How about That Smart Software?
January 3, 2022
In the short cut world of training smart software, minor glitches are to be expected. When an OCR program delivers 95 percent accuracy, that works out to five mistakes in every 100 words. When Alexa tells a child to put a metal object into a home electrical outlet, what do you expert? This is close enough for horse shoes.
Now what about the Google Maps of today, a maps solution which I find almost unusable. “Google Maps May Have Led Tahoe Travelers Astray During Snowstorm” quoted a Tweet from a person who is obviously unaware of the role probabilities play in the magical world of Google. Here’s the Tweet:
This is an abject failure. You are sending people up a poorly maintained forest road to their death in a severe blizzard. Hire people who can address winter storms in your code (or maybe get some of your engineers who are stuck in Tahoe right now on it).
Big deal? Of course not, Amazon and Google are focused on the efficiencies of machine-centric methods for identifying relevant, on point information. The probability is that most of the Amazon and Google outputs will be on the money. Google Maps rarely misses on pizza or the location of March Madness basketball games.
Severely injured children? Well, that probably won’t happen. Individuals lost in a snow storm? Well, that probably won’t happen.
The flaw in these giant firms’ methods are correct from these companies’ point of view in the majority of cases. A terminated humanoid or a driver wondering if a friendly forest ranger will come along the logging road? Not a big deal.
What happens when these smart systems output decisions which have ever larger consequences? Autonomous weapons, anyone?
Stephen E Arnold, January 3, 2021
JPMorgan Chase: One Insignificant Question
December 24, 2021
Years ago I did some analysis for an upscale financial outfit which shall remain nameless in this post. I recall one question I was asked at lunch, at institution-sponsored conferences, and in hallways. The question? It was, “How do burner phones work?” The individuals asking often said, “I am just curious, of course.”
Of course.
I thought of these questions when I read “SEC Gives JPMorgan Chase Record Fine for Using WhatsApp to Conduct Business.” [If the link is dead, you are on your own, gentle reader.] The write up explains that some over achievers were sidestepping assorted rules, guidelines, recommendations, suggestions, and cultural norms to “conduct business” without being monitored. Here’s a passage I noted:
The SEC said the practice of using third-party communication apps was widespread at JPMorgan Chase. Another regulator, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, also said Friday that it fined JPMorgan $75 million for using unapproved communications.
Okay. WhatsApp.
But what about burner phones? Probably not a problem among the squash playing financial health fanatics. I am just curious, of course.
Stephen E Arnold, December 24, 2021
Amazon: Emulating the Big Apple
December 23, 2021
I love the idea that giant technology companies operate in a space untethered from too many conventions, regulatory constraints, and ethical meshes. Apple I have heard entered into a two-buck deal with China. Okay, okay, the dollar amount was closer to US$ 3 billion. What’s the big deal?
Now it seems that Amazon has channeled its inner apple core. “Amazon Partnered with China Propaganda Arm” reports in a truthy and trustworthy way:
That [once confidential Amazon] briefing document, and interviews with more than two dozen people who have been involved in Amazon’s China operation, reveal how the company has survived and thrived in China by helping to further the ruling Communist Party’s global economic and political agenda, while at times pushing back on some government demands. In a core element of this strategy, the internal document and interviews show, Amazon partnered with an arm of China’s propaganda apparatus to create a selling portal on the company’s U.S. site, Amazon.com – a project that came to be known as China Books. The venture – which eventually offered more than 90,000 publications for sale – hasn’t generated significant revenue. But the document shows that it was seen by Amazon as crucial to winning support in China as the company grew its Kindle electronic-book device, cloud-computing and e-commerce businesses.
Is it a surprise that China’s ruling elite told the dog outside the online bookstore to bite the digital hand of any human or bot daring to give a very special book a bad review.
What is the book, one might ask? It appears that the instant best seller and biographical high water mark is “Xi Jinping: The Governance of China.
