Western Union And Wise Boost Google Pay
June 11, 2021
Western Union and Wise are trusted money wiring services and the companies have teamed with Google Pay. Tech Moran explores the new business team up in the story, “Google Pay Partners With Western Union And Wise To Launch An International Money Transfer Service.”
Wise and Western Union are now integrated parts of Google Pay. Google Pay is only available in the US. Customers can now transfer money through the Google Pay app to Singapore and India. Using Wise’s international services, Google Pay will not be available to eighty countries and Western Union connects the app to two hundred countries by the end of 2021.
In order to send money to India or Singapore, the Google Pay app will give customers the option to send money via Western Union or Wise. Google Pay selected Singapore and India as test countries due to the amount of remittance payments sent there from the US senders.
COVID increased the amount of money sent through online payments, but demands for remittance services have decreased since 2019:
“The Covid 19 pandemic has led to an increase in online payments though generally there is a drop in overall remittances flows as the money migrants sent has declined up to 14 percent from 2019.This is occasioned by worsening economic conditions and employment levels in migrant-hosting countries as revealed by the World Bank.”
Remittance services have an advantage over online payments in that they do not require an online account to receive or send money. Are there implications for enforcement officials working in the cyber crime space? Oh, some.
Whitney Grace, June 11, 2021
What Is Cloud Computing? It May Be Timesharing REbranded
June 1, 2021
I have been around long enough to watch hot trends come and go. Then years or decades later the “old” new thing returns. “Nvidia Is Renting Out Its A.I. Superpod Platform for $90K a Month” states:
Nvidia is looking to make work and development in artificial intelligence more accessible, giving researchers an easy way to access its DGX 2 supercomputer. The company announced that it will launch a subscription service for its DGX Superpod as an affordable way to gain entry into the world of supercomputers.
Does this sound like timesharing to you? It does to me. And what about those automatic upticks in charges? It is too early to tell, but my hunch is that there will be “peak times,” data transfer thresholds, and a taxi meter method applied to some user actions. I hope I am wrong, but, hey, timesharing business models have been around since — what? — the 1950s. That is long enough for those thrilling moments after opening a timesharing invoice to become one of the benefits of this “new” but “old” approach to computing.
Will the Nvidia supercomputing deals include a white coat? One tip: If you tour the superpod data facility, take a sweater.
Stephen E Arnold, June 1, 2021
Palantir: Pay Us in Bitcoin
May 19, 2021
I spotted an interesting article called “Palantir Technologies Accepts Bitcoin Payments, Might Hold on Balance Sheet.” Bitcoin is the poster child for digital currency. In some circles, Bitcoin evokes thoughts of money laundering and cyber crime. The write up points out in response to a question about crypto currency on the balance sheet:
Palantir’s CFO, David Glazer said, ‘The short answer is yes. We’re thinking about it and we’ve even discussed it internally. If you take a look at our balance sheet there’s $2.3 billion in cash at quarter-end including $151 million in cash flow in Q1. So it’s definitely on the table from a treasury perspective as well as other investments as we look across our business and beyond. Glazer went on to note that “in terms of accepting bitcoin from our customers, we do accept it as a form of payment. We’re open for business there.”
Some of the early investors in Palantir are enthused about digital currency. Business Insider reported that:
Block.one announced on Tuesday that it would launch a crypto exchange called Bullish. It’s landed over $10 billion in backing from Peter Thiel, Mike Novogratz, Louis Bacon, and Nomura. Novogratz said that Bullish’s scale and Block.one’s experience would make it “a formidable player.
Significant moves indeed. However, in the back of my mind is the thought that Bitcoin facilitates certain types of illegal activity. But that’s just my speculation.
Stephen E Arnold, May 19, 2021
Clarivate Buys ProQuest
May 18, 2021
I don’t want to go into the history of commercial database producers. (Those readings about Oliver Cromwell in my British history class were orders of magnitude more exciting.)
“ProQuest Bought by Clarivate in $5.3bn Deal” reports:
London-based Clarivate said the acquisition would establish it as “a premier provider of end-to-end research intelligence solutions” and significantly expand its content and data offerings.
