Twitch: A Big, Juicy Target
February 16, 2020
Videogame streamers are some of the Internet’s most popular celebrities and most people have never heard about them. PewDiePie is the reigning streaming king and YouTube is his domain, but dozens of other gamers vie for his throne from the land of Twitch. The San Francisco Gate examines the streaming craze and how tech corporations are trying to hone in on the profits, “Game On: Tech Giants Vs. The Kind Of Streaming.”
Both Facebook and Microsoft have attempted to snag a piece of the streaming profit pie, but nothing rivals Twitch. Twitch started as a startup in San Francisco that Amazon purchased for $1 billion in 2014. Twitch now controls 76% of video game streaming on Europe, North America, and South America. While most people are not aware of the popularity of video game streaming, it is an importance facet in the $180 billion gaming industry and it makes more money than movies and music.
Microsoft is eager to take on Twitch and the company hired one of Twitch’s biggest streamers, Tyler Blevins aka Ninja for an undisclosed amount of amount. Microsoft wants Blevins to promote its streaming service Mixer, but he did little to raise Mixer’s users in 2019. Mixer only accounts for 3.2% of the streaming market, while Twitch continues to grow. Hiring Blevins was not enough for Microsoft, although it was a good move:
“Mixer has been growing steadily since it started, said Ben Decker, head of gaming services at Microsoft, and now has more than 30 million monthly active users. But to really compete with Twitch, which has reported that it has 140 million monthly users, Microsoft needs to do more than spend a few million dollars on a star streamer, said Doron Nir, chief executive of StreamElements. When it comes to having a streaming platform, this is a billion-dollar game,” he said. “It’s going to take a lot more from Mixer to really take away from the enormous audience that Twitch has.”
Nir said he didn’t believe the deal for Blevins was bad for Mixer. It still brought widespread media attention and put it in the conversation. And Microsoft was not discouraged, bringing over Michael Grzesiek, a professional gamer known as Shroud, and Cory Michael, a streamer who goes by King Gothalion, from Twitch.”
Other tech giants are attempting to steal some of Twitch’s success, but Twitch remains strong and will continue to dominant for the time being. There is room for streaming platforms like Mixer and other emerging rivals to join the market, but they will need to bring something new and unique like Twitch did.
Whitney Grace, February 16, 2020
Will Amazon Send President Trump a Valentine This Year?
February 13, 2020
DarkCyber noted “Amazon Wants Trump to Testify on Order to Screw Amazon in Pentagon Deal.” The Australian information service states:
Amazon Web Services said on Monday it was seeking to depose President Donald Trump and Defense Secretary Mark Esper in its lawsuit over whether the president was trying “to screw Amazon” when it awarded a Pentagon contract for cloud computing to rival Microsoft Corp. The Amazon.com Inc unit alleged that Trump, who has publicly derided Amazon head Jeff Bezos and repeatedly criticized the company, exerted undue influence on the decision to deny it the US$10 billion contract.
Years ago I read the handbook of modern management, De Principatibus by Niccolo Machiavelli. One observation I sort of recall is:
If an injury has to be done to a man it should be so severe that his vengeance need not be feared.
Worth monitoring billionaires fighting.
Stephen E Arnold, February 13, 2020
Blockchain: Now What Is That Use Case?
February 7, 2020
The DarkCyber team invested some time in figuring out Amazon’s blockchain-related inventions. (A free executive summary is available at this link.) There were some interesting use cases explained in these public documents. But blockchain in Amazon is different in blockchain in the world of a specialist blockchain firm if the information in “Major Blockchain Developer ConsenSys Announces Job Losses” is accurate.
The write up states:
Major blockchain developer ConsenSys has laid off around 14% of its workforce, it said on Tuesday, a move that comes as companies around the world frantically search for applications for the much-hyped technology.
Blockchain in frantic search for applications? Yikes.
The issues blockchain faces range from “good enough”, better known alternatives to scaling.
The write up explains:
Companies from banks and oil traders to retailers and tech vendors, drawn to its promise of making cumbersome processes more efficient and secure, have invested billions as they look to find uses for the technology. Many have turned to blockchain development startups in the process for technical expertise. Yet there have so far there have been few major breakthroughs in the practical application of blockchain, despite the spate of tests and pilots.