The answer, one supposes, is money. The truthy and trustworthy report says:
Amazon Web Services, or AWS, is now one of the largest providers to Chinese companies globally, according to a report this year by analysis firm iResearch in China, and people who have worked for AWS.
Gee, Leader Xi can ping Amazon and Apple any time he chooses. Let’s make a TikTok on a mobile and a desktop too while dining at a TikTok restaurant. Endangered animal stir fry, anyone? It is called Kung Pao Democracy I think.
Stephen E Arnold, December 23, 2021
Silicon Valley: Morphing into Medieval Italy?
December 23, 2021
The historical precedents include Florence (Facebook), Genoa (Google), and Venice (a2z). Venice because it was mostly money people and secret ways of keeping track of who owed whom what, so that’s close enough to a2z for me. The city states had their own ways of ruling, punishing, and exerting influence. What’s a few skirmishes among those who speak the same language. Does this sound like the Silicon Valley we know and love and its giant technology companies? I thought about the golden age of Italian city states as I read a scribe’s retelling of a recent digital skirmish among a couple of these power houses.
“Jack Dorsey’s Hot Web3 Takes Are Apparently Too Much for Marc Andreessen to Handle” reveals that two Duchies are in sharp disagreement. No catapults, just PR. The write up from a modern day Giovanni Villani states:
Marc Andreessen decided to take the step of blocking @jack, and Dorsey responded by saying he’s been “banned from Web3.” That’s not an unfair statement either, as the former Netscape co-founder and co-founder of Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) is now a huge investor in Web3 startups, tossing money around on DeFi projects, metaverse sneakers, tokens, and anything else that catches his eye. According to its “Web3 reading list” (pdf) document from October, “a16z is the largest investor in this space.”
And other digital princes are aligning against the former guru of Twitter.
Are there other signs that the apparent coziness of the impactful environs of Silicon Valley are fraught with digital tension? Are these indicators?
-
- Google’s unhappiness with its trust score and human relations / people management department
- Apple’s once secret deal with a foreign power. What’s a quarter trillion dollars among friends?
- Intel’s apology to China issued in order to comply with US government requirements. What about those chip fabs in Arizona and the water hurdle?
- Amazon’s three consecutive outages and surging orders for pizza to fuel is “two pizza teams”. Isn’t it three strikes and you are out? No, this is no big deal, right Epic.
- Facebook’s alleged dominance of the worst US company rankings. This is unjust.
I don’t know. But unfollowing the guru of the Tweeter and the apparent fractures in a snug club house strike me as an important moment in the history of the technology revolution.
Are there coincidences? My little iTunes’ set up is playing the Beatles’ Revolution:
You say you got a real solution
Well, you know
We’d all love to see the plan
You ask me for a contribution
Well, you know
We’re all doing what we can
Yes, what’s the plan? Perhaps a Decoder to explain what’s happening?
Stephen E Arnold, December 23, 2021
Verizon and Google Are Love Birds? Their Call Is 5G 5G 5G
December 22, 2021
The folks involved with electronic equipment for air planes are expressing some concerns about 5G. Why? Potential issues related to interference. See the FAA and others care about passengers and air freight. Now Verizon and Google care about each other and are moving forward with more 5G goodness. (Please, turn off those 5G mobiles.)
Verizon is regarded as the top mobile provider in the United States. Verizon earns that title, because the company is always innovating. Tech Radar has the story on one of Verizon’s newest innovations: “Verizon Partners With Google Cloud On 5G Edge.” Google Cloud and Verizon will pool their resources to offer 5G mobile edge with guaranteed performance for enterprise customers.
Verizon is promising its 5G networks will have lower latency with faster speeds, reliable connections, and greater capacity. The mobile provider will deliver on its 5G and lower latency promise by decentralizing infrastructures and virtualizing networks, so they are closer to customers. Edge computing means data is processed closer to its collection point. This will enable more advanced technology to take root: smart city applications, telemedicine, and virtual reality.
