Amazon Twitches with Never Complain, Never Explain
August 18, 2022
In 2019, I included a short case example in a lecture for the National Cyber Crime Conference attendees about a Twitch luminary to be. The creator’s name was and is “iBabyRainbow.” The individual wears a bathing suit, purports to be a teen, and cavorts in San Diego. The creator also has some interesting videos findable via Web queries with the name “BabyRainbow.” I pointed out that Amazon Twitch seemed A-Okay with this creator. I checked to see if this creator was still online after I read “Twitch’s Zero-Explanation Bans Continue to Baffle Streamers, This Time a Popular VTuber.” I was and remain puzzled how the “iBabyRainbow” persona fits into the Amazon Twitch rules of the information highway.
The answer, if the information in the cited article is accurate, Amazon Twitch adopts the British upper class maxim “Never complain, never explain..”
The write up describes the plight of a creator who is a cartoon or in young person speak a “VR chat model.” Viewers watch a cartoon and interact in real time. I think this means that the VR chat model talks to the viewers. Interesting but not exactly comprehensible to this dinobaby. I get the willing suspension of disbelief argument, but, actually, no, I don’t get it. At all.
The write tip states:
Shylily and the many other streamers who make a living on the platform are frustrated with Twitch’s lack of communication when it comes to abrupt suspensions. In May(opens in new tab), the streaming site said it was looking into providing more context with the bans it sends out, but hasn’t made any further announcements about implementing this policy. At the time, Twitch said it stood by the accuracy of 99% of its suspension decision.
I interpret this as “never complain, never explain.” Very upper crust, old chap and chapatti. My perception is that Amazon Twitch wants to avoid being tangled in its own rules. Without spelling out the rules on the Amazon Twitch information highway, the company retains some flexibility. The Amazon Twitch executives can do the “Senator, thank you for the question” and the stone walling of which some legal eagles have considerable expertise.
And iBabyRainbow? A bit of a mystery that. A cartoon is problematic but a “teen” on a motorized skateboard holding a mobile phone with a rainbow colored swim suit? Perfectly okay for the teen agers who seek inspiration from Amazon Twitch stars. This dinobaby does not understand.
Stephen E Arnold, August 18, 2022
Forget Data Vacuum Cleaners. Think Amazon Ads
August 18, 2022
I do not read on a regular basis the online publication called “Hustle.” I made an exception for the write up “Amazon’s Ad Biz Is Growing Faster Than Its Rivals.” The write up states:
What is surprising is that Amazon’s digital ad revenue grew 18% YoY to $8.76B in Q2 — more than analysts expected and outpacing Google and Facebook. In fact, Facebook’s revenue shrank for the first time ever by 1.5%.
The Hustle article adds an interesting factoid, which I assume is 100 percent rock solid:
Amazon also has a virtual product placement tool, meaning it can insert brands into its TV shows and movies in postproduction.
I noticed that the nifty chart with a towering growth bar for the Bezos bulldozer noted ad performance for a number of outfits. There was one, in my opinion, glaring omission: TikTok.
I wonder why.
Stephen E Arnold, August 18, 2022
Terrorism and Big Data: A Solution?
August 18, 2022
I recall hearing that a person allegedly named Ayman al-Zawahiri was a terrorist and, thus, became a target for the US. (I thought an entity named Ayman al-Zawahiri had been terminated on one, maybe two previous occasions. But maybe not. Since that action, I have noted a number of terrorism related articles. One that caught my attention was “How Big Data Is Helping Fight Terrorism?” The article contains a shopping list of intelware functions. These types of content types and their applicability to deterring terrorism can, for some, be difficult to find. Here are the items on the list presented in the article. For definitions of leach function, please, consult the original source:
- Processing test, audio, and video inputs. The idea is that intelware can do this work more quickly than officers and analysts.
- Identifying money laundering activities. The gist of this function is that intelware can detect actions and patterns more quickly and effectively than investigators.
- Pattern identification. The idea I think is that smart software can extract from large data sets sequences or connected events better than a person sitting in a cube in a government office.
- AI and machine learning. The author is confident that smart software can improve, learn, and operate in a more effective way than a task force.
- Risk projects. Smart software can identify that doing A presents a greater likelihood of taking place than B.
Stepping back from this list, it is clear to me that the hype, the PR, and the jargon of intelware has diffused outside of specialist circles and been recycled in a particularly snappy way. From my point of view, this article is quite different from the information my team and I will present at an upcoming law enforcement conference in mid September. The jazz and zing of marketers has obscured a number of very important points about what intelware can and cannot do. In fact, there are more cannots than many want to accept.
