Facebook: Another Innovation and Maybe Unforeseen Consequences
March 21, 2020
DarkCyber heard that Google was indexing then not indexing WhatsApp group information. Are other indexing outfits (some we know and love like Bing and others of which few know)?
The purpose of Facebook is for people to share information about themselves publicly or privately. One pull for Facebook is the group chat application WhatsApp that similarly allows users to make groups public or private. If you are a skilled Google searcher, however, some of the private WhatsApp groups are discoverable and joinable says Vice in the article, “Google Is Letting People Find Invites To Some Private WhatsApp Groups.”
To be the best and most competitive search engine, Google crawls the Web and indexes information it finds. Among the information Google is indexing are invite links to WhatsApp group chats. The WhatsApp administrators for those chats probably does not want them publicly shared. There are currently 470,000 results for a Google search of “chat.whatsapp.com.” Most of the private groups are innocuous and/or are for people sharing porn. One link did yield a WhatsApp group for accredited United Nations NGOs and their contact information.
The problem is when WhatsApp users publicly share a private group:
“A WhatsApp spokesperson said in a statement, ‘Group admins in WhatsApp groups are able to invite any WhatsApp user to join that group by sharing a link that they have generated. Like all content that is shared in searchable, public channels, invite links that are posted publicly on the internet can be found by other WhatsApp users. Links that users wish to share privately with people they know and trust should not be posted on a publicly accessible website.’”
DarkCyber thinks there is a fix because Facebook is an interesting company. Governments, including the US government, is nudging forward legislation for backdoors. China and Russia have adopted quite specific tactics to try to make sure that when information is needed, access to those data is available without hurdles, hassles, and techno-bluster.
“Whatsapp Could Soon Get Self-Destructing Messages” may or may not be accurate. The write up articulates an interesting “idea” for Facebook:
Whatsapp has been experimenting with a ‘Delete messages’ feature that allows users to set a self-destructing timer for all of their individual chats and have them removed automatically.
A government cannot request access to data which no longer “exist.”
Some Whatsapp users are likely to greet this “idea” with enthusiasm. Some of that enthusiasm may not influence government officials.
What are some hypothetical unintended consequences of this “idea” set forth in the cited article? Here are three:
- Criminals step up their usage of Whatsapp
- Intercept methods expand
- Controls over what is collected may be relaxed.
Net net: Changes may be upon some sectors.
Stephen E Arnold, March 21, 2020
STM Publishers: The White House, NAS, and WHO Created a Content Collection! What?
March 17, 2020
DarkCyber is not working with a science, technology, or medical professional publishing outfit. Sure, my team and I did in the pre-retirement past. But the meetings which focused on cutting costs and boosting subscription prices were boring.
The interesting professional publisher meetings explored changing incentive plans to motivate a Pavlovian-responsive lawyer or accountant to achieve 10-10-20 were fun. (That means 10% growth, 10% cost reduction, and 20% profit.)
I am not sure how I got involved in these projects. I was a consultant, had written a couple of books, and was giving lectures with jazzy titles; for example, “The Future of the Datasphere,” “Search Is a Failure,” and “The Three R’s: Relationships, Rationality, and Revolution.” (Some of these now wonky talks are still available on the www.arnoldit.com Web site. Have at it, gentle reader.)
Have professional publishers of STM content received the millstone around the neck award?
This morning I hypothesized about the reaction of the professional publishing companies selling subscriptions to expensive journals to the news story “Microsoft, White House, and Allen Institute Release Coronavirus Data Set for Medical and NLP Researchers.” I learned:
The COVID-19 Open Research Dataset (CORD-19), a repository of more than 29,000 scholarly articles on the coronavirus family from around the world, is being released today for free. The data set is the result of work by Microsoft Research, the Allen Institute for AI, the National Library of Medicine at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the White House Office of Science and Technology (OSTP), and others and includes machine-readable research from more than 13,000 scholarly articles. The aim is to empower the medical and machine learning research communities to mine text data for insights that can help fight COVID-19.
