:
The SEC is asking companies to turn over records into “any other” data breach or ransomware attack since October 2019 if they downloaded a bugged network-management software update from SolarWinds Corp, which delivers products used across corporate America, according to details of the letters shared with Reuters. People familiar with the inquiry say the requests may reveal numerous unreported cyber incidents unrelated to the Russian espionage campaign, giving the SEC a rare level of insight into previously unknown incidents that the companies likely never intended to disclose.
Many organizations bite the bullet and keep cyber breach info under wraps. Examples include outfits dealing with financial transactions and juicy pharma companies, among others.
What’s going to happen? Investigators will find interesting information to explore and, in the manner of investigators, and piece together.
What’s one method of dealing with this intriguing government request? The turtle response. Pull one’s head into a shell and hope the legal eagles can make it safe to return to pre-SolarWinds’ practices.
Stephen E Arnold, September 15, 2021
Mythic Search: Yext Introduces the Phoenix with Summer Updates
September 15, 2021
Enterprise search firm Yext is launching new features and a revamped algorithm, poetically named “Phoenix.” We learn about the updates from the press release, “New Yext Features and Algorithm Update Bring AI Search Optimizations to Businesses” at PR Newswire. We learn:
“In addition to features powered by Phoenix like dynamic reranking, the release introduces revamped test search and experience training, as well as a reimagining of Yext’s data connector and app frameworks — all to equip businesses with modern and powerful search solutions.”
The dynamic reranking feature sounds promising. Phoenix analyzes user behavior to push the most relevant results to the top. We are given an example:
“If customers consistently click on a blog post when searching for vaccine information on a healthcare organization’s website, dynamic reranking will push that content to the top of the search results page so it appears first any time someone searches about vaccines. The Phoenix update also introduces more relevant results for queries about locations that are ‘open now’ and rich text fields, like lists, in featured snippets.”
Another feature is the ability to build Yext platform configurations and package them into installable apps. The update also makes it easy to test search experiences from the customer’s point of view. But Yext may promise a bit much with its updates to data connectors:
“With the new update to Yext’s data connectors framework, businesses can use a low-code ‘extract, transform, load’ (ETL) tool that extracts all of their data and transforms it into the same format for easy integration into their knowledge graph (a unique brain-like database of facts).”
We do not want to be critical, but we are skeptical when a vendor of search and retrieval uses the word “all.” Certain types of data are notoriously difficult to access, like chemical structures, audio, video, images, and product-management quality assurance data, to name a few. Retrieving “all” data is unlikely at prices most organizations can afford. Still, it does sound like Phoenix is a step forward from the company that promises “Search made for today. Not 1999.” Today’s “search” dates back a half century, but who is interested in history?
Cynthia Murrell, September 15, 2021
Are Mainframes Still Numero Uno?
September 15, 2021
Mainframes are robust, powerful, and cost-effective computing tools, but they still have their doubters. Planet Mainframe explores why mainframes are the best option with statistical data to verify their claim: “The IBM Mainframe: The Most Powerful And Cost-Effective Computing Platform For Business.”
It is true that Microsoft, Google, and Amazon do not use mainframes, instead they use commodity servers. Hardware is cheaper on commodity servers, but maintenance, software, and operational costs are cheaper in the long run on mainframes. IT expenses are an increasing part of ongoing business costs. Different industries have different operating costs and technology needs, but mainframes still prove to be the cheaper option.
Mainframes also offer a competitive advantage:
“Any large company interested in maximizing computing power AND controlling cost will clearly enjoy a competitive advantage over a similar company that just seeks to avoid mainframe technology in favor of server farms. This advantage translates directly to the bottom line, shareholders and investors. And for a company considering a mainframe migration project as a means for cutting costs, this information could be seen as “found money.””
Anyone who claims that a mainframe is not the superior system is simply ignorant or biased towards commodity servers. Organizations that could benefit from a mainframe system are not upgrading, because they are told it is not cost-effective and it is easier to continue using their older systems.
So Amazon, Google, and Microsoft have not upgraded to a mainframe system, because they do have the money, because they do not want to take the time to change. The “logical” approach is too much trouble.
Wow, I want a mainframe in my home office which is a small closet.
Whitney Grace, September 15, 2021
Forgetting the Lessons of the Phalanx: Zooming In Does Not Work for Some
September 14, 2021
I read a write up from the Android mobile of Captain Obvious. The title? Here she be: “Study of Microsoft Employees Shows How Remote Work Puts Productivity and Innovation at Risk.” Ground breaking!
