Google: Cracks in the Facade of Smart
June 2, 2019
I find it amusing that a company with the smartest people in the world cannot fail gracefully. When the GOOG goes down hard. I discovered this chugging along from rural Kentucky to a rural location in South Carolina. Google did not deliver. Once I was able to fire up a connection which actually worked, I read “Google Outage Takes Down YouTube, Gmail, and Snapchat in Parts of US.” I learned:
Discord, Snapchat, and Vimeo users are also experiencing issues logging into the apps, and these all use Google Cloud on the backend. “We are experiencing high levels of network congestion in the eastern USA, affecting multiple services in Google Cloud, GSuite and YouTube,” says a Google spokesperson in a statement to The Verge. “Users may see slow performance or intermittent errors. We believe we have identified the root cause of the congestion and expect to return to normal service shortly.”
Now about those smart people. Are too many trying to abandon assignments which have zero future for the zippier work? Of course not. Google does not have Android fragmentation or other technical weaknesses. I would suggest that some work needs to be done on foundational services.
Stephen E Arnold, June 2, 2019
Factualities for May 29, 2019
May 29, 2019
Numbers, particularly nice round ones, have been zipping around the interwebs in the last seven days. Here’s a tasty selection of some which caught our attention.
8. Number of people with whom a Google Duo user can chat simultaneously on one mobile phone screen. Source: Esquire
2,000. Number of Mannequin Challenge videos Google used to train its smart software. Source: Igyhaan
14. Number of years Google stored some customers’ passwords in plain text. Source: Next Web
3. Number of years to elapse before IBM commercializes quantum computing. Source: Interesting Engineering
$30 million. Palantir Technologies’ losses in 2018. Note: The company was founded in 2003. Source: Bloomberg
885 million. Number of customer records “exposed” online by a Fortune 500 insurance company named First American Financial. Source: Krebs on Security
71 percent. Percentage of student who would buy an Apple Mac computer if the students could afford the Apple product. Source: Tech Radar
50 percent. Percentage of businesses unable to handle cloud computing security. Source: IT Pro Portal
$425 million. How much money Google will not capture due to the Huawei ban. Source: Mr. Top Step
$2.5 billion. Dollar size of the cloud game market (aka online games) in 24 months. Source: IHS
120 minutes. The length of Microsoft’s E3 2019 press conference. Source: Game Rant
Stephen E Arnold, May 29, 2019
Books and Learning: Go Mobile, Stay Clueless
May 27, 2019
I read “The Books of College Libraries Are Turning into Wallpaper.” The main idea is that today’s students are not using libraries to locate books which are then read, thought about, and analyzed in order to:
- Learn
- Find useful facts
- Exploit serendipity
- Figure out which source or sources is relevant to a particular issue or topic.
The Atlantic states about Yale University:
There has been a 64 percent decline in the number of books checked out by undergraduates from Bass Library over the past decade.
News flash.
Once online information systems found their way into libraries in the 1980s, the shift from books to online information access was underway. How do I know? I worked at the database unit of the Courier Journal & Louisville Times. Greg Payne and Dennis Auld acquired the Abstracted Business Information product and converted it to an online research source for those interested in the major journal articles about commercial enterprises. The Courier Journal acquired the database product and marketed ABI/INFORM to university libraries with some success. Many people rowed the boat that raced to become one of the most widely accessed business information databases in the world in the period from 1980 to 1986 when other online products nibbled into ABI/INFORM’s position.
The point is that 1980 to 2019 is the period in which the shift from journals and books to online for certain types of research has been chugging along.
Net net: The decline in the use of books has been underway for more than 39 years. The consequence is less informed people who routinely tell me, “I am an expert researcher.” What these individuals lost in a cloud of unknowing do not comprehend is that someone is deciding for them what is relevant and important. You may call atrophied thinking an oddity. I call it “deep stupid.” In a well stocked library one can become deeply informed.