Complexity, performance, cost, and security may be barriers. Just what catches Amazon’s attention?
Stephen E Arnold, February 7, 2020
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Bezos-tics: A Billionaire and an Alleged Political Alignment
February 6, 2020
Jeff Bezos heads Amazon, but he allegedly has goals beyond changing the face of retail. The Strategic Culture Foundation examines Bezos’s political views in the article, “Jeff Bezos’s Politics.” Heads up. DarkCyber thinks this “strategic culture” write up is a one-sided argument about Mr. Bezos’ goals to spread American imperialism, control other nations, and spread the ideals of neo-conservatism.
Bezos’s political power exploded when he purchased the Washington Post from Donald Graham (Washington D.C.’s daily newspaper) and negotiated with CIA Director John Brennan a ten-year cloud computing contract hosted by Amazon. As this quote says he is definitely wise about business:
“He was now the most influential salesman not only for books, etc., but for the CIA, and for such mega-corporations as Lockheed Martin. US imperialism has supercharged his wealth, but didn’t alone cause his wealth. Jeff Bezos might be the most ferociously gifted business-person on the planet.”
The article continues that Bezos, like all of American billionaires, ally themselves with neo-conservatism and imperialism. They seek to preserve these systems at all costs. Also Bezos has this going for him:
“Bezos also wants to privatize everything around the world that can become privatized, such as education, highways, health care, and pensions. The more that billionaires control those, the less that everyone else does; and preventing control by the public helps to protect billionaires against democracy that would increase their taxes, and against governmental regulations that would reduce their profits by increasing their corporations’ expenses. So, billionaires control the government in order to increase their takings from the public.”
But, use the word coined by DarkCyber, the Amagenic responses to Amazon a moving, just slowly. With employee push back and dissention in a close friend’s brother sister bond, is negativism being pulled to the man and the Amazon machine.
Worth monitoring to see if this “house divided against itself” is a myth or a reality.
Whitney Grace, February 6, 2020
Amazon: How Many Employees?
February 4, 2020
DarkCyber noted a story in Gadgets 360. The title reveals the factoid: “Amazon Now Employs 798,000 People Worldwide, 500,000 in the US.” Is there a company which employs more people?
The answer is, “Yes.”
And that company is Walmart. This outfit allegedly employs 1.5 million people in the US and more than two million worldwide.
The write up has another interesting factoid:
Walmart, however took 35 years to build a workforce of similar size to Amazon today. Amazon reached the milestone in 24 years, more than a decade sooner.”
DarkCyber discovered that Walmart also advertises the availability of DDR2 SPD 800 memory when that product is not available. Hopefully a couple of Walmart employees will update the memory inventory data.
Stephen E Arnold, February 4, 2020
AWS AI Improves Its Accuracy According to Amazon
January 31, 2020
An interesting bit of jargon creeps into “On Benchmark Data Set, Question-Answering System Halves Error Rate.” That word is “transfer.” Amazon, it seems, is trying to figure out how to reuse data, threshold settings, and workflow outputs.
Think about IBM’s DeepBlue defeat of Gary Kasparov in 1996 or the IBM Watson thing allegedly defeating Ken Jenkins in 2011 without any help from post production or judicious video editing. Two IBM systems and zero “transfer” or more in more Ivory Towerish jargon “transference.”
Humans learn via transfer. Artificial intelligence, despite the marketer assurances, don’t transfer very well. One painful and expensive fact of life which many venture funding outfits ignore is that most AI innovations start from ground zero for each new application of a particular AI technology mash up.
Imagine if DeepBlue were able to transfer its “learnings” to Watson. IBM may have avoided becoming a poster child for inept technology marketing. Watson is now a collection of software modules, but these don’t transfer particularly well. Hand crafting, retraining, testing, tweaking, and tuning are required and then must be reapplied as data drift causes “accuracy” scores to erode like a 1971 Vega.
Amazon suggests that it is making progress on the smart software transference challenge. The write up states:
Language models can be used to compute the probability of any given sequence (even discontinuous sequences) of words, which is useful in natural-language processing. The new language models are all built atop the Transformer neural architecture, which is particularly good at learning long-range dependencies among input data, such as the semantic and syntactic relationships between individual words of a sentence.