Clarivate describes itself this way:
Together, we can create a better tomorrow.
The firm uses these phrases to communicate its business:
Every drop of potential needs to be squeezed from your IP
Make critical decisions with speed and certainty
Innovation in focus
Human ingenuity can change the world and improve our future
Accelerating innovation with actionable information and insights
If you are still unsure what the firm does, you will need to check the About page on the company’s Web site. Oh, sorry. There is no “About” page for Clarivate. A profile of the firm, which is assumed to be a household work, is available at this link.
ProQuest warrants its own Wikipedia entry which explains that
ProQuest LLC is an Ann Arbor, Michigan-based global information-content and technology company, founded in 1938 as University Microfilms by Eugene B. Power. ProQuest provides applications and products for libraries. ProQuest started as a producer of microfilm products, then became an electronic publisher, and later grew through acquisitions. Today, the company provides tools for discovery and citation management,[example needed] and platforms that allow library users to search, manage, use, and share research.
Net net: For fee online information access appears to mesh with the increased interest in subscription services. Challenges exist; for example, individuals like Sci Hub’s founder Alexandra Elbakyan and university professionals who can go off the reservation and present content outside of the peer reviewed journals, Dark Web archives, and customers mindful of the cost associated with an online for fee search may look for relevant information on Medium or Substack type services. My view is that this is a sale by ProQuest’s owner Cambridge Scientific Abstract comparable to Bill Ziff’s legendary deals.
Stephen E Arnold, May 18, 2021
Believe It or Not: The First AI to Surpass Humans
May 12, 2021
Say what you will about other aspects of Google, you have to hand it to the company’s research arm. Developers at Google Brain, DeepMind, and the University of Toronto have developed the reinforcement-learning AI DreamerV2. According to Analytics India Magazine, “Now DeepMind’s New AI Agent Outperforms Humans” as measured by the Atari benchmark. The tech evolved from last year’s Dreamer agent created by the same team. It uses a world model, an approach that is more adept at forming generalizations than traditional trial-and-error machine learning processes. World models have not been as accurate as many other algorithms, however. Until now. Reporter Ambika Choudhury writes:
“Dreamer learns a world model from the past experience and efficiently learns far-sighted behaviors in its latent space by backpropagating value estimates back through imagined trajectories. DreamerV2 is the successor of the Dreamer agent. … This new agent works by learning a world model and uses it to train actor-critic behaviors purely from predicted trajectories. It is built upon the Recurrent State-Space Model (RSSM) — a latent dynamics model with both deterministic and stochastic components — allowing to predict a variety of possible futures as needed for robust planning, while remembering information over many time steps. The RSSM uses a Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU) to compute the deterministic recurrent states. DreamerV2 introduced two new techniques to RSSM. According to the researchers, these two techniques lead to a substantially more accurate world model for learning successful policies: [a] The first technique is to represent each image with multiple categorical variables instead of the Gaussian variables used by world models; [b] *The second new technique is KL balancing. This technique lets the predictions move faster toward the representations than vice versa.”
See the write-up for a chart of DreamerV2’s performance compared to previous world models. And all this on a single GPU. Curious readers can check out the team’s paper here. We believe.
Cynthia Murrell, May 12, 2021
Google Bets: Chump Change
April 30, 2021
In the midst of stakeholder ebullience about Alphabet Google’s money making prowess, I spotted one interesting comment. “Alphabet Reports Q1 2021 Revenue of $55.3 Billion” included this statement:
The closely-watched “Other Bets” continues to lose money. It reported $198 million revenue primarily generated by Verily and Fiber from $135 million in Q1 of 2020. However, it lost $1.15 billion compared to $1.12 billion in the same quarter of last year.
For a company of Alphabet Google YouTube’s scale this is a modest loss. However, it does beg a couple of questions:
- Is the data analysis used to decide upon what to wager flawed?
- Is there high value information about the firm’s management of certain projects contained in these increasing and continuing losses?
