Cheerleading: The PicRights’ Method
May 30, 2022
I read what appears to be a news release designed to promote an outfit with an interesting business model. Navigate to “PicRights Sponsors Upcoming CEPIC Congress in Spain.” the write up explains:
For the fifth consecutive year, PicRights will also sponsor the annual Digital Media Licensing Organization (DMLA) Conference, to be held later this year. Last year’s conference offered sessions with Adobe, Google, Microsoft and Getty, and discussed NFTs, AI, synthetic content, remote production, and other issues shaping today’s creator economy. PicRights was a sponsor of the conference from 2018 through 2021, and was previously a speaker at the 2020 conference.
The news release points out:
Last month, PicRights was a supporter of the 32nd annual MINDS Conference held in Helsinki. The theme of the conference was “Stronger Together – Collaboration and Sharing for Success” and discussed successful partnerships within MINDS and beyond, collaboration with major platforms, newsroom evolution, and the power of diversity and inclusion.
Several questions arose as I thought about this somewhat rah rah-type news story:
- What is the false positive rate for the software used by this organization to identify copyright missteps? When was it developed? By whom?
- What financial deals are in place for largely reactive and technologically sluggish publishing companies’ whose intellectual property is the subject of legal interactions?
- Why are image protected by assorted copyright regulations appearing in a free Web search system like Google-type image search?
I don’t have answers to these questions. It seems to me that some odd synchronized vibration is buzzing among the image indexing outfits, the PicRights-type operations, and the copyright holders.
Is the solution to use “smart software” to delete inclusion of any image which requires a fee for use or the insertion of a message that clearly identifies an image as one which requires a fee to be paid should someone like a veteran’s group, a college newspaper, or a one-person Medium blogger?
I find this harmonic vibration among the rights enforcement folks, the Google-type search systems, and the entity “owning” the rights to a particular image fascinating.
The business model is clever but it appears that additional publicity is needed to make the excellence of the approach more visible. Rah rah rah.
Stephen E Arnold, May 30, 2022
Google: Quantumly Supreme in PR That Is
May 26, 2022
It looks like Google PR department is working overtime. An article at The Independent declares: “‘The Game Is Over’: Google’s DeepMind Says It Is on Verge of Achieving Human-Level AI.” The lofty claim comes from DeepMind’s lead researcher, but is he getting ahead of himself? Writer Anthony Cuthbertson reveals:
“Dr Nando de Freitas said ‘the game is over’ in the decades-long quest to realise artificial general intelligence (AGI) after DeepMind unveiled an AI system capable of completing a wide range of complex tasks, from stacking blocks to writing poetry. Described as a ‘generalist agent’, DeepMind’s new Gato AI needs to just be scaled up in order to create an AI capable of rivaling human intelligence, Dr de Freitas said. Responding to an opinion piece written in The Next Web that claimed ‘humans will never achieve AGI’, DeepMind’s research director wrote that it was his opinion that such an outcome is an inevitability. ‘It’s all about scale now! The Game is Over!’ he wrote on Twitter. ‘It’s all about making these models bigger, safer, compute efficient, faster at sampling, smarter memory, more modalities, innovative data, on/offline… Solving these challenges is what will deliver AGI.’ When asked by machine learning researcher Alex Dimikas how far he believed the Gato AI was from passing a real Turing test – a measure of computer intelligence that requires a human to be unable to distinguish a machine from another human – Dr de Freitas replied: ‘Far still.'”
So… not quite there yet after all. A reality we are keenly aware of as we ponder standing in front of a Google self-driving car surrounded by traffic cones and temporary lane dividers. Or, on a less perilous but annoying note, consider those oh-so-relevant YouTube ads. But sure, general AI is right around the corner.
Cynthia Murrell, May 26, 2022
IBM: Fueling the Quantum Computing PR Push
May 25, 2022
I wonder if your mom wants a quantum computer in her tablet. Who wants a quantum computer? Many people, and IBM wants to deliver. The issue is that the fungible quantum computer is a bit of a specialty item. IBM wants to be perceived as the Big Dog in the sector.
“IBM Plans to Deliver 4 000+ Qubit System” explains that IBM will produce a quantum computing Big Blue Great Dane of a system. (Did you know that there are more than a dozen dogs which have blue coats? In addiiton to the Great Dane, there is the blue Chihuahua and the blue Lacy.) The important word to me is “plans.” The 4,000 qubit giant is not ready for the quantum computer market yet. But it is coming. Soon. And the road map will be updated in 2023.