DarkCyber has dubbed some of these efforts as Bert and Ernie exercises, but that point of view is DarkCyber’s, not the views of those with skin in the AI game.
Amazon adds:
Our approach uses transfer learning, in which a machine learning model pretrained on one task — here, word sequence prediction — is fine-tuned on another — here, answer selection. Our innovation is to introduce an intermediate step between the pre-training of the source model and its adaptation to new target domains.
Yikes! A type of AI learning. The Amazon approach is named Tanda, not Ernie thankfully. Here’s a picture of how Tanda (transfer and adapt) works:
The write up reveals more about how the method functions.
The key part of the write up, in DarkCyber’s opinion, is the “accuracy” data; to wit:
On WikiQA and TREC-QA, our system’s MAP was 92% and 94.3%, respectively, a significant improvement over the previous records of 83.4% and 87.5%. MRR for our system was 93.3% and 97.4%, up from 84.8% and 94%, respectively.
If true, Amazon has now officially left Google, Microsoft, and others working to reduce the costs of training machine learning systems and delivering many wonderful services with a problem.
Most smart systems are fortunate to hit 85 percent accuracy in carefully controlled lab settings. Amazon is nosing into an accuracy range few humans can consistently deliver when indexing, classifying, or identifying if a picture that looks like a dog is actually a dog.
DarkCyber generally doubts data produced by a single research team. That rule holds for these data. Since the author of the report works on Alexa search, maybe Alexa will be able to answer this question, “Will Amazon overturn Microsoft’s JEDI contract award?”
Jargon is one thing. Real world examples are another.
Stephen E Arnold, January 31, 2020
Amazon and Open Source: A Wee Bit Sensitive
January 31, 2020
Amazon Web Services (AWS) is one of the nation’s leading cloud computing services and its dominance increases every day. Computer Weekly commented on how AWS might be taking advantage of open source technology in the article, “AWS Hits Back At Open Source Theft Allegations.” Throughout 2019, AWS undermined open source software companies by “stealing” the free version of their software, then hosting it on their cloud computing service.
The actuations were so bad that The New York Times picked up the story and stated that in 2015 AWS integrated Elasticsearch from Elastic into their offerings, now Elastic and AWS are now rivals for customers. MongoDB and Redis have had to alter their open source software and licensed software so their customers know the difference. For example, the free version of MongoDB is integrated into AWS, but the licensed version is not, so it lacks certain features.
AWS responded with:
“In October 2018, Eliot Horowitz, chief technology officer and founder of MongoDB, changed the open source licensing used for MongoDB to reflect the risk of the company’s service revenue being gobbled up by public cloud providers. In response, AWS introduced a MongoDB-compatible service, DocumentDB, in January 2019.”
While open source technology is free, developers behind such offerings usually offer a licensed version with more bells and whistles. These include customer support, free upgrades, patches, and specific features.
AWS is strip mining the open source technology’s source code, then reconfiguring it their services. AWS Vice President of Analytics and ElastiCache states that AWS is only responding to their clients’ demands and their clients want open source software in AWS. He also said that AWS does give back to the open source community:
“AWS contributes mightily to open source projects such as Linux, Java, Kubernetes, Xen, KVM, Chromium, Robot Operating System, Apache Lucene, Redis, s2n, FreeRTOS, AWS Amplify, Apache MXNet, AWS SageMaker NEO, Firecracker, the OpenJDK with Corretto, Elasticsearch, and Open Distro for Elasticsearch. AWS has not copied anybody’s software or services.”
Many of the projects aim to make it easier for developers to build on top of AWS services. SageMaker is its machine learning cloud service; Greengrass extends the AWS cloud to the internet of things (IoT) edge and Firecracker is its kernel virtual machine. However, the s2n project is an open source implementation of the TLS encryption protocol, which AWS made publicly available under the terms of the Apache Software License 2.0.”
While AWS might be a singular provider for multiple services and products, organizations do not want to be locked into one supplier.
Whitney Grace, January 31, 2020
Amazon: Some Trouble Down Under?
January 29, 2020
DarkCyber noted “Case Study: Why the Australian Electoral Commission Migrated to Microsoft Azure.” On the surface, the write up is another PR output. When considered in terms of the competition between Amazon and Microsoft for juicy non commercial jobs, the article provides a check list of what’s lacking in Amazon AWS. DarkCyber identified these “advantages” for the Redmond brain trust which finds questionable methods for altering a user’s Windows 7 machine amusing. (This black screen incident provides a reminder that PR check points may not match a firm’s actual behavior.)