Stephen E Arnold, May 27, 2019
Amazonia, May 27, 2019
May 27, 2019
DarkCyber’s review of the Amazon news in the last seven days reveals an uptick in the critical tone in some of the open source commentary about the company. In addition to watching what Amazon says, DarkCyber will note what those writing about the company highlight. Note that the Amazonia for Monday, June 3, 2019, will be an abbreviated run down. Most of teh DarkCyber team will be at the TechnoSecurity conference.
Senator Questions Amazon Privacy
CNet reported that Senator Chris Coons, a Democrat from Delaware and member of the judiciary committee, has asked Amazon for information about the privacy methods for Amazon’s Echo. As information about alleged data retention and use of recorded conversations swirls through open source channels, Amazon may find itself subject to “Facebook think.” Is Amazon a data analysis company in addition to an online bookstore? Amazon has been able to dodge some of the scrutiny directed at certain social media companies. The Bezos bulldozer could be mired in investigations and subject to fines in the US and elsewhere if these “questions” morph into hearings, investigations, and other legal mechanisms.
You may want to download US 20190156818, a patent which allows Alexa to record before a customer says the “Alexa” word. Privacy?
AWS Share Prices Dip, Prices for AWS Seem to Go Down Too
There is probably no correlation between a dip in Amazon’s share price and the price changes explained in “Announcing the New Pricing Plan for AWS Config Rules.” The blog post said:
Effective August 1st, 2019, AWS Config rules will switch to a new pay-per-use pricing model, lowering the bill for almost all existing AWS Config rules customers. AWS Config helps you assess and maintain compliance over your AWS resource configurations.
The pay per use approach appears to be a benefit in the form of a cost reduction. DarkCyber wants to point out that AWS pricing can be complicated. What appears to be a deal may turn out that for a certain class of customers, the new pricing may add to some costs.
Business2Community has published tips for reducing AWS costs.
Amazon Pushes Forward with Facial Recognition Technology
Criticism of facial recognition continues in the US. TechCrunch reported that Amazon shareholders have voted down two proposals to terminate its sale of Rekognition to government customers.
TechCrunch said:
The resolutions failed despite an effort by the ACLU to back the measures, which the civil liberties group accused the tech giant of being “non-responsive” to privacy concerns.
Unless management actions can curtail employee and shareholder grousing about the direction of Amazon’s policeware initiatives, Amazon could find itself at risk from push back from those upon whom the company depends.
Business Insider provides some information about the Amazon complaints related to the sales of services and products to what is called “big oil.”
Amazon’s management actions may curtail the growth of the company despite the lax regulatory environment in which the firm thrives.
The Kindle Support Chinese
Engadget reports that the Amazon book reading and “baby tablet” Kindle devices now su9pport “traditional Chinese books.” We learned:
Amazon has launched a portal in the Kindle store with 20,000 Traditional Chinese titles you can download, including translations of popular books like George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Fire and Ice series. You can now also self-publish eBooks written in the characters through Kindle Direct Publishing.
The service is supported worldwide.
Amazon Satellites
If you need tips to use Amazon satellites, you may not be the informed customers the online bookstore seeks. Nevertheless, information appears in the 247 Wall Street write up “Why Amazon Is Now Giving AWS Users Access to Its Satellites.” DarkCyber thought the idea was revenue and getting customers to pay part of Amazon’s increasing infrastructure and technical debt costs. The write up states:
sing AWS Ground Station, customers can save up to 80% of their ground station costs by paying for antenna access time on demand, and they can rely on AWS Ground Station’s growing global footprint of ground stations to downlink data when and where they need it.
An Amazon official is quoted as saying:
The goal of AWS Ground Station is to make space communications ubiquitous and to make ground stations simple and easy to use, so that more organizations can derive insights from satellite data to help improve life on Earth and embark on deeper exploration and discovery in space.
At this time DarkCyber understands that two ground stations are now active. DarkCyber sticks with the cost and revenue interpretation of Amazon satellites.