The article explains without a trace of Saturday Night Live humor:
A new study finds that Microsoft’s companywide shift to remote work has hurt communication and collaboration among different business groups inside the company, threatening employee productivity and long-term innovation.
To make the academic goodness of the report even more credible, the write up explains that the research report was:
published Thursday morning by Microsoft researchers in the journal Nature Human Behaviour. It coincides with Microsoft’s announcement that employees won’t be returning to the office Oct. 4 as previously expected.
I circled this quote nestled in the article:
The desire of employees to have both flexibility and connection with others is what Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella calls the “Great Paradox.” The company is also announcing new features in Teams, LinkedIn and other products meant to address some of the challenges revealed by the data.
War fighters employing the reliable phalanx figured out that Zooming in to a battle was not a reliable way to win. Teaming in, even with new features, is unlikely to yield better results.
Perhaps the lack of togetherness at Microsoft makes life easier for those exploiting the security peculiarities of Microsoft systems and software? No, hold that thought, please. Microsoft’s Windows 11 is a Covid era product. The Microsoft Exchange Server and Azure issues are from PC time; that is, the pre Covid period.
Perhaps the already present communications and togetherness issues have been present for many years. The work from home approach just amplified them.
Paradoxical? Nope. Management acting as a 50000 watt AM radio station. Static, anyone? Will Microsoft employees do the Thermopylae thing to defeat Microsoft’s antagonists? Sure, just via Zoom and one hopes a functioning Teams with extra features.
Stephen E Arnold, September 14, 2021
Facebook: Continuous Reality Distortion
September 14, 2021
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg stated in 2019 that WhatsApp was designed as a “privacy-focused vision” for communication. WhatsApp supposedly offers end-to-end encryption. ProPublica shares that is not true in, “How Facebook Undermines Privacy Protections For Its 2 Billion WhatsApp Users.” Essentially the majority of WhatsApp messages are private, but items users flag are sifted through WhatsApp employees.
These employees monitor the flagged messages for child pornography, terroristic plots, spam, and more. This type of monitoring appears contrary to WhatsApp’s mission, but Carl Woog, the director of communications, did not regard this as content monitoring and saw it as preventing abuse.
WhatsApp reviewers sign NDAs and, if asked, say they work for Accenture. They review over 600 violation tickets a day, leaving less than a minute for each one, then they decide if they should ban the account, put the user on “watch,” or do nothing. Reviewers are required to:
“WhatsApp moderators must make subjective, sensitive and subtle judgments, interviews and documents examined by ProPublica show. They examine a wide range of categories, including “Spam Report,” “Civic Bad Actor” (political hate speech and disinformation), “Terrorism Global Credible Threat,” “CEI” (child exploitative imagery) and “CP” (child pornography). Another set of categories addresses the messaging and conduct of millions of small and large businesses that use WhatsApp to chat with customers and sell their wares. These queues have such titles as “business impersonation prevalence,” “commerce policy probable violators” and “business verification.””
Unlike Facebook’s other platforms, Facebook and Instagram, WhatsApp does not release statistics about what data it collects, because it cites that its an encryption service. Facebook also needs WhatsApp to generate a profit, because the company spent $22 billion on it in 2014. WhatsApp does share data with Facebook, despite its dedication to privacy. Facebook also faced fines for violating user privacy. WhatsApp was used to collect data on criminals and governments want backdoors to access and trace data. It is for user safety, but governments can take observation too far.
Whitney Grace, September 14, 2021
Hard Working Coders Love Code That Writes Itself
September 14, 2021
Code programmers are excited about an AI software that writes new code. The BBC investigates the software in, “Why Coders Love The AI That Could Put Them Out Of A Job.” Github revealed the new AI Copilot in June 2021. Users type code into Copilot, then it suggests how to finish it. Copilot is very intuitive and its suggestions are on par with what coders want.
Copilot has made waves in the coding community:
“It is based on an artificial intelligence called GPT-3, released last summer by OpenAI, a San Francisco-based AI lab, co-founded by Elon Musk. This GPT (which stands for generative pre-training) engine does a “very simple but very large thing – predicting the next letter in a text,” explains Grzegorz Jakacki, Warsaw-based founder of Codility, which makes a popular hiring test.
OpenAI trained the AI on texts already available online such as books, Wikipedia and hundreds of thousands of web pages, a diet that was “somewhat curated but in all possible human languages,” he says. And “spookily, it wasn’t taught the rules of any particular language,” adds Mr Jakacki. The result was plausible passages of text.”
Despite its accuracy, new AI always makes mistakes and anything Copilot suggests needs to be reviewed by real programmers. Instead of worrying about losing their jobs, coders are happy because Copilot helps them. Copilot edits their code for them and also provides instantaneous feedback as they write.