Here are the upsides for Azure, presumably without a black screen on Luddites’ Windows 7 computers:
- Quick turn around
- Publicly exposed APIs
- API management tools
- API creation tools
- Real time information feeds
- Ability to create an “express route” for speedy data communications
- Zero failure
- Ability to support self service from users
- A customer or user service portal
- A much loved integrator.
What was the deciding factor? The much loved vendor it seems.
Does Amazon match up on these check points? Sure.
Marketing presentations are one thing. The much loved vendor is another.
Stephen E Arnold, January 29, 2020
Amazon Security in the News: AWS Documentation
January 29, 2020
Curious about Amazon’s security features? Navigate to this link and review AWS Security Documentation by Category. In order to make sense of the information, one needs to speak Amazonia; for example, Glacier, Snowball, ECR, ECS, and SQS plus another bulldozer blade of product and service nomenclature. Because an Amazon phone breach allegedly took place, DarkCyber entered the query “mobile” into the AWS Security Documentation search function. Here’s the result:
There were 138 pages of results, numbering 1,379 results.
A somewhat cursory review of the information provided zero guidance related to the security issue encountered by Mr. Bezos. Perhaps if he had used an Amazon phone, the documentation would have provided some guidance? Perhaps.
Stephen E Arnold, January 29, 2020
Amazon: 2020 Begins with Problems Penetrating the Company Membrane
January 28, 2020
DarkCyber coined a work to capture what seems to be happening to Amazon. That word is “amagenic.” The idea is that external factors which previously bounced off the online bookstore are now getting through.
A more MBA type of phrasing might be “amagenesis”; that is, the conditions under which external factors penetrate an organization, its management team, and its business activities. An example of an amagenic event is the mobile phone “event.”
The information about the alleged hacking of Mr. Bezos’ iPhone X is difficult to interpret. A consulting firm doing business as FTI issued a report. That report suggests that a third party compromised Mr. Bezos’ mobile phone. You can download and read the allegedly original and complete report at this link. Critical discussion of the FTI report may be located at this link.
Other facets of the story include allegations that a specialized software vendor in Israel provided the tool used to compromise Mr. Bezos’ mobile phone. A number of sources link the assault on the phone to the government of Saudi Arabia. The reason? Dissatisfaction with Amazon’s blockchain technology? No, the country took action to find out if there was information related to the murder of Jamal Khashoggi, a journalist who provided some stories to the Washington Post. Other sources say that Mr. Bezos’ mobile was compromised in 2008. (Yep, a decade ago.)
To muddy the water, information has been pulled from the “real” journalism archives; specifically, Mr. Bezos’ found himself the victim of a leak of information from a member of his “close friend’s” family. That information circulated, it is rumored, among the tabloids. Some of the “leaked information” presented Mr. Bezos in situations which were of a private nature.
But this Amagenic event is just one of a string of digital and real life viruses penetrating the juggernaut. Others include:
- An increasing tension between Amazon and Facebook. The vector of attack allegedly was WhatsApp.
- Amazon faces employees going public with information about alleged climate-hostile policies and actions. (Details are at this link.)
- Amazon workers are grousing about their work. An interesting example is the alleged Amazon truck driver who had to drive for 30 hours. (Allegation is summarized here.)
- Amazon is working hard to block Microsoft from beginning work on the $10 billion JEDI project. Did Amazon hire Department of Defense professionals in order to get an inside edge? Good question.
- Some US elected officials want an anti trust investigation of the company. (Some additional information is at this link.)
- Google and Microsoft poaching some Twitch stars.
Plus, there are continued complaints about knock offs (shanzai adherents) sold as the real deal on the Amazon eCommerce site, third-party sellers’ allegations that Amazon watches for hot products and then introduces its own product undercutting the Amazon seller, and other assorted hisses and boos.
Stepping back, DarkCyber believes these issues may illustrate amagenesis presenting itself in the Amazon construct.
Is this type of amagenic reaction curable? DarkCyber suggests taking two aspirin, getting a good night’s sleep, and checking in the morning.
Stephen E Arnold, January 28, 2020
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