UK Pundit Chops at the Google Near Its Palatine Raphe
September 6, 2022
I read “Google’s Image-Scanning Illustrates How Tech Firms Can Penalise the Innocent.” The write up is an opinion piece, and I am not sure whether the ideas expressed in the essay are appropriate for my Harrod’s Creek ethos.
The write up states:
The background to this is that the tech platforms have, thankfully, become much more assiduous at scanning their servers for child abuse images. But because of the unimaginable numbers of images held on these platforms, scanning and detection has to be done by machine-learning systems, aided by other tools (such as the cryptographic labelling of illegal images, which makes them instantly detectable worldwide). All of which is great. The trouble with automated detection systems, though, is that they invariably throw up a proportion of “false positives” – images that flag a warning but are in fact innocuous and legal.
Yep, false positives from Google’s smart software.
Do these types of errors become part of the furniture of living? Does Google have a duty to deal with disagreements in a transparent manner? Does Google’s smart software care about problems caused by those who consume Google advertising?
It strikes me that the UK will be taking a closer look at the fascinating palatine raphe, probably in one of those nifty UK jurisprudence settings: Wigs, big words, and British disdain. Advertising, privacy, and false positives. I say, “The innocent!”
Stephen E Arnold, September 6, 2022
Google and Security: The Google Play Protect Situation
September 1, 2022
Unfortunately for Android users, Google’s default app-security program is not the safest bet. A write-up at News Patrolling explores “Why Google Play Protect Fails to Identify Malicious Apps.” A few points are obvious—Google cannot help users who turn the feature off, for example, or those who install software from other sources. The company also lacks Apple’s advantage of controlling both hardware and software. That does not explain, however, why third-party tools from AhnLab to Trend Micro outperform Play Protect. Reporter Satya Prakash observes:
- New kid on the block – As compared to other security software platforms that have been in existence for decades, Google Play Protect was launched in 2017. While it’s true that Google can hire the best security experts, it may still take some time for Google Play Protect to achieve the same level of security as offered by private software platforms. …
- Too many apps and devices – There are around 3 million apps on Google Play and several thousands are added almost every day. Combine that with thousands of different types of smartphones, having different Android versions. Apparently, it’s a massive task to be able to fix security vulnerabilities that may be present in each of these cases.
- Reliance on automated systems – Due to huge number of apps and devices, Google relies on automated systems to detect harmful behavior. Private security firms use the same approach, but apparently, they are doing a much better job. Hackers are constantly looking for new security vulnerabilities that can be exploited. This makes the job tougher for Google Play Protect.”
Happily, there are many stronger alternatives as tested by AV-Test. Their list is worth a look-see for Android users who care about security. A comparison to last year’s results shows Play Protect has actually improved a bit. Perhaps someday it will perform as well in its own app store as its third-party competition.
Cynthia Murrell, September 1, 2022
Here We Go Again: Google Claims To Improve Search Results
August 31, 2022
Google has been blamed for biased search results for years. Users claim that Google pushes paid links to the top of search results without identifying them Organic search results are consigned to the second and third pages. Despite having a monopoly on search and other parts of the tech sector, Google does deliver decent services and products. To maintain its market dominance, Google must continue offering good services. Engadget explores how “Google’s Search AI Now Looks For General Consensus To Highlight More Trustworthy Results.”
Google wants it “search snippets, “blocks of text that appear at the top of search results to answer questions,” to be more accurate. Google designed the Multitask Unified Model AI to search for consensus when selecting a snippet. The AI checks snippets against verified resources to determine a consensus of information. Some queries, such as false premises, should not have snippets, so Google’s AI reduces those by 40%.
Also Google is showing more citations:
“Google is now also making its “About this result” tool more accessible. That’s the panel that pops up when you click on the three dots next to a result, showing you details about the source website before you even visit. Starting later this year, it will be available in eight more languages, including Portuguese, French, Italian, German, Dutch, Spanish, Japanese, and Indonesian. It’s adding more information to the tool starting this week, as well, including how widely a publication is circulated, online reviews about a company, or whether a company is owned by another entity. They’re all pieces of information that could help you decide whether a particular source is trustworthy.”