Stephen E Arnold, August 18, 2022
Albert the (Bug) Bounty Hunter
August 18, 2022
Albert Pedersen, an inquisitive scholar in Denmark, makes a hobby of prodding software for vulnerabilities. Now he has proudly collected a bounty after his second successful hunt. Gizmodo reports, “A College Student Discovered a Bug in Cloudflare Email Routing that Let You Read Any User’s Emails.” Email routing services allow users to create disposable email addresses that point back to their “real” accounts and can be valuable privacy tools. That is, if they are truly secure. Writer Lucas Ropek reports:
“Unfortunately, as demonstrated in research published Wednesday by a college student from Denmark, Cloudflare’s service had a giant bug in it. The flaw, when properly exploited, allowed any user to read—or even manipulate—other users’ emails. … The vulnerability, which Cloudflare has confirmed but says was never exploited, involved a flaw in the program’s ‘zone ownership verification’ system, meaning that it was possible for a hacker to reconfigure email routing and forwarding for email domains that weren’t owned by them. Proper manipulation of the exploit would have allowed someone with knowledge of the bug to re-route any users’ emails to their own address. It would have also allowed a hacker to prevent certain emails from being sent to the target at all. In his write-up, Pedersen notes that it’s not that difficult to find online lists of email addresses attached to Cloudflare’s service. Using one of those lists, a bad guy could have quite easily targeted anybody using the forwarding service. After discovering the exploit, Pedersen managed to reproduce it a number of times using multiple personal domains and decided to report the issue to Cloudflare’s bug bounty program.”
We are sure Cloudflare considers the bounty to be $6,000 well spent. Had the bug gone unsquashed, the repercussions may have gone well beyond the troublesome privacy issues. Bad actors could also have used it to reset passwords, gaining access to financial and other accounts. As Ropek points out, this is a good illustration of why two-factor authentication is worth the hassle. As talented as he is, the intrepid young Dane is only one person. He may not catch the next bug in time.
Cynthia Murrell, August 18, 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
YouTube: Some Proof about Unfindable Content
August 17, 2022
I read “5 Sites to Discover the Best YouTube Channels and Creators Recommended for You.” The write up presents five services which make YouTube content “findable.” What I learned from the article is that YouTube videos are, for the most part, unfindable. A YouTuber can stumble upon a particular video and rely on Google’s unusual recommendation system. In my experience, that system is hobbled by its assorted filters and ad-magnetic methods. If I want to locate a video by eSysman (a fellow who reports about big money yachts loved by some money launderers and oligarchs), Google refers me to NautiStyles, YachtsForSale (quite a sales person is visible on that channel), or the flavor of the day like Bering Yachts. eSysman is the inspiration for one former CIA professional, and her edging into the value of open source intelligence. Does Google’s algorithm “sense” this? Nah, not a clue. What if I want some downhome cookin’ with Cowboy Kent, the chuck wagon totin’, trail hand feedin’ Oklahoma chef. Sorry, promoting Italian chefs are not what I was looking for. Cowboy cookin’ is not Italian restaurateurs showing that their skills are sharper than fry cooks in French restaurants. But what about YouTube search? Yes, isn’t it fantastic? Enough said.
What about the services identified in the article? Each offers different ways to find a video or channel on a specific or semi-specific topic. You can navigate to the source document and work your way through the list of curated “finder” sites.
The write up points out:
YouTube has over 50 million channels, but as you might have guessed, most of them aren’t worth subscribing to.
That’s the type of “oh, well, don’t worry statement” that drives me bonkers. Just let someone tell you what’s good. Go with it. Hey, no problemo. Who wants to consider the implications of hours of video uploaded every minute or the fact that there are 50 million channels from the Googlers’ service.
Several observations:
- No one knows what is on YouTube. I have some doubts that filters designed to eliminate certain types of content work particularly well. The idea that the Google screens each and every uploaded video with tools constantly updated to keep track of possibly improper videos is interesting to contemplate. Since no one knows what videos contain, how can one know what’s filtered, allowed in mistakenly, blocked inadvertently, or processed using methods not revealed to the public. (Lists of user “handles” can be quite useful for some purposes.)
- Are the channels no one can find actually worthless? I am not too sure. There are channels which present information about how to game the Google algorithm posted by alleged Google “partners.” I engaged in a dialogue with this “professional” and found the exchange quite disturbing. I located the huckster by accident, and I can guarantee that keeping track of this individual is not an easy task. Is that a task a Googler will undertake? Yeah, sure.
- YouTube search is one of the many “flavors” of information location the company offers. In my experience, none of the Google search services works very well or delivers on point information without frustration. Does this comment apply to Google Patent search? Yep. What about Google News search? Yep yep. What about regular Google search for company using a common word for its name? Yep yep yep. (Google doesn’t have a clue about a company field code, but it sure pushes ads unrelated to anything I search. I love mindless ads for the non-US content surveillance products that help me express myself clearly. Hey, no I won’t buy.)