Amazon AWS Is Ready for Bigger Data
Geekwire reports that an Amazon AWS executive revealed that the online bookstore is ready for bigger data. The write up quotes the Amazon professional as saying:
“The explosion of data is going to be beyond what we’ve ever seen before…cloud customers really need new and powerful tools to unlock the potential of that data.”
Not many details, but it is good to know that Amazon can handle the JEDI contract if the firms wins that deal.
Partners and Resellers
More remarkable vendor names as the roster of AWS specialists continues to swell.
- Advertity says that it “has achieved Amazon Web Services competency for digital customer experience. Source: Yahoo
- Agilisium says that it is now okayed to sell Amazon’s QuickSight Service. (QuickSight is Amazon speak for analytics.) Source: Yahoo
- BAE Systems, operator of NetReveal (Detica) has been deemed “competent” for creating applications for US government clouds. This is important because BAE is one of the go-to providers of intelware in the UK, US, and elsewhere. Source: Marketwatch
- CapGemini, a consulting firm, is actively selling engagements to move SAP installations to the AWS cloud. Source: Yahoo
- Informatica wants to apply smart software to the task of moving large amounts of data to the AWS cloud. The line up of Information services is available at this AWS Marketplace location. Informatica has a similar capability with the Google Cloud. Betting on more than one horse? Yes.
- modelizeIT is now an Amazon Advanced Tier Technology Partner. Source: Marketsinsider
- Northwest Vista College has become the first Amazon Web Services academy in South Central Texas. The idea is to train future Amazon savvy coders. Source: Yahoo
Stephen E Arnold, May 27, 2019
IBM Watson Studio: Watson, Will It Generate Big Revenue?
May 22, 2019
Despite its troubles, Watson lives on. ZDNet reports, “IBM Updates Watson Studio.” The AI-model-building platform relies on Watson’s famous machine learning technology and can deploy its models to either onsite data centers or in the cloud. Writer Stephanie Condon specifies:
“Watson Studio 2.0 includes a range of new features, starting with data preparation and exploration. For data exploration, IBM is adding 43 data connectors like Dropbox, Salesforce, Tableau and Looker. It’s also adding an Asset Browser experience to navigate through Schemas, Tables and Objects. For refining data, there are new tools for previewing and visualizing data. For running analytics where your data lives and to leverage existing compute, IBM has enhanced Watson Studio’s integrations with Hadoop Distributions (CDH and HDP). Watson Studio 2.0 also now includes built-in batch and evaluation job management for Python/R scripts, SPSS streams and Data Refinery Flows. There’s a new collaborative interface, similar to Slack, to the Jupyter Notebook integration. Version 2.0 also lets scientists import open source packages or libraries.”
We’re also told support for your major GIT frameworks: Github, Github enterprise, Bitbucket and Bitbucket Server. This release is in line with IBM’s goal, stated earlier this year, of making all of its Watson tech available to multiple cloud platforms. These applications, dev tools, and models now make their home under the IBM Cloud Private for Data. Back to the question in the headline. The answer, stakeholders hope, is “Yes.” For those with less optimism, the answer may be, “Probably not.”
Cynthia Murrell, May 22, 2019
Factualities for May 22, 2019
May 22, 2019
Ah, the beauty, the power, the allure of numbers. Remember. Every number has a person behind it. Within that person may be mathematical and other skills. Do round numbers make you suspicious?
$2.5 billion. Size of cloud gaming market in 2023. Source: Venture Beat
414,000,000. Number of pieces of plastic scientists “found” on a remote island. Source: Live Science
95 percent. The decline in activist hacking. Source: Engadget
69 percent. The increase in Web site and hacking. Source: Dark Reading
380. Number of submarine cables. 100. Number of submarine cables in the control of Huawei. Source: Axios
483,300. Number of shares of Amazon Warren Buffet owns. Source: Business Insider
735,000. Number of fraudulently obtained IP addresses revoked. Source: CircleID
4,629. Number of organized crime groups in the UK. Source: The Guardian
2038. The year in which electric vehicles overtake gasoline powered cars. Source: Quartz
51 percent. The percentage of marketers who think they are sending low value content. Source: Search Engine Journal
5. Number of hacker services which actually took action from a pool of 27 black hatters. Source: ZDNet
3 percent. Percentage of Americans who can pass a basic security test. Source: Dark Reading
100 percent. The security of a Google account with an attached mobile phone number. Only bots thwarted. Source: ZDNet
Stephen E Arnold, May 22, 2019
Amazonia for May 20, 2019
May 20, 2019
The Amazon machine is grinding along. We noted these items from the last seven days’ marketing exhaust.