Google search results with limited returns or do not have verified sources will contain content advisories encouraging users to conduct further research.
It is great that Google is turning itself into an academic database, now if they would only do that for Google Scholar.
Whitney Grace, August 31, 2022
Libraries and Google: Who Wins?
August 31, 2022
Google uses various ways to protect users’ accounts, such as authentication through a mobile phone or non-Gmail address. This is a problem for large portions of the American population who don’t have regular access to the Internet. These include ethnic minorities, people with low socioeconomic status, and the elderly. These groups usually rely on public libraries for Internet access. These groups also need welfare and other assistance programs for survival.
Shelly R., a librarian in the Free Library of Philadelphia System, wrote a letter to Google in 2021 about how their security authentication hurts these groups. The letter was picked up by Hacker News and it was meant to be private. Her description of the services her library system provides is typical of many places in the United States.
People say that libraries are obsolete, but the naysayers are not taking into account the people that need Internet access, help with technology literacy, applying for benefits and jobs, and more. Librarians have one of the most stressful jobs in the country, because they are forced into more roles than helping people research: teacher, therapist, babysitter, and more. It is ridiculous the amount of roles librarians fill, however, helping people in their community get access to technology is one thing they excel at.
Shelly R. makes a valiant point that many groups cannot afford expensive technology or know how to use it. They rely on community resources such as the public library for assistance, but security features like Google’s authentication system do not help them.
Online accounts must remain secure to protect users, but people without regular Internet access or technology literacy must be taken into account as well. The Internet is supposed to be a great equalizer, but it does not work when everyone does not have equal access.
Shelly R. updated the letter in August 2022, said she spoke with Google’s security team, and things were better for her job. Is that true? We hope so. If only Google would do more to help equalize Internet access. Hey Google, maybe you could donate money or resources to public libraries? You have the power and ability to do so, plus it would be a tax write-off.
Whitney Grace, August 31, 2022
Google Management: If True, a New Term Gains Currency
August 29, 2022
Caste bias. That’s a bound phrase with which I was not familiar. I grew up in Illinois, and when I was a wee lad in Illinois by the river gently flowing, castes and biases were not on my radar. Flash forward 77 years, and the concept remains outside the lingo of some people who live in Harrod’s Creek, Kentucky.
“Google Scrapped a Talk on Caste Bias Because Some Employees Felt It Was “Anti Hindu”, if accurate, provides another glimpse of the Google’s difficult situation with regard to different ethnicities, religions and cults, and other factors which humanoids manifest.
The issue of management is a tricky one. Google, as I pointed out in The Google Legacy (Infonortics Ltd, 2004), Google is a company with non traditional management methods. These embraced settling an intellectual property misunderstanding with Yahoo related to advertising systems and methods, permitting a wide range of somewhat adolescent behaviors such as sleeping in bean bags and playing Foosball at work, and ignoring some of the more interesting behaviors super duper wizards demonstrate as part of their equipment for living.
The cited Quartz India article states:
“I cannot find the words to express just how traumatic and discriminatory Google’s actions were towards its employees and myself…” Soundararajan [the terminated speaker who is executive director of the US-based social justice organization Equality Labs] said in the press release.
The Google wizard charged with explaining the termination of the lecture allegedly said:
While noting that caste discrimination had “no place” at Google, Shannon Newberry, Google’s spokesperson, said in a statement to The Washington Post, “We also made the decision to not move forward with the proposed talk which—rather than bringing our community together and raising awareness—was creating division and rancor.”
Observations? I would like to offer three:
- Who in charge at the Google? Does this individual harbor some biases? My experience suggests that it is very difficult for an individual to step outside of the self and judge in an objective manner what behaviors could trigger such remarkable management decisions, explanations, and reversals.
- The lingo used to explain the incident strikes me as classic Sillycon Valley: A statement designed not to address the core issue.