Net net: YouTube’s utility is designed for Google ads. The murky methods used to filter content and the poor search and recommender systems illustrate why professional libraries and specific indexing guidelines were developed. Google, of course, thinks that type of dinobaby thinking is not hip.
Yes, it is. Unless Google tames the YouTube, the edifice could fall down. TikTok (which has zero effective search) may just knock a wall or trellis in the YouTube garden over. Google wants to be an avant guard non text giant. Even giants have vulnerable points. The article makes clear that third parties cannot do much to make information findable in YouTube. But in a TikTok world, who cares? Advertisers? Google stakeholders? Those who believe Google’s smart software is alive? I go for the software is alive crowd.
Stephen E Arnold, August 17, 2022
Is Google Drive — Gulp — a Hacking Tool for Bad Actors?
August 17, 2022
Russia is a near-impregnable force when it comes to hacking. Vladimir Putin’s home base is potentially responsible for influencing many events in the United States, including helping Donald Trump win his first presidential election. Russia neither confirms nor denies the roles hackers play in its and global politics. Unfortunately, Cyber Scoop shares how a common Google tool has been purloined by hackers: “Russian Hacking Unit Cozy Bears Adds Google Drive To Its Arsenal, Researchers Say.”
In what is one of the simplest ways to deliver malware, Russian hackers from the state-funded unit Cozy Bear are using Dropbox and Google Drive. Did you read that? Russian hackers are using legitimate cloud storage services, including one from one of the biggest tech giants, to deliver malware. Palo Alto Networks’ Unit 42 researchers are confounded by the delivery process, because it is hard to detect:
“This is a new tactic for this actor and one that proves challenging to detect due to the ubiquitous nature of these services and the fact that they are trusted by millions of customers worldwide,” the researchers said. “When the use of trusted services is combined with encryption, as we see here, it becomes extremely difficult for organizations to detect malicious activity in connection with the campaign.”
Russian hackers and other black hat people have used cloud storage services to deliver malware before, but using Google Drive is a new tactic. Google is a globally trusted brand that makes more people vulnerable to malware. When people see Google, they automatically trust it, so potential victims could unknowingly download malware.
Dropbox is deleting any accounts that are exploiting their services for hacking. The good news is cloud storage services want to protect users, but the bad news is they are not acting fast enough.
Whitney Grace, August 17, 2022
NSO Group: Now a Humor Piñata
August 16, 2022
Intelware once was serious, secret, and one of the few topics would be comedians would reference in an act. Not any more. Navigate to “NSO Group Finally Figures Out How Many European Countries It Does Business With” reports:
It seemingly takes about six weeks to count higher than five but NSO has put in the time and effort to ensure EU lawmakers have something more than the vague (and obviously low) estimate the company previously decided to provide in lieu of actual data.
Ho ho ho.
The quip is unlikely to cause chuckles in Tel Aviv. Three observations:
- A topic which becomes the focus of a joke has entered popular culture. This is intelware, remember, not a remake of Elvis’ life story with glitter.
- NSO Group appears to lack the management infrastructure to respond in a way which does not cause graduates of an online university MBA program to roll their eyes.
- The NSO Group continues to demonstrate an ability to attract attention.
Net net: What’s next for the intelware sector? More marketing, slicker PowerPoint decks, and the quest for smarter software and (hopefully) decision makers.
Stephen E Arnold, August 16, 2022
Quantum Supremacy Emulators: The Crypto Claim
August 16, 2022
I noted the silliness of the quantum supremacy claims first by the GOOG and then by the Red Hat dependent IBM. I pointed out that Intel claimed a quantum thing-a-ma-bob that would be a hub for certain quantum functions. Yeah, horse something, maybe ridge, maybe feathers. I mentioned in one of my blog posts or client emails that the US government aided by big wizards had developed algorithms that could not be broken by yet-to-be-invented quantum computers.
Now we have an interesting story that puts much of the quantum supremacy-type PR in a flaming dumpster. Wow, look at the dense smoke from a piddling fire.
“Post Quantum Encryption Contender Is Taken Out by Single-Core PC and 1 Hour” states:
SIKE is the second NIST-designated PQC candidate to be invalidated this year. In February, IBM post-doc researcher Ward Beullens published research that broke Rainbow, a cryptographic signature scheme with its security, according to Cryptomathic, “relying on the hardness of the problem of solving a large system of multivariate quadratic equations over a finite field.”
Everyone will keep trying. Perhaps a functioning quantum computer will become available to make hunting for flaws more helpful. No, wait a minute. The super algorithm was compromised by a single core PC chugging along for one hour.
Oh, well, as long as one doesn’t look too closely some of the quantum supremacy PR sounds great. In my opinion, some of the stuff is a bit silly.
Stephen E Arnold, August 16, 2022
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