Alphabet does online advertising and data vending. Innovation may be more of a reach than some expected.
Stephen E Arnold, April 30, 2021
Smart Software: What YCombinator Has Been Doing
April 28, 2021
I read a very good overview of Y Combinator’s involvement in smart software. Artificial intelligence generates significant investor interest and spins out massive hyperbole. “What Over a Decade of Y Combinator Data Reveals About Artificial Intelligence” takes a factual approach to characterizing Y Combinator’s activities in this active area of software and services.
The write up states:
The majority of AI funding in YC has been placed into what can be defined as Next Gen AI Infrastructure. The backbone of AI is Infrastructure which consists of numerous subcategories such as AI model development, computer vision, development operations, and natural language generation/natural language processing.
I was surprised to learn that YCombinator has placed emphasis on blocking and tackling, not spray painting the gym walls with slogans.
I circled the conclusion with a red marker.
Y Combinator’s 15 years’ worth of information suggests AI is rapidly heading towards mainstream adoption as companies are utilizing data to automate their activities. The data also suggests certain industries are getting more AI dollar investment than others (e.g., Business Operations, E-Commerce, Sales & CRM). Nonetheless, founders of startups specializing in Next Gen AI Infrastructure, Healthcare, and other mainstream industries should be encouraged that capital allocation will continue to grow in their respective sectors.
Well done. Worth reading.
Stephen E Arnold, April 28, 2021
Financial Warfare: Another View of FinTech
April 21, 2021
I usually ignore articles about big finance and international wheeling and dealing. I did read “China’s Digital Yuan Displaces the Dollar.” The headline struck me as misleading and somewhat deceptive. You will have to read the original write up and make your own decision.
I am not going to walk through the argument and the facts supporting the point of view in the essay. I will cite one interesting passage:
The $16 trillion of offshore dollar deposits at international banks won’t turn into the equivalent amount of Chinese Yuan. Instead, that $16 trillion will shrink to a small fraction of its present volume, because the Big Tech/fintech revolution will make them redundant. Instead, as Morgan Stanley analysts explained this week, “banks will lose their deposit base” as digital currencies replace their most basic functions.
Let’s assume that this assertion is correct.
From an intelligence perspective, consider these questions:
- What’s the impact of the US printing dollars to cover Covid et al?
- What happens if China takes direct action to add Taiwan to its collection of entities?
- What happens if Russia annexes Ukraine?
- What happens if these events occur at the same time?
I try to stick to online information in this blog. Therefore, one final question:
What happens if the cyber attacks based on SolarWinds, Exchange Server, Pulse Secure, and similar entities move into a new phase of active aggression?
Maybe Texas power problems on steroids? Thumbtyping and sucking down YouTube and TikTok content might become problematic. ATMs are online devices and possibly vulnerable.
Stephen E Arnold, April 21, 2021
Amazon Withholds Its E-Books from Public Libraries: Who Remembers Andrew Carnegie?
April 16, 2021
This was not what the Internet was supposed to bring—quite the opposite. We learn of a growing problem from The Washington Post in their article, “Want to Borrow That E-Book from the Library? Sorry, Amazon Won’t Let You.” Tech giant Amazon has never forgotten it began with books and has now grown into a powerful publisher as well as book vendor. However, the company’s obsession with its bottom line is posing a real problem for society—it is refusing to sell its digital titles to public libraries. Reporter Geoffrey A. Fowler writes:
“[Amazon] won’t sell downloadable versions of its more than 10,000 e-books or tens of thousands of audiobooks to libraries. That’s right, for a decade, the company that killed bookstores has been starving the reading institution that cares for kids, the needy and the curious. And that’s turned into a mission-critical problem during a pandemic that cut off physical access to libraries and left a lot of people unable to afford books on their own. Many Americans now recognize that a few tech companies increasingly dominate our lives. But it’s sometimes hard to put your finger on exactly why that’s a problem. The case of the vanishing e-books shows how tech monopolies hurt us not just as consumers, but as citizens.”