The most striking allegedly accurate factoid from the write up: No mention of the professional publishers who “create” and are the prime movers of journal articles. Authors, graduate students, academicians, scholars, and peer review ploughmen and plough women. Yes, professional publishing is sui generis.
Several observations:
- Did I miss the forward leaning contributions of the professional publishing community responsible for these STM documents and data sets?
- Are the professional publishers’ lawyers now gearing up for a legal action against these organizations and institutions creating a free content collection?
- Why didn’t one of the many professional publishing organizations, entities, and lobbying groups take the lead in creating the collection? The virus issue has been chugging along for months.
DarkCyber finds the go-getters behind the content collection a diverse group. Some of the players may be difficult to nail with a breach of licensing or copyright filing. If the article is true and the free assertion is a reality, has an important milestone been passed. Has a millstone been strapped to the neck of each of the STM professional publishing companies? Millstones are to be turned by the professional publishing content producers, not by upstarts like the White House and the World Health Organization.
Not as good as a Netflix show but good for a quick look.
Stephen E Arnold, March 17, 2020
Amazon Versus Microsoft: A Jedi Fight Development
March 13, 2020
DarkCyber spotted this story on the BBC Web site: “Pentagon to Reconsider Jedi $10bn Cloud Contract.” Since we are in rural Kentucky, the intrepid team does not know if the information in the Beeb’s write up is accurate. The factoids are definitely interesting. The story asserts:
The US Department of Defense is to “reconsider” its decision to award a multi-billion dollar cloud contract to Microsoft over Amazon.
The story points out that Microsoft is confident that its Azure system will prevail. Amazon, on the other hand, is allegedly pleased.
What’s at stake?
- Money
- A hunting license for other government contracts
- Implicit endorsement of either AWS or Azure
- Happy resellers, integrators, and consultants
- Ego (maybe?)
When will JEDI be resolved? Possibly in the summer of 2020.
Stephen E Arnold, March 13, 2020
Banjo: A How To for Procedures Once Kept Secret
March 13, 2020
DarkCyber wrote about BlueDot and its making reasonably clear what steps it takes to derive actionable intelligence from open source and some other types of data. Ten years ago, the processes implemented by BlueDot would have been shrouded in secrecy.
From Secrets to Commercial Systems
Secret and classified information seems to find its way into social media and the mainstream media. DarkCyber noted another example of a company utilizing some interesting methods written up in a free online publication.
DarkCyber can visualize old-school companies depending on sales to law enforcement and the intelligence community asking themselves, “What’s going on? How are commercial firms getting this know how? Why are how to and do it yourself travel guides to intelligence methods becoming so darned public?”
It puzzles DarkCyber as well.
Let’s take a look at the revelations in “Surveillance Firm Banjo Used a Secret Company and Fake Apps to Scrape Social Media.” The write up explains:
- A company called Pink Unicorn Labs created apps which obtained information from users. Users did not know their data were gathered, filtered, and cross correlated.
- Banjo, an artificial intelligence firm that works with police used a shadow company to create an array of Android and iOS apps that looked innocuous but were specifically designed to secretly scrape social media. The developer of the apps was Pink Unicorn. Banjo CEO Damien Patton created Pink Unicorn.
- Why create apps that seemed to do one while performing data inhalation: “Dataminr received an investment from Twitter. Dataminr has access to the Twitter fire hose. Banjo, the write up says, “did not have that sort of data access.” The fix? Create apps that sucked data.
- The apps obtained information from Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Russian social media app VK, FourSquare, Google Plus, and Chinese social network Sina Weibo.
- The article points out: “Once users logged into the innocent looking apps via a social network OAuth provider, Banjo saved the login credentials, according to two former employees and an expert analysis of the apps performed by Kasra Rahjerdi, who has been an Android developer since the original Android project was launched. Banjo then scraped social media content.”