Google Cloud’s storage and compute capabilities are what Verizon needs to deliver 5G:
“The partnership will initially combine Verizon’s private on-site 5G and its private 5G edge services with Google Distributed Cloud Edge, but the two companies have said they plan to develop capabilities for public networks that will allow enterprises to deploy applications across the US.”
Verizon’s new Google partnership makes it the first mobile provider to offer edge services with Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure.
The advancement of 5G will transform developed countries into automated science-fiction dreams. Verizon 5G edge sounds like it requires the use of more user data in order for it to be processed closer to the collection point. Is this why Verizon has been capturing more of late? Will 5G networks require more private user data to function?
One of my colleagues at Beyond Search had the silly idea that the Verizon Google discussions contributed to Verizon’s keen interest in capturing more customer data. Will the cooing of 5G 5G 5G soothe those worried about having a 757 visit the apartments adjacent O’Hare Airport? Of course not. Verizon and Google are incapable of making technical missteps.
Whitney Grace, December 22, 2021
NSO Group: How about That Debt?
December 14, 2021
The NSO Group continues to make headlines and chisel worry lines in the faces of the many companies in Israel which create specialized software and systems for law enforcement and intelligence professionals. You can read the somewhat unpleasant news in Bloomberg’s report, the Financial Times’ article, and Gizmodo’s Silicon Valley-esque write up. Gizmodo said:
the company’s cumbersome mixture of unpaid debts and growing international scrutiny have made NSO a bloated pariah and is forcing its leadership to consider shutting down its Pegasus spyware unit. Selling the entire company is also reportedly on the table.
First, the reports suggest, without much back up, that NSO Group has about a half a billion US in debt. This is important because it underscores what is the number one flaw in the jazzy business plans of companies making sense of data and providing specialized services to law enforcement, intelligence, and war fighting entities. Here’s my take:
Point 1. What was secret is now open and easily available information.
Since Snowden, the systems and methods informing NSO Group and dozens of similar firms are easy to grasp. Former intelligence professionals can blend what Snowden revealed with whatever these individuals picked up in their service to their country, create a “baby” or “similar” solution and market it. This means that there are more surveillance, penetration, intercept, and analysis options available than at any other time in my 50 year career in online information and systems. Toss in what’s in the wild from dumps of FinFisher and Hacking Team techniques and the gold mine of open source code, and it should be no surprise that the NSO Group’s problem is just the tip of an iceberg, a favorite metaphor in the world of surveillance. None of the newsy reports grasp the magnitude of the NSO Group problem.
Point 2. There’s a lot of “smart” money chasing a big pay day from software purpose built for law enforcement, intelligence, and military operations. VC cows in herds, however, are not that smart or full of wisdom.
There are many investors who buy the line “cyber crime and terrorism” drive big, lucrative sales of specialized software and systems. That’s partially correct. But what’s happened is that the flood of cash has generated a number of commercial enterprisers trying to covert those dollars into highly reliable, easy to use systems. The presentations at off the radar trade shows promise functionality that is almost science fiction. The situation today is that there is a lot of hyper marketing going on because there’s money to apply some very expensive computational methods to what used to be largely secret and manual work. A good case for the travails of selling and keeping customers is the Palantir Technologies’ journey which is more than a decade long and still underway. The marketing is seeping from conferences open only to government agencies and those with clearances to advertising trade shows. I think you can see the risk of moving from low profile or secret government solutions to services for Madison Avenue. I sure can.
Point 3. Too few customers to go around.
There are not enough government customers with deep pockets for the abundant specialized services and systems which are on offer. In this week’s DarkCyber at this link, you can learn about the vendors at conferences where surveillance and applied information collection and analysis explain their products and services. You can also learn that the Brennan Center has revealed documents obtained via FOIA about Voyager Labs, a company which is also engaged in the specialized software and services business. Our DarkCyber report makes clear that license fees are in six figures and include more special add ins than a deal from a flea market vendor selling at the Clignancourt flea market. Competition means prices are falling, and quite effective systems are available for as little as a few hundred dollars per month and sometimes even less. Plus, commercial enterprises are often nervous when the potential customer realizes the power of specialized software and services. Stalking made easy? Yep. Spying on competitors facilitated? Yep. Open source intelligence makes it possible to perform specialized work at a quite attractive price point: Free or a few hundred a month.
