Free Content: Like Technology, Now a Political Issue
August 3, 2020
Free content is interesting. It seems to represent a loss when compared to content that costs money. But are these two options the only ones? Nope, digital information has a negative cost. I think that’s a fair characterization of the knowledge road many are walking.
For seven years, I have produced “content” and made it available without charge to law enforcement and intelligence professionals in the US and to US allies. When I embarked on this approach, I met with skepticism and questions like “What’s the catch?”
I learned quickly that “free” means hook, trick, or sales ploy. Intrigued by the reaction, I persisted. Over time, my approach was — to a small number of people — somewhat helpful. In a few weeks, I will be 77, and I don’t plan on changing what I do, terminating the researchers who assist me, and telling those who want me to give a talk or write up a profile about one of the companies I follow to get lost.
I thought about my approach when I read “The Truth Is Paywalled But The Lies Are Free.” The title annoyed me because what I do is free. I could identify an interesting organization which has recently availed itself of one of my free reports. My team and I tried to assemble hard-to-find and little known information and package it into a format that was easy-to-understand. Yep, the document was free, and it has found its way into several groups focused on chasing down bad actors.
The write up in Current Affairs, now an online information service, states:
This means that a lot of the most vital information will end up locked behind the paywall… The lie is more accessible than its refutation.
I think I understand. The majority of free content has spin. For fee content is, therefore, delivered with less spin or without spin.
Is this true?
The reports I prepare describe specific characteristics of a particular technology. In my opinion and that of the researchers who assist me, we make an effort to identify consistent statements, present information for which there is a document like a technical specification, and use cases that are verifiable.
I suppose the fact that I maintain profiles of companies of little interest to most “real” journalists and pundits creates an exception. What I do can be set aside with the comment, “Yeah, but who really cares about the Polish company Datawalk?”
The write up states:
More reason to have publications funded by the centralized free-information library rather than through subscriptions or corporate sponsorship. Creators must be compensated well. But at the same time we have to try to keep things that are important and profound from getting locked away where few people will see them. The truth needs to be free and universal.
I think I see the point. However, my model is different. The content I produce is a side product of what I do. If someone pays me to produce a product or service, I use that money to keep my research group working.
Money can be generated and a portion of it can be designated to an information task. The challenge is finding a way to produce money and then allocating the funds in a responsible way. Done correctly, there is no need to beg for dollars, snarl at Adam Carolla for selling a “monthly nut,” or criticize information monopolies.
These toll booths for information are a result of choice, a failure of regulatory authorities, the friction of established institutions that want “things the way they have to be” thinking, and selfish agendas.
In short, the lack of high value “free” information is distinctly human. I want to point out that even with information paywalls, there are several ways to obtain useful information:
- Talking to people, preferable in person but email works okay
- Obtaining publicly accessible documents; for example, patent applications
- Comments posted in discussion groups; for instance, the worker at a large tech company who lets slip a useful factoid
- Information recycled by wonky news services; for example, the GoCurrent outfit.
The real issue is that “free” generally triggers fear, doubt, and uncertainty. Paying for something means reliable, factual, and true.
Put my approach aside. Step back from the “create a universal knowledge bank which anyone can access. Forget the paying the author angle.
High-value information exists in the flows of data. Knowledge can be extracted from deltas; that is, changes in the data themselves. The trick is point of view and noticing. The more one tries to survive by creating information, the more likely it is that generating cash will be difficult if not impossible.
Therefore, high value content can be the result of doing other types of a knowledge work. Get paid for that product or service, then generate information and give it away.
That’s what I have been doing, and it seems to work okay for me. For radicals, whiners, monopolists fearful of missing a revenue forecast — do some thinking, then come up with a solution.
What’s going on now seems to be a dead end to me. Ebsco and LexisNexis live in fear of losing a “big customer.” Therefore, prices go up. Fewer people can afford the products. The knowledge these companies have becomes more and more exclusive. I get it.
But what these firms and to some extent government agencies which charge for data assembled and paid for with tax payer dollars are accelerating intellectual loss.
The problem is a human and societal one. I am going to keep chugging along, making my content free. I think the knowledge economy seems to be one more signal that the datasphere is not a zero sum game. Think in terms of a negative number. We now have a positive (charging for information), free (accessing information for nothing), and what I call the “data negative” or D-neg (the loss of information and by extension being “informed”).