- The write up explains, Banjo, via a deal with Utah, has access to the “state’s traffic, CCTV, and public safety cameras. Banjo promises to combine that input with a range of other data such as satellites and social media posts to create a system that it claims alerts law enforcement of crimes or events in real-time.”
Discussion
Why social media? On the surface and to most parents and casual users of Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, there are quite a few cat posts. But via the magic of math, an analyst or a script can look for data which fills in missing information. The idea is to create a record of a person, leave blanks where desirable information is not yet plugged in, and then rely on software to spot the missing item. How is this accomplished? The idea is simple. One known fact appears in the profile and that fact appears in another unrelated item of content. Then the correlated item of content is scanned by a script and any information missing from the profile is plugged in. Using this method and content from different sources, a clever system can compile a dossier on an entity. Open source information yields numerous gems; for example, a cute name applied to a boy friend might become part of a person of interest’s Dark Web handle. Phone numbers, geographic information, friends, and links to other interesting content surface. Scripts work through available data. Data can be obtained in many ways. The methods are those which were shrouded in secrecy before the Internet started publishing essays revealing what some have called “tradecraft.”
Net Net
Banjo troubles DarkCyber on a number of levels:
- Secrecy has significant benefits. Secrets, once let loose, have interesting consequences.
- Users are unaware of the risks apps pose. Cluelessness is in some cases problematic.
- The “now” world looks more like an intelligence agency than a social construct.
Stephen E Arnold, March 13, 2020
In the UK, Brexit Leads to Taxit for Techs
March 13, 2020
US technology companies are likely to face a rocky 2020. The Coronavirus is creating some problems. If the information in “US Tech Companies Will Be Hit with New UK Tax in Just Three Weeks” is accurate, those juicy margins may be trimmed. The write up states:
The UK government said Wednesday [March 11, 2020] that it’s moving ahead with a 2% tax on revenue from digital services such as search and advertising starting on April 1. The levy will apply to firms with global sales of more than £500 million ($648 million), with at least £25 million ($32.4 million) coming from UK users.
Is the tax discriminatory? Yep.
What happens if the US technology companies pay up?
That’s easy. There are a number of European entities eager to implement a taxation model that generates revenue.
What happens if the US retaliates?
There will be collateral damage.
How likely will countries be to escalate if the tax fails? Some may implement a simple but Draconian solution: Throttling or blocking maybe?
Monopolies are good for those who obtain money from the firms in the cat-bird seat. Some European countries may not share the same view.
Stephen E Arnold, February 13, 2020
Russia: Ever the Innovator for Internal Controls
March 12, 2020
DarkCyber tries to ignore Russia. The Fancy Bears, the hackers, and the secretive university research facilities—these give the team a headache. We spotted a headline which caused us to lift our gaze from more interesting innovations in Herliya and Tel Aviv to read “Russia Seeks to Block ‘Darknet’ Technologies, Including Telegram’s Blockchain.” According to the story:
A Russian government agency has requested contractor bids to find ways to block censorship-resistant internet technologies, like mesh networks. The list includes messaging app company Telegram’s yet-to-be-launched blockchain.
The technologies which Russia deems problematic include:
mesh networks, Internet of Things (IoT) protocols and protocols allowing anonymous browsing, including Invisible Internet Project (I2P), The Onion Router (TOR), Freenet, Zeronet, anoNet – and one blockchain, the Telegram Open Network (TON).
Other countries are likely to have similar concerns. Client states are likely to benefit from any Russian innovations which blunt these digital tools.
DarkCyber has a slightly different view:
- The technologies needed to deal with these systems will be developed. How quickly is anyone’s guess. But progress will be made.
- Turnover within research entities and Russia’s dynamic and quite interesting commercial sector is ongoing.