The write up says:
IBM has announced the expansion of its roadmap for achieving large-scale, practical quantum computing. This roadmap details plans for new modular architectures and networking that will allow IBM quantum systems to have larger qubit-counts – up to hundreds of thousands of qubits.
Note that the numerical leap is from 4,000 qubits to hundreds of thousands of qubits.
And IBM’s innovations are not Google-style pronouncements of quantum supremacy. IBM, according to the article:
will leverage three pillars: robust and scalable quantum hardware; cutting-edge quantum software to orchestrate and enable accessible and powerful quantum programs; and a broad global ecosystem of quantum-ready organizations and communities.
In addition, IBM will roll out IBM Condor, not a Big Blue dog but a condor, which is a Big Bird. I noted this statement:
On the hardware front, IBM intends to introduce IBM Condor, the world’s first universal quantum processor with over 1 000 qubits.
The Big Blue Great Dane and the Big Bird are part of the road map. Is IBM Watson available to answer a question about this forward leaning quantum computing PR announcement about “plans”?
Stephen E Arnold, May 25, 2022
Cyber Safeguards: Do Digital Prophylactics Have Holes?
May 19, 2022
I have had a sneaking suspicion that cyber security vendors were prone to exaggerating the capabilities of their systems. I sit in webinars in which I hear about the exploit of the day. I scan newsfeeds to learn that each cyber security and threat intelligence experts announce with considerable confidence. (Why don’t other cyber security vendors announce the same exploit? Each vendor, it appears to me, finds something unique to explain and then neutralize…. after the fact.) I look at dozens of news releases about cyber security, threat detection, and the ransomware gang wanting citizens of Costa Rica to overthrow the country. So many vulnerabilities, it seems.
“Report: 80% of Cyberattack Techniques Evade Detection by SIEMs” highlights a contrarian report from an outfit named CardinalOps. (You can learn more about the company at this link.) This company, founded in 2020, is involved in the security information and event management business. The acronym is SIEM, and it is bandied about with considerable abandon as a must-know acronym.
The VentureBeat article describes some of the information in the CardinalOps monograph called “The State of SIEM Detection Risk: Quantifying the Gaps in MITRE ATT&CK Coverage for Production SIEMs.”
(The catchy MITRE ATT&CK refers to an MIT Research activity (now MITRE). Here’s how the information is described by MITRE:
a globally-accessible knowledge base of adversary tactics and techniques based on real-world observations. The ATT&CK knowledge base is used as a foundation for the development of specific threat models and methodologies in the private sector, in government, and in the cybersecurity product and service community.)
With the jargon behind me, I want to highlight this passage from the article published by the estimable VentureBeat:
enterprise SIEMs are missing detections for 80% of all MITRE ATT&CK techniques and only address five of the top 14 ATT&CK techniques employed by adversaries in the wild.
What the CardinalOps monograph seems to say to me is: “The cyber security vendors’ software and systems don’t work as advertised.”
If I interpret the VentureBeat article correctly, the story ventures into territory avoided by most of those involved in cyber security. Criticizing the dozens, nay, hundreds of cyber defense companies and their services has been a no-no in my experience. Outfits which purport to review these systems rarely suggest that out of a hundred threats, about four out of five will zip right through the defenses.
(Is this way some upscale consultants suggest using layers of security. This phrase means to me: “License lots of systems and maybe the combination will stop threats.” The implication is that if one system is only 20 percent effective and my understanding that each cyber security vendor has some method to stop stuff their experts have identified, the average company only requires five systems running at the same time to reduce risks.)
The VentureBeat article about the CardinalOps report offers:
Rather than rely on subjective survey-based data, CardinalOps analyzed configuration data from real-world production SIEM instances to gain visibility into the current state of threat detection coverage in modern Security Operations Centers (SOCs). These organizations represent multibillion dollar, multinational corporations, which makes this one of the largest recorded samples of actual SIEM data analyzed to date, encompassing more than 14,000 log sources, thousands of detection rules and hundreds of log source types.
Okay, hard data, not soft podcast-grade chatter.