In my experience, D-neg accelerates stupidity. That’s a bigger problem than many want to think about. Arguing about the wrong thing seems to be the status quo; that is, generating negatives.
Stephen E Arnold, August 3, 2020
Alleged Business Practices of the Rich and Worshipped or Ethics R Us
July 28, 2020
DarkCyber spotted two separate stories which address a common theme. The write ups are “new age” news, so allegations, speculation, and political perspectives infuse the words used in each of these. Nevertheless, both write ups merit noting because two points are useful when a trend line may lurk in the slope between the dots.
The first article is “Google Spying on Users’ Data to Learn How Rival Apps Work: Report.” The article asserts:
Google is reportedly keeping tabs to how its users interact with rival Android apps, selectively monitoring how the users interact with non-Google apps via an internal program to make its own products better.
The article jumps to Google’s unique ability to see lots of data from its privileged position of being involved in each facet of certain markets: Channel, partner, vendor, developer, and customer. The operative word in the title is “spying,” but the issue is ethical and socially responsible behavior. Some science club members want access to the good stuff in the electronics supply door. Hey, cool.
The second write up is about everyone’s favorite online retailer, cloud vendor, and services firm. DarkCyber thinks the logo of Amazon should be the Bezos bulldozer. It landscapes the way it wants. “Amazon Reportedly Invested in Startups and Gained Proprietary Information before Launching Competitors, Often Crushing the Smaller Companies in the Process” is one of those stories whose title is the story. We noted this passage in the write up as additive:
Amazon met with or invested in their companies, only to later build its own products that directly competed with the smaller company.
Let’s assume that these write ups are mostly accurate. The behaviors are untoward because those duped, bilked, fooled, or swindled assumed that those across the table were playing with an unmarked deck and wanted an honest game.
DarkCyber sees the behavior as similar to a “land grab.” As long as there is minimal anti monopoly enforcement and essentially zero consequences in a legal process, the companies identified in these write ups can do what they want. DarkCyber thinks that the behaviors are institutionalizes; that is, even with changes in senior management and regulatory oversight, the organizations will, like a giant autonomous mine truck, just keep rolling forward. When the truck rolls over a worker, collateral damage. That’s how life works in the gee whiz world of high technology.
Stephen E Arnold, July 28, 2020
Zoom, Zoom, Meet, Meet, and Trust, Well?
July 24, 2020
We evolved to be social creatures—long, long before Zoom or MS Teams existed. That is why, as Canada’s CBC declares, “Video Chats Short Circuit a Brain Function Essential for Trust—and That’s Bad for Business.” Journalist Don Pittis writes:
“Canadian research on ‘computer-mediated communication,’ begun long before the current lockdown, shows video chat is an inadequate substitute for real-life interaction. The real thing, dependent on non-verbal cues, is extraordinarily more effective in creating rapport and getting ideas across. Not only that, but the familiarity and trust we currently feel with coworkers during the lockdown’s remote calls rests on connections remembered from back when we sat at a nearby desk or met for lunch. As the lockdown stretches out and the mix of colleagues changes, it may be almost impossible to establish healthy trusting working relationships using remote video chat tools alone. That’s bad for business, said organizational behavior specialist Mahdi Roghanizad from Ryerson University’s Ted Rogers School of Business. The reason: getting a good reading on your fellow workers has been repeatedly shown to be essential for business efficiency, reaching common goals and establishing trust. It is why teams that worked remotely even before the pandemic lockdown always met periodically in person. The latest research shows human-to-human bonding is like a kind of intuitive magic.”
Researchers suggest several reasons for this “magic,” including pheromones, body language, and in-person eye contact. Some have found it is harder to detect when someone is lying across video. One social scientist, the University of Waterloo’s Frances Westley, likens video chat to talking with someone wearing sunglasses—it is less satisfying, and can even sap our energy.
For all these reasons, Pittis suspects the supposed work-from-home “revolution” may not last, as many had predicted. Businesses may find it more productive to summon workers back to the office once the danger is gone. In the meantime, Westley suggests, we should reinforce connections with the occasional (socially distanced, mask-augmented) in-person conversation.