- Certain entrepreneurs apply innovations to what some people might describe as “extra legal” activities. If these individuals and their corporate constructs enjoy the benefit of positive support from some Russian officials, the innovations will find their way into a gray market.
Net net: Censorship is part of the government agenda. The new tools will have an impact outside of the Russian nation states. Censorship and monitoring go hand in hand in some countries.
Stephen E Arnold, March 12, 2020
Amazon Versus Microsoft: JEDI in Play?
March 7, 2020
DarkCyber spotted a story in Stars and Stripes titled “Judge Says Amazon Likely to Succeed on Key Argument in Pentagon Cloud Lawsuit.” The source appears to be the Bezos-owned Washington Post. That fact may provide some context for the story.
The main point in the write up seems to be:
A federal judge has concluded that a bid protest lawsuit brought by Amazon over President Donald Trump’s intervention in an important Pentagon cloud computing contract “is likely to succeed on the merits” of one of its central arguments, according to a court document made public Friday [March 6, 2020].
The article states:
In an opinion explaining her reasoning, Campbell-Smith sided with Amazon’s contention that the Pentagon had made a mistake in how it evaluated prices for competing proposals from Amazon and Microsoft. She also concluded that the mistake is likely to materially harm Amazon, an important qualifier for government contract bid protests.
What’s missing from this story? Detail for one thing.
Several observations:
- Planners for the JEDI program are likely to experience uncertainty
- Regardless of the ultimate decision, time to implement newer systems is being lost
- The cost of the procurement process for JEDI will climb and, at some point, may become larger than the program itself.
Net net: Government procurement remains an interesting and impactful process. Procurement just keeps grinding its procedural mechanisms, delivering “efficiency.”
Stephen E Arnold, March 7, 2020
Canadian Government Computers: Getting Arthritic
March 3, 2020
Government organizations are usually the last to upgrade their computer systems to anything resembling state of the art technology. Lack of new technology prevents the government organizations from implementing new, streamlined procedures and even catching bad actors who cheat the system. CBC explains that something much worse could happen with old government technology in the article: “Aging Government Computer Systems At Risk Of ‘Critical Failure,’ Trudeau Warned.”
One would expect Canada to be on top of its computer systems compared to the United States, but in many ways the country has just as many problems as its southern neighbor. Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau described that his country’s computer infrastructures are outdated and on the brink of collapsing. Many of the computer systems are almost sixty years old, but the technology can no longer be maintained.
The Canadian Press accessed documents through the Access to Information Act, but most of the obtained information was blacked out except lines like “to stabilize mission-critical systems.”
Outdated computer systems are not high on politicians’ priority list, but they are learning that their constituents are happier when government organizations work. One of Canada’s most notorious antiquated and very used computer system is the Employment and Social Development that manages insurance benefits for every citizen. Upgrades are in the budget, but they cost more than anticipated.
“The Liberals have already made multiple changes to the federal social safety net that required programming changes to old systems. The documents to Trudeau suggest the aged systems pose a problem for more changes the Liberals have promised.
“The complex array of existing programs and services means that future program changes, to continue providing Canadians with the programs and services they expect when interacting with their government, will need to account for pressures on legacy IT systems, which are facing rust-out and critical failure,” part of the briefing binder says.
“These aging platforms neither meet the desired digital interaction nor are capable of full automation, and thus are unable to deliver cost-savings through back-office functions.”
Upgrades are planned, but the projects are complex. Also funding is required to keep systems running that were not meant to be used for so long. Funding is pulled away from upgrades to keep the legacy systems running. Canada did not attempt to update its systems as long they worked.
There is not a need to panic yet, but the warning signs are starting to blink. Canada’s government tried to update some IT-related projects in the past but they did not do well. It is estimated that upgrading all of Canada’s systems will take a decade. The problem will be finding the money and the right people to handle the project. Once the decade is over and everything is upgraded, the Canadian government will have to start all over again because technology advances so quickly. At least there will be a better system to upgrade from.