One problem that arises from Copilot is that it could write auto-generated code that someone already created. It also brings into question about how much code is original and comes from the source code and how to detect that. At the moment, Copilot is only writing short code passages, not full software. AI is a long way from evolving past human intelligence, but it can imitate basic behaviors.
Whitney Grace, September 14, 2021
Simple Error for a Simple Link to the Simple Sabotage Field Manual
September 13, 2021
I love Silicon Valley type “real” news. I spotted a story called “The 16 Best Ways to Sabotage Your Organization’s Productivity, from a CIA Manual Published in 1944.” What’s interesting about this story is that the US government publication has been in circulation for many years. The write up states:
The “Simple Sabotage Field Manual,” declassified in 2008 and available on the CIA’s website, provided instructions for how everyday people could help the Allies weaken their country by reducing production in factories, offices, and transportation lines. “Some of the instructions seem outdated; others remain surprisingly relevant,” reads the current introduction on the CIA’s site. “Together they are a reminder of how easily productivity and order can be undermined.”
There’s one tiny flaw — well, two actually — in this Silicon Valley type “real” news report.
First, the url provided in the source document is incorrect. To download the document, navigate to this page or use this explicit link: https://www.hsdl.org/?view&did=750070. We verified both links at 0600, September 13, 2021.
And the second:
The write up did not include the time wasting potential of a Silicon Valley type publication providing incorrect information via a bad link. Mr. Donovan, the author of the document, noted on page 30:
Make mistakes in quantities of material when you’ are copying orders. Confuse similar names. Use wrong addresses.
Silly? Maybe just another productivity killer from the thumbtyping generation.
Stephen E Arnold, September 13, 2021
Coveo: A Search Vendor Repositions, Pivots, and Spins
September 13, 2021
Coveo was a vendor of search and retrieval software. Then Coveo morphed into help desk and self-service software. Now the company appears to be spinning like a whirling dervish into a new positioning. “Coveo Adds More Developer Features to Its AI Powered Digital Experience Platform” explains:
Coveo Solutions Inc., a unicorn startup that helps companies such as Salesforce.com Inc. and Adobe Inc. improve their websites with artificial intelligence, today introduced new features to help developers more easily use its technology.
A couple of minor points. Coveo has ingested about $330 million since it was set up in 2005. I think that works out to 16 years, which in my experience makes Coveo something other than a start up. Your book may be different, of course.
I am not into enterprise search, but I find it interesting that this company is spinning in an AI powered digital experience platform. I don’t have a clue how to define “artificial intelligence.” I simply don’t know what a “digital experience platform” is.
That may not matter. The point is keep moving, changing, and morphing in order to generate sufficient revenue to make long suffering investors happy campers and differentiate the commodity of search technology from open source and proprietary options.
Oh, do dervishes get dizzy? I do.
Stephen E Arnold, September 13, 2021
Australia Channels China: What Is Next Down Under?
September 13, 2021
Should one be alarmed about the power that social media has. Should one sorry when governments, after decades of indifference, exert their authority over social media. The Conversation discusses a new Australian law and its implications in, “Facebook Or Twitter Posts Can Now Be Quietly Modified By The Government Under New Surveillance Laws.” The new law updates the Surveillance Devices Act 2004 and Telecommunications (Interception and Access) Act 1979. The addendum gives law enforcement officials in Australia to modify, add, copy, or delete online during an investigation.
The Human Rights Law Centre says the bill could violate free speech, while the Digital Rights Watch pointed out that the Australian government ignored recommendations to limit powers in the new bill. Not to mention, legal hacking could make it easier for bad hackers.
The new bill allows authorities to copy, delete, or modify data, with a warrant collect data, and assume control of a social media account. It also contains “emergency authorization” for law enforcement to do any of the above without a warrant.
Prior legislation of this nature included better privacy protections, but the new bill gives law enforcement free rein and force individuals to assist them or face prison time. On one hand the ill makes sense:
“According to the Department of Home Affairs, more and more criminal activity makes use of the “dark web” and “anonymising technologies”. Previous powers are not enough to keep up with these new technologies. In our view, specific and targeted access to users’ information and activities may be needed to identify possible criminals or terrorists. In some cases, law enforcement agencies may need to modify, delete, copy or add content of users to prevent things like the distribution of child exploitation material. Lawful interception is key to protecting public and national security in the fight of global community against cybercrimes.”
On the other hand, third parties could be subject to law enforcement. Individuals’ freedoms could be violated too.
Channeling China? Trying to control speech? What’s next?
Whitney Grace, September 13, 2021
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