So what’s the fix if you are using popular systems from outfits like the lovable outfit Microsoft, the firm which shipped an update that breaks domain security? The article states:
The latest CardinalOps research provides readers with a series of best practice recommendations to help CISOs and detection engineering teams address these challenges, and be more intentional about how detection coverage is measured and continuously improved over time.
I think this means consulting. No surprise there.
To get a copy of the report, click here and amp up your fear. Email and captcha hoops required. You know, for security.
Net net: Marketing information may not describe accurately cyber security capabilities. Is this news?
Stephen E Arnold, May 19, 2022
Distraction Attraction: The Twitter Bot Tactic
May 13, 2022
I have noted in this Web log some corporate actions which I think are like magician tricks. Distract the audience and pull a card from a sleeve. Wow! Magic. The distraction attraction tactic works on a larger scale than a kids’ birthday party with a rent-a-clown and a down-at-the-heels Houdini. Google said it was the holder of the coveted crown of quantum supremacy. At the same time, the lovable Google was busy finding ways to make life interesting for insiders who disagreed with the Google’s version of its technical achievements. The Windows 11 announcement, which showed the Windows Weekly crew that their access to insiders was going the way of Vista; that is, nowhere fast. I still think that the SolarWinds’ misstep motivated this distraction attraction. Who needs Windows 11? It seems fewer than 10 percent of the Windows 10 users, but who knows it this number is real or fake?
This morning (Friday the 13th as luck has it) is was greeted with headlines saying that the wizard of electric cars which have a parts supply chain problem may not buy Twitter. A representative story is from the UK Daily Star (an estimable publication): “Elon Musk Says £36 Billion Twitter Deal Is ‘On Hold’ Following Spam Bot Revelation.” Imagine a story about a service popular in the US in San Francisco/Silicon Valley and Manhattan/Brooklyn with other users dotted in hippity dippity locations like Austin and Nashville appearing in London underground riders’ hands.
That’s publicity, and visibility is the life force of distraction attraction.
I am fighting my keen interest in identifying the issues associated with this deal. Okay, I will mention one: How’s the value of Tesla stock holding up?
Is there a connection between the on hold and actually buying what may be the ultimate nest for legal eagles?
Yep, surfing the TikTok-type concentration with a T shirt that says, “News cycle? Yes!” is one of the joys of distraction attraction. What’s important? The current financial turmoil? The coming dust up with Finland if some Russian duma members have their way? Covid’s chugging along? The black hole at the center of the galaxy which has an immediate and direct contribution to my understanding of astrophysicists’ Kodak moments?
Attraction distraction: A tactic which creates a reality housing other substantive issues requiring a bit of thought, not a tweet.
Stephen E Arnold, May 13, 2022
Quantum Computing: Who Sent the Memo? Who Read It?
May 12, 2022
I read “America Is Losing the Quantum Race with China.” Interesting because Google claimed “quantum supremacy” in 2019. NASA helped out the Google, and I wonder if the author of the Newsweek article got the memo. Then, as I recall, an IBM blog took a positive view of Google’s PR play, but in 2021 fired up its marketing system and announced it had achieved quantum supremacy (whatever this term means).
Okay, what’s the story? Is it IBM, Google, or the mysterious and semi-questionable Chinese?
The Newsweek story designed to strike fear into the hearts of those who care about keeping encrypted messaging encrypted learned:
Quantum computing, a form of high-speed calculation at the subatomic level conducted at extraordinarily cold temperatures, will bring computers to speeds barely imaginable today. Atoms, photons and electrons that operate beyond the classical laws of physics and in the realm of “quantum” can be harnessed for extraordinary computing power. Complex problems that once took years to solve could take seconds. And that means everything we know about cybersecurity—every lock secured by current encryption methods—could get blown wide open.
Yikes.
What’s the solution? Teaching American students to make change, avoid the plague of innumeracy as one expert called being sort of stupid, and reading books, not TikTok hashtags?
Here’s the fix:
President Biden’s recent moves will better coordinate our government’s efforts to prevent this nightmare scenario, by bringing federal agencies and critical infrastructure companies together to address quantum threats. It also brings the National Quantum Initiative Advisory Committee under White House control.
Sounds like a plan. However, with US firms already quantumly supreme is a committee necessary? And if the US methods fall short of the mark, there’s always PR. TikTok videos are much more important than wrestling with a differential equation.