Cynthia Murrell, July 24, 2020
Close Enough for Horse Shoes? Why Drifting Off Course Has Become a Standard Operating Procedure
July 14, 2020
One of the DarkCyber research team sent me a link to a post on Hacker News: “How Can I Quickly Trim My AWS Bill?” In the write up were some suggestions from a range of people, mostly anonymous. One suggestion caught my researcher’s attention and I too found it suggestive.
Here’s the statement the DarkCyber team member flagged for me:
If instead this is all about training / the volume of your input data: sample it, change your batch sizes, just don’t re-train, whatever you’ve gotta do.
Some context. Certain cloud functions are more “expensive” than others. Tips range from dumping GPUs for CPUs to “Buy some hardware and host it at home/office/etc.”
I kept coming back to the suggestion “don’t retrain.”
One of the magical things about certain smart software is that the little code devils learn from what goes through the system. The training gets the little devils or daemons to some out of bed and in the smart software gym.
However, in many smart processes, the content objects processed include signals not in the original training set. Off the shelf training sets are vulnerable just like those cooked up by three people working from home with zero interest in validating the “training data” from the “real world data.”
What happens?
The indexing or metadata assignments “drift.” This means that the smart software devils index a content object in a way that is different from what that content object should be tagged.
Examples range from this person matches that person to we indexed the food truck as a vehicle used in a robbery. Other examples are even more colorful or tragic depending on what smart software output one examines. Detroit facial recognition ring a bell?
Who cares?
I care. The person directly affected by shoddy thinking about training and retraining smart software, however, does not.
That’s what is troubling about this suggestion. Care and thought are mandatory for initial model training. Then as the model operates, informed humans have to monitor the smart software devils and retrain the system when the indexing goes off track.
The big or maybe I should type BIG problem today is that very few individuals want to do this even it an enlightened superior says, “Do the retraining right.”
Ho ho ho.
The enlightened boss is not going to do much checking and the outputs of a smart system just keep getting farther off track.
In some contexts like Google advertising, getting rid of inventory is more important than digging into the characteristics of Oingo (later Applied Semantics) methods. Get rid of the inventory is job one.
For other model developers, shapers, and tweakers, the suggestion to skip retraining is “good enough.”
That’s the problem.
Good enough has become the way to refactor excellence into substandard work processes.
Stephen E Arnold, July 14, 2020
Sillycon Valley: When Molecules No Longer Collide
July 14, 2020
“How Remote Work Could Destroy Silicon Valley” presents a slightly dark scenario for those infused with technology. The write up explains that when lots of eager smart people no longer interact in real life, something magical is lost.
If you wonder about the magic of Silicon Valley, Philz Coffee, and the risk of techquakes, you may find the write up interesting.
Two of the DarkCyber team wondered if Brownian motion is a factor. Those hyper educated, over-achievers bask in the sun. The closeness and the “energy”: What could be provide a better greenhouse for innovation. Money can grow on that code.
The spoiler is that WFHers will not benefit from the environment in a basement or a comparatively spacious two bedroom apartment in Salinas, Kansas.
When those folks go to work via Zoom, those sprouts of innovation, those vulnerable innovators suffer.
Thus, Sillycon Valley starts to look more like Salinas in the winter.
Stephen E Arnold, July 14, 2020
App Store Curation: Hey, the Method Is a Marvel
June 29, 2020
I don’t think about app store curation policies. One of the DarkCyber researchers was excited about Hey. At lunch, this individual groused about Apple’s editorial review process or what I call curation. Newspapers in the good old days used to do curation. Not so much any more. I still have a headache after my talk with a New York based big time real journalist.
I read “Another 53 iOS Apps Besides TikTok Are Grabbing Clipboard Data.” The write up, if accurate, illustrates how a company can create its own myth from Olympus. Then do exactly what most Silicon Valley companies do; that is, anything that is easy and good for them.
The write up states:
ikTok may be ending its nosy clipboard reading on iOS, but that doesn’t mean other app developers are mending their ways. Security researcher Tommy Mysk told Ars Technica in an interview that an additional 53 apps identified in March are still indiscriminately capturing universal clipboard data when they open, potentially sharing sensitive data with other nearby devices using the same Apple ID. The apps are major titles, too — they’d normally be trustworthy. The behavior is visible in news apps for Fox News, the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. You’ll also find it in games like Bejeweled, Fruit Ninja and PUBG Mobile.