Whitney Grace, March 3, 2020
Social Media Versus a Nation State: Pakistan Versus the Facebook and Friends
February 29, 2020
DarkCyber believes that collisions of conscience and money will become more frequent in 2020. “Facebook, Twitter, Google Threaten to Suspend Services in Pakistan” explains that the Asia Internet Coalition does not want a nation state to get in the way of the standard operating procedures for US companies. Imagine. A country telling US firms what’s okay and what’s not okay. A mere country!
The government of Pakistan’s social media position is reflected in this passage from the article:
The new set of regulations makes it compulsory for social media companies to open offices in Islamabad, build data servers to store information and take down content upon identification by authorities. Failure to comply with the authorities in Pakistan will result in heavy fines and possible termination of services.
The consequences of ignoring the nation state’s approach to social media are not acceptable to the US companies. Pakistan’s ideas are easy to understand:
According to the law, authorities will be able to take action against Pakistanis found guilty of targeting state institutions at home and abroad on social media.
The law will also help the law enforcement authorities obtain access to data of accounts found involved in suspicious activities. It would be the said authority`s prerogative to identify objectionable content to the social media platforms to be taken down. In case of failure to comply within 15 days, it would have the power to suspend their services or impose a fine worth up to 500 million Pakistani rupees ($3 million).
DarkCyber finds it interesting that three high profile social media companies have formed some sort of loose federation in order to catch Pakistan’s attention.
Will the play work? Will other countries fall in line with the social media firms’ ideas of what’s acceptable and what’s not? Will China, Russia, and their client states for with the social media flow or resist? Are the US companies unreasonable?
Interesting questions.
Stephen E Arnold, February 29, 2020
Protecting Digital Data Eggs with Multiple Clouds
February 20, 2020
Rumor has it the CIA has finally begun the procurement process to update its cloud technology, we learn from Inventa’s article, “The CIA Wants to Upgrade its Cloud Tech Without DoD’s JEDI Drama.” Though we’re told an agency spokesperson refused to confirm the plan, we imagine the CIA is eager to avoid the Iowa App syndrome. Writer surbhi suspects the CIA is reluctant to comment because it wishes to avoid the sort of spotlight that was cast last year on the Pentagon’s JEDI cloud procurement process. According to Nextgov, though, the agency has released its draft RFP, expects proposals to be in this spring, and plans to make a decision by September.
The article notes that, about a year ago, the CIA’s Directorate of Digital Innovation put forth its C2E (or Commercial Cloud Enterprise) plan. Though some specifics seem to have changed since that announcement, it likely still represents a commercial contract worth tens of billions of dollars. That impression is reinforced by the plan outlined last summer by the Director of National Intelligence, “The Strategic Plan to Advance Cloud Computing in the Intelligence Community” (PDF), which emphasizes:
“Information is exploding in volume and velocity and challenging our ability to expeditiously collect, analyze, and draw conclusions from disparate data sets. Additional manpower will not close the resulting gap; we must leverage leading edge technology. The future IC cloud environment presented herein will effectively function as a force multiplier to enhance our effectiveness and address mission challenges.”
The write-up reminds us:
“The CIA was an early adherent of the cloud when it chose Amazon to build a $600 million private cloud in 2013. … The Atlantic called it a ‘radical departure for the risk-averse intelligence community’ in a 2014 article. Cloud technology has certainly evolved in the seven years since the CIA last did this exercise, and it makes sense that it would want to update a system this old, which is really ancient history in technology terms. The CIA likely sees the same cloud value proposition as the private sector around flexibility, agility and resource elasticity, and wants the intelligence community to reap the same benefits of that approach. Certainly, it will help store, process and understand an ever-increasing amount of data, and put machine learning to bear on it as well.”
Putting the available digital eggs in one rucksack may not be prudent.
Cynthia Murrell, February 20, 2020
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