Stephen E Arnold, May 12, 2022
Interesting List: Marketing Professionals, Start Your Spamming Bots
May 11, 2022
An outfit called Himalayas published or made available a list of more than 1,500 companies. The unifying thread for the diverse assortment of firms is that remote work is okay. The listing is displayed on Web pages, which makes browsing a bit of a pain. Each entry includes:
- The name of the company
- Broad index terms
- Short description of the company
- Number of staff the company allegedly wants to hire.
How long will the list be available? That’s anyone’s guess.
Stephen E Arnold, May 11, 2022
Issues with the Zuckbook Smart Software: Imagine That
May 10, 2022
I was neither surprised by nor interested in “Facebook’s New AI System Has a ‘High Propensity’ for Racism and Bias.” The marketing hype encapsulated in PowerPoint decks and weaponized PDF files on Arxiv paint fantastical pictures of today’s marvel-making machine learning systems. Those who have been around smart software and really stupid software for a number of years understand two things: PR and marketing are easier than delivering high-value, high-utility systems and smart software works best when tailored and tuned to quite specific tasks. Generalized systems are not yet without a few flaws. Addressing these will take time, innovation, and money. Innovation is scarce in many high-technology companies. The time and money factors dictate that “good enough” and “close enough for horseshoes” systems and methods are pushed into products and services. “Good enough” works for search because no one knows what is in the index. Comparative evaluations of search and retrieval is tough when users (addicts) operate within a cloud of unknowing. The “close enough for horseshoes” produces applications which are sort of correct. Perfect for ad matching and suggesting what Facebook pages or Tweets would engage a person interested in tattoos or fad diets.
The cited article explains:
Facebook and its parent company, Meta, recently released a new tool that can be used to quickly develop state-of-the-art AI. But according to the company’s researchers, the system has the same problem as its predecessors: It’s extremely bad at avoiding results that reinforce racist and sexist stereotypes.
My recollection is that the Google has terminated some of its wizards and transformed these professionals into Xooglers in the blink of an eye. Why? Exposing some of the issues that continue to plague smart software.
Those interns, former college professors, and start up engineers rely on techniques used for decades. These are connected together, fed synthetic data, and bolted to an application. The outputs reflect the inherent oddities of the methods; for example, feed the system images spidered from Web sites and the system “learns” what is on the Web sites. Then generalize from the Web site images and produce synthetic data. The who process zooms along and costs less. The outputs, however, have minimal information about that which is not on a Web site; for example, positive images of a family in a township outside of Cape Town.
The write up states:
Meta researchers write that the model “has a high propensity to generate toxic language and reinforce harmful stereotypes, even when provided with a relatively innocuous prompt.” This means it’s easy to get biased and harmful results even when you’re not trying. The system is also vulnerable to “adversarial prompts,” where small, trivial changes in phrasing can be used to evade the system’s safeguards and produce toxic content.
What’s new? These issues surfaced in the automated content processing in the early versions of the Autonomy Neuro Linguistic Programming approach. The fix was to retrain the system and tune the outputs. Few licensees had the appetite to spend the money needed to perform the retraining and reindexing of the processed content when the search results drifted into weirdness.
Since the mid 1990s, have developers solved this problem?
Nope.
Has the email with this information reached the PR professionals and the art history majors with a minor in graphic design who produce PowerPoints? What about the former college professors and a bunch of interns and recent graduates?
Nope.
What’s this mean? Here’s my view:
- Narrow applications of smart software can work and be quite useful; for example, the Preligens system for aircraft identification. Broad applications have to be viewed as demonstrations or works in progress.
- The MBA craziness which wants to create world-dominating methods to control markets must be recognized and managed. I know that running wild for 25 years creates some habits which are going to be difficult to break. But change is needed. Craziness is not a viable business model in my opinion.
- The over-the-top hyperbole must be identified. This means that PowerPoint presentations should carry a warning label: Science fiction inside. The quasi-scientific papers with loads of authors who work at one firm should carry a disclaimer: Results are going to be difficult to verify.
Without some common sense, the flood of semi-functional smart software will increase. Not good. Why? The impact of erroneous outputs will cause more harm than users of the systems expect. Screwing up content filtering for a political rally is one thing; outputting an incorrect medical action is another.