Did Aristotle cover this type of mental glitch in his Nicomachean Ethics?
Of course he did.
Stephen E Arnold, June 29, 2020
Is Cyber Crime Boring? Maybe The Characterization Masks a Painful Consequence?
June 1, 2020
DarkCyber read “Career Choice Tip: Cybercrime is Mostly Boring.” The article is clear. The experts cited are thorough and thoughtful. Practicing cyber crime is similar to what engineers, developers, and programmers do in the course of their work for firms worldwide. Much of that work is boring, filled with management friction, and repetitive.
The article states:
the academics stress that the romantic notions of those involved in cybercrime ignore the often mundane, rote aspects of the work that needs to be done to support online illicit economies. The researchers concluded that for many people involved, cybercrime amounts to little more than a boring office job sustaining the infrastructure on which these global markets rely, work that is little different in character from the activity of legitimate system administrators.
Exactly.
The paper is quoted in the article as explaining:
We find that as cybercrime has developed into industrialized illicit economies, so too have a range of tedious supportive forms of labor proliferated, much as in mainstream industrialized economies. We argue that cybercrime economies in advanced states of growth have begun to create their own tedious, low-fulfillment jobs, becoming less about charismatic transgression and deviant identity, and more about stability and the management and diffusion of risk. Those who take part in them, the research literature suggests, may well be initially attracted by exciting media portrayals of hackers and technological deviance.”
The DarkCyber study team discussed the Cambridge research summary and formulated some observations:
- Boring means that cyber crime will be automated. Automated processes will be tuned to be more efficient. Greater efficiency translates to the benefit the cyber criminals seek. Thus, the forward momentum of boring cyber crime is an increase in the volume and velocity of attacks.
- Certain criminal elements are hiring out of work or disgruntled technologist from mainstream companies, including high-profile Silicon Valley companies. Our research identified one criminal organization paying 90,000 euros per month and offering benefits to contract workers with specialized skills. The economic pressures translates to a talent pool available to certain criminal orchestrators. More talent feeds the engineering resources available to cyber crime constructs. DarkCyber believes a “Google effect” is beginning, just in the cyber crime market space.
- Law enforcement, government agencies, and some providers of specialized services to law enforcement and intelligence entities will be unable to hire at the rate criminal constructs hire. Asymmetry will increase with bad actors having an opportunity to outpace enforcement and detection activities.
Net net: The task facing law enforcement, security, and intelligence professionals is becoming more difficult. Cyber crime may be boring, but boring tasks fuel innovation. With access to talent and cash, there is a widening chasm. Talking about boring does not make clear the internal forces pushing cyber crime forward.
Stephen E Arnold, June 1, 2020
Work from Home: Trust but Use Monitoring Software
May 19, 2020
As the COVID-19 pandemic keeps offices closed and employees continue to work from home, bosses want to be sure their subordinates are working. According to the Washington Post, bosses are “replicating the office” using webcams, microphones, and surveillance software says the article, “Managers Turn To Surveillance Software, Always-On Webcams To Ensure Employees Are (Really) Working From Home.”
Harking back to the chatrooms of yesteryear, employees log into digital work spaces with customizable avatars and chatroom cubicles with instructions to keep webcams and microphones on all day. The idea of the digital workspace designed by Pragli will encourage spontaneous conversation. Some quickly adapt to the technology change, others have difficulty.
While some companies do not replicate the office with programs, they are using other tools such as always on webcams, check-ins, and mandatory digital meetings. There is the concern that companies are being invasive:
“Company leaders say the systems are built to boost productivity and make the quiet isolation of remote work more chipper, connected and fun. But some workers said all of this new corporate surveillance has further blurred the lines between their work and personal lives, amping up their stress and exhaustion at a time when few feel they have the standing to push back.”
Since the COVID-19 forced the American workforce into quarantine, companies want to confirm their workers’ productivity and report on how they are spending their business hours. There has also been an increase in the amount of time Americans spend working each day.