For decades lawmakers have evaluated the harm monopolies cause by asking one simple question—are prices going up? In the case of tech firms like Amazon, Google, Facebook, and Apple, their large-scale operations often mean the answer is no. But that metric misses a lot of factors. Fowler notes:
“But we’re not just price-sensitive consumers — we’re also citizens. We need products that are made fairly, serve our needs and are equitably distributed. Groundbreaking government antitrust lawsuits filed in late 2020 argue Google’s monopoly hurts us because it’s blocking competitors and prioritizing its own inferior services. In my own investigation, I found Google search results are getting worse as it puts its own business ahead of our interests. Libraries losing e-books matters because they serve us as citizens.”
Yes, libraries are critical to maintaining an informed public even in the digital age. As with physical books, most publishers happily sell libraries e-book versions of their works. In fact, libraries typically pay more for each publication than an end consumer would. That apparently is not enough for Amazon. Why spare even one potential sale for the greater good?
The American Library Association testified to Congress on the matter, calling digital sales bans “the worst obstacle for libraries.” Maryland, New York, and Rhode Island have proposed bills that would force Amazon and other publishers to sell their e-books on reasonable terms. We will see whether any of these or similar bills make it into law. Meanwhile, authors who want to see their books on libraries’ virtual shelves should turn to other publishers.
Cynthia Murrell, April 16, 2021
Fables of Googzilla: The Theoretical Information Tsar and the Search Duck
April 14, 2021
The mom and pop online ad vendor (hereinafter “The Google”) will appear in a thrilling new video series tentatively titled “Tales of Googzilla.”
Public sources (aka open source intelligence or OSINT) reveals two magnetic programs.
The first is summarized in “YouTube Pulls Florida Governor’s Video, Says His Panel Spread Covid-19 Misinformation.” The plot involves an emerging star named Gov Ron. In the midst of Covid, spring break dust ups, and NASCAR races — the Alphabet Google YouTube mom and pop online ad vendor hit the delete button. The write up reports:
Video of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and a panel of scientists apparently trading in Covid-19 misinformation has been pulled from YouTube.
To add some back alley darkness, the report noted:
It had been embedded in a Tampa-area TV station’s news story and it’s removal was flagged by the American Institute for Economic Research, a “free market” think tank based in Great Barrington, Massachusetts.
Ah, ha. Misinformation “embedded.”
What will Gov Ron do? Will Googzilla continue to squash certain info bugs? What if Googzilla, like a drunken elephant, get frisky amidst the shanties erected by other alleged miscreants? How does one corral an elephant under the influence?
The second is reported in “DuckDuckGo Promises to Block Google’s Latest Ad-Tracking Tech — If Google Allows It.” The semi mighty metasearch engine Duck is honking in an intimidating manner at Googzilla. Can the Duck thing cause the mom and pop giant to discard its new approach to ensuring the privacy of Google services’ users?
The DuckDuck write up asserts that the Duck:
announced that the latest version of its Chrome extension would prevent websites from tracking users via their FLoC identification. Of course, the company notes that the extension update will have to be approved by Google before it becomes available to its users.
This seems like a fair fight. Issue a news release, honk angrily, and then point out that unless Googzilla grunts, “Okay,” the “new” user privacy methods will be implemented. Quack, quack, quack.
What’s the point of these two programs?
Advertising. Power. Control. Power. Did I already mention power? And PR/marketing. Yes.
Googzilla is the creation of the mom and pop finding system which has a large appetite for revenue.
Programs will air exclusively on streaming services supported by a company which lives in fear of Qwant, a fact revealed by Googzilla’s former keeper, Eric Schmidt.
Roar. Stomp. Quack. Quack. Delayed programs in the series may be released on Amazon Twitch. Programs air at random and in response to real life, just like YouTube influencer videos containing wholesome family entertainment like Valentine’s Day Inspired Try On Haul Fashion Nova Lingerie, Sleepwear & Dresses. Hey, four million views of Disney-grade excellence at this link.
Stephen E Arnold, April 14, 2021
-
- Subscribe to Beyond Search
Feature archive
News archive
-