- I wonder how Dr. Timnit Gebru interprets the management decision making for the allegedly true Quartz described incident.
Yep, just part of the Google Legacy. “Caste bias” plus accompanying Google babble in my opinion.
Stephen E Arnold, August 29, 2022
Google: Errors Are Not Possible… Mostly
August 29, 2022
In my upcoming talk for a US government law enforcement meeting, I talk about some of the issues associated with wonky smart software. I spotted a fantastic example of one quasi-alleged monopoly deals with tough questions about zippy technology.
As I understand “Google Refuses to Reinstate Man’s Account after He Took Medical Images of Son’s Groin,” an online ad company does not make errors… mostly. The article, which appeared in a UK newspaper, stated:
Google has refused to reinstate a man’s account after it wrongly flagged medical images he took of his son’s groin as child sexual abuse material…
The Alphabet Google YouTube DeepMind entity has sophisticated AI/ML (artificial intelligence/machine learning) systems which flag inappropriate content. Like most digital watch dogs, zeros and ones are flawless… mostly even though Google humans help out the excellent software. The article reports:
When the photos were automatically uploaded to the cloud, Google’s system identified them as CSAM. Two days later, Mark’s Gmail and other Google accounts, including Google Fi, which provides his phone service, were disabled over “harmful content” that was “a severe violation of the company’s policies and might be illegal”, the Times reported, citing a message on his phone. He later found out that Google had flagged another video he had on his phone and that the San Francisco police department opened an investigation into him. Mark was cleared of any criminal wrongdoing, but Google has said it will stand by its decision.
The cited article quotes a person from the US American Civil Liberty Union, offering this observation:
“These systems can cause real problems for people.”
Several observations:
- Google is confident its smart software works; thus, Google is correct in its position on this misunderstanding.
- The real journalists and the father who tried to respond to a medical doctor to assist his son are not Googley; that is, their response to the fabulous screening methods will not be able to get hired at the Alphabet Google YouTube Alphabet construct as full time employees or contractors.
- The online ad company and would be emulator or TikTok provides many helpful services. Those services allow the company to control information flows to help out everyone every single day.
- More color for this uplifting story can be found here.
Net net: Mother Google is correct… mostly. That’s why the Google timer is back online. Just click here. The company cares… mostly.
Stephen E Arnold, August 23, 2022
Google Outages: The Logic of a Quasi Monopoly
August 24, 2022
I read “Google Search Goes Down Around the World, Chaos Ensues.” In today’s world, I am not certain that a quasi monopoly’s technical shortcomings cause chaos. Anger, frustration, and confusion, yes. Chaos already exists in a number of high profile activities; for example, air plane luggage handling, medicines which don’t work as advertised on cable TV, and self driving vehicles. The write up states about one outage:
Google Search went down in dozens of countries. Other Google services, like Google Maps, were affected too.
Then:
The outage followed an “electrical incident” earlier in the day at a Google data center in Council Bluffs, Iowa, according to local media and SFGate. The incident critically injured three electricians around midday Iowa time. One person was flown to a nearby hospital and the other two were transported by ambulance.
Now here is the sentence which made the logic of quasi monopolies clear to me and probably no one else in the world, including the 150,000 or so Googlers laboring in the vineyards of truth and advertising revenue:
A Google spokesperson, however, told CNET that the two incidents were unrelated.
Er, one company is the glue that connects the two events. Thus, in my opinion, the one company has failed twice and the events are related: Corporate DNA does not infuse just the Mountain View folks. Everyone has the chemical magic if not the technical skills to demonstrate that technical debt is now too burdensome to address in an effective way. Focus, right?
Stephen E Arnold, August 24, 2022
Google: Redefines Quality. And What about Ads?