Amazon Covets Covington, Kentucky
Geekwire’s reported that Amazon plans to use the white elephant airport near Cincinnati as a hub for its air freight delivery business. The Prime Air Hub requires an initial investment of $1.5 billion. The hub will accommodate 100 airplanes. Kentucky, like other Amazon suitors, ponied up $45 million in incentives.
DarkCyber believes that FedEx (Memphis) and UPS (Louisville) may face some headwinds as the Amazon Prime operation picks up steam. The Amazon bulldozer cuts new paths, and it is possible that some of these will cross the paths of these two and other air freight competitors. UPS may have less “economies” to squeeze in its operations. FedEx continues to ponder the impact of email on those once lucrative overnight deliveries for fast trackers.
It’s worth noting that Amazon is headed toward another facet of the shipping business if the information in “Amazon Jumps Into Freight Brokerage” is accurate. The article states:
Amazon.com has jumped into the market of the third-party logistics broker, roiling the waters and raising concern that the Seattle-based e-commerce giant could disrupt the freight industry forever and indelibly. Amazon’s new freight-hauling site — located at freight.Amazon.com — has been up and running since August 2018, but it went largely unnoticed by media until early May, when The Wall Street Journal and others reported on Amazon’s entry into the market. Reports noted Amazon was offering “beta service” full truckload hauling in dry vans. The service is available for pickups in Connecticut, Maryland, New Jersey, New York and Pennsylvania.
Amazon Embraces Semi-Abandoned Malls Too
A report in Inc. Magazine explains
Amazon is now moving into precisely those derelict malls. Why? To use the space for its vast and, some might say heartless, fulfillment centers.
Once people visited malls. Perhaps Amazon trucks with the happy face will deliver products to people.
Amazon-a-Roo
The Inquirer noted that Amazon twice tried to acquire the food delivery outfit Deliveroo. Those flopped. Amazon’s response? Invest. Amazon is part of a $575 million funding round for the company. The company’s funding is more than $1.5 billion. Deliveroo operates in more than 14 countries.
Alexa, Will You Stop Listening to Me?
Forbes reported that Alexa is always listening to one’s conversations. The reason is, “Make life better.” According to the capitalist tool:
The fact that Alexa is always listening to her surrounding is easily explained by the technology that Amazon chose to implement for its smart speakers: The Seattle-based technology giant uses cloud computing to process every spoken word captured by its smart speakers. What it means, in layman’s terms, is that every word you say to Alexa is sent to Amazon’s cloud service to be automatically transcribed before it can respond to your request including basic commands like “play music” or “turn on the light”—nothing is processed on the device itself because it doesn’t have the necessary computing power and the intelligence on-board.
Seems efficient and quite delicate, like a bulldozer. But there is one rust spot on the shiny Alexa D-9. According to ZDNet:
Amazon can’t yet completely delete Alexa voice transcriptions. It is working on a solution to deleting data when users request and is planning a bug fix for its Echo Dot Kids Edition.
The article pointed out:
Amazon’s admission that it retains text transcripts indefinitely followed news of a joint complaint filed with the the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) over the Amazon Echo Dot Kids Edition devices. A group of 19 consumer and public health advocates claim children’s data is retained even after parents delete voice recordings. A child can use an Alexa feature called “Remember This”, which keeps anything a child says until parents call Amazon customer service to delete the entire profile.