InterGuard is a software that can be hidden on computers and creates a log of everything a worker did during the day. The software records everything a worker does as frequently as every five seconds. It ranks the apps and Web sites as “productive” and “unproductive,” then tallies a “productivity score.”
Many employees do not like the surveillance software and cite that the need to confirm they are actually working disrupts their work flow. Pragli, on the other hand, says the replication of human interaction brings employees closer and allows them to connect more frequently.
A new meaning for the phrase “trust but verify.”
Whitney Grace, May 19, 2020
Content Marketing: The Faux Monte
May 8, 2020
I wrote about the SEO hustle email I received on April 30, 2020. That email became the subject of the conversation I had with the former CIA professional, Robert David Steele. He interviewed me and posted the video from his Web site PhiBetaIota.net. You can view the video at this link. In this post, I want to call attention to the SEO expert’s example blog content, thoughtfully provided by an individual named Christian Arriola and using the alias of a person named Jeffrey Garay. The blog in question is part of a kitchen remodeling business doing work in Pearland near Houston and Allen near Dallas.
The blog post is “How to Get Your Dream Kitchen Remodel Without Breaking the Bank.” Here’s an example of the content which the outfit Woobound wanted to provide to Beyond Search / DarkCyber:
When you have an excellent suggestion of what you desire, take a seat and also write a great breakdown of jobs that you desire finished. You do not need to be technological and also you do not need to make use of building terms yet simply state all the important things you desire a service provider to do and also bid. It can be as easy as: eliminate all existing floor covering and also closets; mount brand-new floor covering, cupboards, kitchen counters, sink as well as home appliances per the strategy; paint; attach sink pipes; as well as mount brand-new lighting fixtures.
It appears that the connection between Beyond Search / DarkCyber is that the root “techno*” appears in the paragraph above and some of Beyond Search / DarkCyber’s more than 18,000 articles. I may be missing other, more sophisticated connections, but on the surface, the idea that kitchen remodeling and the topics in Beyond Search / DarkCyber are tenuously related. Oh, wait, I do cover cyber crime, perhaps that is the hook?
The blog features some broken image links, an 888 number to contact the firm, and a content pool exactly one post deep.
My concern about search engine optimization’s latest “trick” is that some people will accept this “link trade” or “backlink” pitch.
Meaningless links are not helpful to a user. We will be monitoring this ploy because deception is a precursor of cyber crime. Our objective is to take a close look at this faux monte. What we see so far is not appealing; in fact, one of the DarkCyber team used the term
Stephen E Arnold, May 8, 2020
Why Search Sucks: The MVP Approach Maybe?
April 13, 2020
I read what seems to be a modern management write up. The implicit idea is that when developing an app or other software, people get excited. The coder or the team thinks of the many nifty things the new gizmo can deliver. What happens? There are Windows 10 and Apple OSX updates that brick a user’s computer? There are services like Quibi which fall over on Day One because scaling didn’t happen. There are other examples ranging from Google’s wild and crazy Zoom killers to Zoom’s encryption which wasn’t and still may not be… encrypted.
“Why We Are Hardwired to Focus on the Wrong Parts of our Product” seeks to explain why flawed apps and software are the norm. Remember? That’s the big hump in the middle of standard distribution. The challenge today is producing software that sort of works; that is, good enough for today’s often clueless user.
The write up asserts:
Iterative product development achieves its speed through a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) approach. MVP means taking the possible feature set that could be included in a product, or the possible functionality a specific feature could deliver, and cutting it down to the minimum needed to bring value to the end-user.
The consequence of MVP: The bell curve of failure.
The MVP process primes us to want to regain the value we believe we’ve lost. As soon as the product is live, we fall into a weakness-based, additive strategy, where we are compelled to add new functionality in order to win back our lost value (real or imagined).
This weakness-based mindset gets further reinforced when we start analyzing data and feedback. Because loss aversion causes us to focus on losses more than gains, we are more likely to gloss over positive signals and areas of strength and focus instead on the areas of the product that “aren’t working.”
What’s the fix? Here you go:
Analyze what works
Move from addition to subtraction
Understand your strengths.
Sound too good to be true? Well, the approach may be good enough. I am waiting for a book called Thinking Wronger: A Basic Guide.
Stephen E Arnold, April 13, 2020
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