August 23, 2022
When I was working on The Google Legacy (Infonortics, 2004), I gathered information about Google’s method for determining quality. Prior to 2006, Google defined “quality” in a way different from the approach taken at professional indexing and commercial database companies. Professional organizations relied on subject matter experts’ views. Some firms — for example, the Courier Journal & Louisville Times, Predicasts, Engineering Index, the American Petroleum Institute, among others — were old fashioned. Commercial database firms with positive cash flows would hire specialists to provide ideas and suggestions for improving content selection and indexing. At the Courier Journal, we relied on Betty Eddison and a number of other professionals. We also hired honest-to-goodness people with advanced degrees to work on the content we produced.
Google pops up with jibber jabber about voting, a concept floated by an IBM Almaden researcher, and the notion of links and their value. As Google evolved, I collected a list of what amount4ed to 140 or so factors which were used by Google to determine the quality of content. At one time, Dr. Liz Liddy used my compilation as illustrative material for her classes in information science.
By 2006, Google shifted quality from its mysterious and somewhat orthogonal factors to what I call “ad quality.” The concept gained steam when Google acquired Applied Semantics and worked hard to relax a user’s query, match the query to a stack of ads to which the query would relate, and display these as “personalized” and targeted messages. Quality, therefore, became an automated process for working through ad revenue.
Since 2006, Google has been focused on ad revenue. My personal view is that Google has one stream of revenue: Ad revenue. Its other ventures have not demonstrated to me that the company can match its first “me too” innovation. If you don’t remember what that was, think about the Yahoo settlement related to the “inspiration” Google obtained from the GoTo.com and Overture “pay to play” system. The idea was that those with Web pages would pay to get their message in front of a service’s users.
Where is Google quality now? Is it anchored in editorial policies, old fashioned ideas like precision and recall? Is the Google using controlled vocabulary lists designed to allow precise queries? Is Google adding classification codes to disambiguate terms like terminal as in “computer terminal” or “airport terminal”?
“Google’s Planned Search Changes Could Upend the Internet” reveals:
Google is trying to improve the quality of search results and reduce the number of misleading sites, misinformation, and clickbait users are subjected to.
I want to point out that the lack of precision and recall in Google’s approach is the firm’s notion that new Web sites are more important than older Web sites, traffic is more important than factual accuracy, and ad revenue goals are the strong force in the Google datasphere.
Thus, after a certain outfit headed by a search engine optimization crazed advanced the SEO “revolution”, the Google is, according the article:
As part of the change, the company will roll out its “helpful content update” to identify content that is primarily written to rank well in search engines and lower its rank. Sullivan says the update seems to especially benefit searches related to tech, online education, shopping, arts, and entertainment. The company is also working to improve access to high-quality reviews, ones that provide helpful, in-depth information.
Does this suggest that Google will focus on high-value content, explicit editorial policies, and professional indexing by subject matter experts?
Nope.
It means quicker depletion of the ad inventory and an effort to cope with the fact that those in middle school and high school use TikTok for information.
Google is officially a dinobaby just one not very good at anything other than selling ads and steering its coal fired steam boat away from the rapids in today’s data flows. For serious information research Google is too consumer oriented. Search based applications are what some researchers prefer. The content in these systems comes from specialized crawls and collections.
The quality list? Old fashioned and antiquated. How much of Google fits in that category? SAIL on, steam boat. Chug chug chug. PR PR PR. Toot toot.
But what about traffic to sites affected by Google’s content rigor?
Just buy ads, of course.
Stephen E Arnold, August 23, 2022
Google and the Thirst for Quantum Supremacy
August 17, 2022
The operative word is “supremacy.” For a very basic reason — money — Google wants to be the source of low cost training data, integrated models, and assorted software to own the fabled quantum computing sector. You (and probably the management and technical wizards) at the online advertising firm may disagree. That is okay with me. Since I wrote the Google Legacy in 2006 or so, Google has been a bifurcated outfit.
On one hand, the Google had oodles of money from its bar-room swinging door business model. In may view, the approach means that for some transactions, the Google gets paid with each swing. Ka-ching, ka-ching, ka-ching 24×7. Great for high school reunion talk and for the estimable company; maybe not so great for the advertisers. How does one add a gloss of intellectual excellence to this core business?