Stephen E Arnold, May 10, 2022
Do Marketers See You As Special? Nope.
May 9, 2022
I read “Forget Personalisation, It’s Impossible and It Doesn’t Work.” My hunch is that the idea that a zippy modern system would “know” a user, assemble an appropriate info-filter, and display what that individual required has lost traction. I remember Pointcast and Desktop Data which suggested a user could get the information he/she/it/them needed each day. My recollection is that individual information needs in business changed. Fiddling with the filters was a hassle. As a result, the services were novel at first and then became a hassle. Maybe automation via processes tuned to figure out what the user needed would make such services more useful. If memory serves, the increasing costs of making these systems work within budget and developer constraints were not very good. The most recent example is my explanation of how a Google alert is about half right or half wrong when it flags an item I am supposed to need. See this “Cheerleading” article.
The Forget Personalisation write up calls individuation “the worst idea in the marketing industry.” The statement is not exactly a vote of confidence, is it? The article states:
There’s just one little problem with personalisation: it doesn’t make any sense.
I thought marketing types were optimists. I am wrong again.
The article includes some factoids about the accuracy of third party data. These are infobits which allows marketers and investigators to pinpoint behaviors and even identify people. Here’s what the article reports as actual factual:
Spoiler alert: it’s not. Most third-party data is, to put it politely, garbage. In an academic study from MIT and Melbourne Business School, researchers decided to test the accuracy of third-party marketing data. So, how accurate is gender targeting? It’s accurate 42.3% of the time. How accurate is age targeting? It’s accurate between 4% and 44% of the time. And those are the numbers for the leading global data brokers.
I assume that this is a news flash because informed individuals from investigative reporters at the Wall Street Journal to law enforcement administrators assume that data gathered from clicks, apps, and other high value inputs are “accurate.” Well, sometimes yes, but in my experience 50 to 75 percent accuracy is darned good. Lower scores are common. The 95 percent accuracy is doable under certain circumstances.
What’s the fix? Once again marketers have the answer. Keep in mind that many marketers majored in business administration or art history. Just sayin’. Note this solutions from the cited article:
Marketers would be much better off investing in ‘performance branding’; in other words, one-size-fits-most creative that speaks to the common category needs of all potential buyers, all the time. This is a much simpler approach that also happens to be supported by the evidence. Reach is, and has always been, the greatest predictor of marketing success.
I think this means TikTok. What do you think?
And the future? Impersonalization. And how does Marketing Week know this? Here’s the source of the insight:
Gartner predicts 80% of marketers will abandon personalisation by 2025.
Yep, Gartner. Wow. Solid indeed.
Net net: Those marketing types are on the beam. What else does not work in marketing? Smart ad matching to a user query?
Stephen E Arnold, May 9, 2022
Palantir Technologies: Following in the Footsteps of Northern Light and Autonomy
May 4, 2022
What market sector is the one least likely to resonate with race car fans? I would suggest that the third party Chinese vendor TopCharm23232 is an unlikely candidate. Another outlier might be PicRights, a fascinating copyright enforcement outfit relying on ageing technology from Israel.
What do you think about search and content processing vendors?
I spotted this ad in the Murdoch-owned Wall Street Journal which resides behind a very proper paywall.
The full page ad appeared in my Kentucky edition on May 3, 2022. I was interested when Northern Light, a vendor of search systems relying originally on open source technology shaped by Dr. Marc Krellenstein, sponsored a NASCAR vehicle. I wonder how my NASCAR fans were into Northern Light’s approach to content clustering? Some I suppose.
I also noted Autonomy plc’s sponsorship of an F-1 car and the company’s logo on the uniform of the soccer / football club Tottenham Hotspur. (That’s the club logo with a big chicken balancing on a hummingbird egg.)
How did the sponsorships work out? I am not sure about sales and closing deals, but hanging with the race car drivers and team engineers is allegedly a hoot.
Will Palantir’s technology provide the boost necessary to win the remaining F-1 races? I don’t do predictive analytics so, of course, Palantir is a winner. The stock on May 4, 2022, opened at $10.55. For purposes of comparison, Verint which is a company with some similar technology opened at $54.04. Verint does not do race cars from what I have heard.
Stephen E Arnold, May 4, 2022
Stephen E Arnold
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