What’s next?
Financial wizards may be able to swizzle the NSO Group’s financial pickles into a sweet relish for a ball park frank. There will be other companies in this sector which will face comparable money challenges in the future. From my perspective, it is not possible to put the spilled oil back in the tanker and clean the gunk off the birds now coated in crude.
Policeware and intelware vendors have operated out of sight and out of mind in their bubble since i2 Ltd. in the late 19909s rolled out the Analysts Notebook solution and launched the market for specialized software. The NSO Group’s situation could be or has already shoved a hat pin in that big, fat balloon.
More significantly, formerly blind and indifferent news organizations, government agencies, and potential investors can see what issues specialized software and services pose. More reporting will be forthcoming, including books that purport to reveal how data aggregators are spying on hapless Instagram and TikTok users. Like most of the downstream consequences of the so called digital revolution, NSO Group’s troubles are the tip of an information iceberg drifting into equatorial waters.
Stephen E Arnold, December 14, 2021
Rising Cyber Crimes Mean High Prevention Costs
December 13, 2021
The COVID-19 pandemic forced organizations to institute remote work. Many organizations were not prepared, because they lacked secure networks and other necessary security measures to prevent cyber crimes. It is not surprising when Read Write explains in “Lessons Learned From The Skyrocketing Cost Of Cyber Crime” are loss of revenue, obvious preventable issues, and that cyber security and cyber crimes are burgeoning industries.
The pandemic spurred a rise in cyber crime, especially in ransomware, phishing, malware, island hopping, and hyper-targeted nation state attacks. (Does spreading of misinformation count as a cyber crime?). Cloud computing company Iomart recorded that data breaches rose by 273% in the first quarter of 2020 compared to 2019. Cyber crime cost the US an estimated $3.5 billion and the UK $1.8 billion, but it could be more as many crimes are unnoticed.
The cost of cyber crimes are projected to rise exponentially and cause more economic damage than natural disasters. It is important that organizations take preventative measures:
“With all the realistic threats that lurk in the digital space, it’s imperative for companies to deploy best practices in cybersecurity to protect their data and other digital assets. Plus, companies need to do everything they can to avoid the burdensome financial costs associated with cybercrime. While we can’t always prevent cyber attacks, we can learn from them and apply tangible steps to protect ourselves and our businesses.”
Good cyber security practices include implementing and enforcing identification, robust encryption policies, strong data hygiene, patch management programs, using blockchain and crypto currency solutions, and use traditional measures like firewalls, antivirus software, and anti-spyware.
Whitney Grace, December 13, 2021
The Coveo IPO: Making Some Headway
December 9, 2021
A number of Canadian tech companies have recently gone public on the Toronto Stock Exchange only to be met with muted responses. One was enterprise search firm Coveo, which went public in November in order to position itself globally, attract talent, and fund future acquisitions. CEO Louis Têtu appears unconcerned about the apparent indifference to his and other companies’ fledgling stock, The Globe and Mail reports in its piece, “Coveo CEO Dismisses Soft Trading Start on TSX as Quebec Software Company Closes $215-Million IPO.” Writer Sean Silcoff tells us:
“Coveo received more than $1-billion in orders for its IPO… . The stock hit $18 on its first day of trading last Thursday, but has since retreated, briefly trading below the issue price Tuesday. That makes it the fourth new tech issue this autumn – following D2L Corp., Q4 Inc. and E Automotive Inc. – to trade below its issue price. Coveo stock closed Wednesday at $15.30, up 1.7 per cent. Mr. Têtu dismissed Coveo’s ho-hum start as a public company, noting the share price of New York Stock Exchange-listed rival Elastic NV had dropped by 15 per cent over the previous four sessions. ‘There is a set of market dynamics we don’t control; the tide raises and lowers all boats,’ he said. ‘I think the jury is going to be out until the first earnings call [as a public company] and the subsequent earnings call. I think anybody who understands the stock market and IPOs … wouldn’t draw conclusions’ from the stock’s early performance. Coveo became the 20th Canadian tech IPO on the TSX to raise $50-million or more since July, 2020. By contrast, there were 12 such IPOs in the 11 years ended December, 2019.”