Easy. Solve “real world” technical problems; for example, make death go away, allow autos to drive themselves (sort of), and master the future world of quantum computing or quantum stuff from pharma drug “discovery” to inventing new materials with a short ride on the bioengineering bypass.
However, doing these innovative things is hard. Writing papers, giving talks, and writing blog posts is a little easier. “DeepMind Feuds with Russian Scientists over Quantum AI Research” puts Google in a defensive posture. That’s uncomfortable for today’s bastion of management excellence.
To further irritate the Google, academic researchers from a couple of countries like
Here’s the passage I circled because it is important and pretty easy to understand by a dinobaby like me:
According to the commenting researchers, the training process that DeepMind used to build its neural network taught it how to memorize the answers to the specific problems it was going to face during benchmarking — the process by which scientists determine if one approach is better than another.
Since the Google cannot fire the academics beavering away in Russia and South Korea, Google denies the allegation that its snorkeling-like approach to creating training data suffers from a flaw. Google wants, as I understand the goal, to become the Big Dog of all things quantum. Supremacy is the goal, and some academics criticizing the intellectual skyscrapers erected by Google is not permitted. In fact, if the Russian and South Korean academics are a little bit right, the claim to quantum supremacy and all-thingns-quantum is tilting like the Millennium Tower in San Francisco.
Net net: My view is that quantum research is chugging along at the turtle-racing pace of other next-big things. Google’s need to be the leader in something substantive and not yet directly associated with the worshipful business of online ad sales is growing. Thus, one thing is clear: None of the researchers has demonstrated much in the way of Googley behavior. If their analysis is correct, what will be the value of a digital Millennium Tower?
Stephen E Arnold, August 17, 2022
High School Science Club Management Goes Man in the Gray Flannel Suit
August 17, 2022
I read the stories about Facebook and Google trying to manage their paid humanoids. Both companies, not surprisingly, are pulling tips from the “Universal Guide to Running a High School Science Club” and its Annex 1: Never Do These Things. The two estimable companies skipped the Annex. Why read something at the back of a user manual. That’s for those who are smart, just not brilliant.
Among the tips in my copy of the Universal Guide was this one: “Never tell a fellow science club member to work harder.”
Another precept was: “Never tell a fellow science club member to quit if the alleged humanoid did not like what the president told them to do.
Both Facebook and Google appear to have pushed to the “work harder” and “go away” approach. Brilliant, right?
Even the Silicon Valley type of “real” news outfit Protocol published an article focusing on this management approach. “Don’t Be Meta or Google: How to Tell Workers They Need to Be More Productive” has some management advice for the fellow travelers; to wit:
the idea that underperforming individuals are solely responsible for their companies’ large-scale financial troubles is probably inaccurate, and you don’t want your productivity pep talk to give that impression. Launching a companywide campaign to improve productivity is absolutely reasonable, as long as you’re not alienating employees in the process.
Yes, Harvard Business School, here we come!
I am not sure what’s crazier: The management methods of the high school science club or the faux-Drucker inputs from a “real” news Silicon Valley type online publication.
The write up adds:
Sharing a specific game plan to improve productivity is key to avoiding chaos.
Yes, is the corollary “sharing is caring”?
That method was not part of the Woodruff High School Science Club in Central Illinois. My fellow members believed themselves to be budding wizards. One of the best and brightest had his first date and ran the train signal. The train won. Not a best nor brightest moment as I recall.
“Management” was, in my opinion, a no show at some of the zippy Silicon Valley outfits for which I labored until I threw in the dead fish in 2013. The idea that the methods of a high school science club would contribute to management science would have been laughable about a decade ago. Now that Facebook and Google type outfits have to manage, the adolescent guidelines of the unread Annex seem oddly appropriate.
Had Google solved death, Mr. Drucker would be available to provide some management guidance to the “real news” and the Facebooks and Googles of the world. I am not sure “don’ts” work… at all.
Stephen E Arnold, August 17, 2022
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