I suppose that is a good point—progress is progress, even if it is not at light speed. The write-up [paywalled] includes a few more details about Coveo’s growth and profits. Since its founding in 2005, the company has acquired two AI-powered e-commerce firms: Tooso in 2019 and Qubit in 2021. It sounds like Coveo may have some more companies already in its sights.
The good news is that the stock on December 8, 2021, was trending up. Search and retrieval is a tough business. Just ask the former CEOs of Autonomy and Fast Search & Transfer or take a look at the dust up between Amazon and Elastic. Worth monitoring. Maybe take a stake?
Cynthia Murrell December 10, 2021
US Government Procurement: Diagram the Workflow: How Many Arrows Point Fingers?
December 8, 2021
I want to keep this short. For a number of years, I have pointed out that current Federal procurement procedures and the policies the steps are supposed to implement create some issues. I like to mention procurement time for advanced software. By the time the procurement goes through the RFQ, the RFP, the proposal evaluation, the selection, the little meeting at which losers express their concerns, and the award — the advanced technology is often old technology. Another issue is the importance of marketing hoo hah which often leads the Federal government to purchase products and services which are different from that which was described in the PowerPoint presentations and the proposals. There are other interesting characteristics of the process; for example, coffee chats with senators, nice lunches with important people who may pop up on a cable TV talking head program, or good old friendship from a college social group. Ah, yes. Procurement.
“US Government Agencies Bought Chinese Surveillance Tech Despite Federal Ban” is a collection of some procurement anecdotes. Interesting? Not particularly. Why? There are no consequences for buying products and services from vendors who should not be eligible for US government contracts. The article focuses on Chinese related missteps. The explanations are crafted to avoid getting anyone in legal hot water.
Net net: I worked in DC starting in the early 1970s. How much has changed in the last 50 years. Not much. China is nemesis but China was a bit of a nemesis 50 years ago. The FARs have been updated. Nevertheless, some interesting purchases have been made over the years. Where’s the Golden Fleece Award now? Are there some unwanted and unloved tanks parked somewhere? What about certain air superiority systems which experience more downtime than a second hand taxi purchased from a shady character in Mexico City. Yes, procurement and some proud moments. Why not fire up that TikTok and ignore the useful data hosed back to certain servers?
Stephen E Arnold, December 8, 2021
Amazon: The Online Bookstore Does FinTech
December 1, 2021
Several years ago, I did a series of reports about Amazon’s push into a data marketplace. That technology is chugging along, but it appeals to the back office crowd. “Goldman Sachs Unveils Amazon Backed Cloud Service for Wall Street Trading Firms” makes clear that the back office is an important part of the Bezos bulldozer’s post-Jeff itinerary. Instead of teaming with US government agencies, the online bookstore has connected with everyone’s favorite financial institution to create a fintech cloud.
The write up reports:
The bank is opening up access to its trove of market data and software tools to hedge funds and asset managers in an offering designed with Amazon’s cloud division.
Like other Amazon back office services, many Amazon watchers will yawn. The excite swirls around Black Friday deals and Amazon’s alleged manipulation of its product search results.
How long has the online bookstore been working with the estimable Wall Street eminence? The answer is more than a decade.
Worth watching because the back office in the world of finance is possibly more lucrative than selling Amazon Basics T shirts.
Stephen E Arnold, December xx, 2021
-
- Subscribe to Beyond Search
Feature archive
News archive
-