Amazon Travel: Another Amazon Hotels?
Google has been trying to corner the travel bookings market. Now Amazon wants a piece of the action. Is Amazon confronting the Google head on? No, Amazon is starting in India. “Amazon Launches Flight Bookings in India in a Superapp Strategy” reports that Amazon’s angle is to offer cash back on bookings. DarkCyber noted this passage:
Before 2014, Amazon had offered hotels sporadically at steep discounts with vouchers, but it then tried to provide public rates, and build a more ongoing offering, with the initial iteration focusing on weekend getaways from several major cities. But Amazon abruptly shuttered its hotel business in October 2015, perhaps a year after launching it, when it found the going very tough, and after not getting the results it apparently expected. Amazon was coy about its precise reasons for abandoning the hotel effort as it didn’t provide any substantial information about its exodus.
Amazon flopped in the hotel business. Skift opines:
Given Amazon’s stilted try at building a hotel business from scratch, some would argue that an acquisition of a major travel company, such as Expedia or TripAdvisor, for example, might be the way to go. Amazon had $23 billion in free cash flow for the trailing 12 months at the end of the first quarter, so buying either company would be affordable.
More Robots Are Coming to Amazon Warehouses
Reuters reported that Amazon will replace humanoid workers with robots. The robots pack boxes with customers’ goods more quickly than the humans. Over time robots will be more economical: No breaks for personal needs, no vacations, no coffee breaks, and no thinking about diapers, unionizing, or pay. “Amazon Rolls Out Machines That Pack Orders and Replace Jobs” reports:
The new machines, known as the CartonWrap from Italian firm CMC Srl, pack much faster than humans. They crank out 600 to 700 boxes per hour, or four to five times the rate of a human packer, the sources said. The machines require one person to load customer orders.
The first robots will require two or three humans to support the single robot. But it is faster, and a robot is unlikely to think about a union, a vacation, or the personal necessities a humanoid has.
Is Amazon Eco-Friendly in France?
“Does Amazon France Really Destroy Millions of Products? Yes, But –” asserts:
Amazon destroys a lot of products they can’t sell.
Why?
Taxes. Amazon does not like the idea of taxes DarkCyber assumes. The article makes this clear:
Amazon does destroy products, and one reason they do so is taxes
Logical and efficient.
Buffet and Amazon
Business Insider (the odd duck outfit with a pay wall and no pay wall) reported that Warren Buffet, once the world’s richest man, has about $1 billion in Amazon stock. Buffet’s group “it bought 483,300 shares in the first quarter, worth about $904 million.”
According to Yahoo, Amazon’s AWS boss sold $5.9 million worth of Amazon shares. Does Andy Jassy know something that Mr. Buffet does not?
Amazon Pays Employees to Quit and Deliver Instead
“Minecraft Meets the Real World, Amazon Pays its Employees to Quit, and the Scooter Saga Continues,” despite the wonky title, contains an interesting Amazon factoid:
Amazon is offering its employees an incentive to quit their jobs, if they start their own package delivery companies. This is the latest wrinkle in the company’s Delivery Service Partner program.
Efficient and logical. Let the inefficient workers drive around delivering packages hopefully.
Amazon Away Teams
The Register explained how Amazon coordinates its engineering work. The trick is a “hivemind”. We noted that Amazon
has a system of optimizing internal collaboration by organizing development around a collection independently managed services with a fascinating set of policies for governing it all based on A/B testing, pushed-down decision making, and a carefully curated culture of collaboration that makes use of a novel concept: Away Teams.
The article includes other details which may be of interest to a person eager to emulate one of the methods designed to keep Amazon efficient. There is no information about how an Away Team orders a virtual pizza for the ravenous technologists elsewhere in the hive.
Wanna Code in Cannes?
DarkCyber is not sure Cannes and coding go together as well as money, sun, sand, and Campari. If you know how to make AWS sit and fetch, you may want to journey to the Change for Good Hackathon. Those long khaki pants, gray T shirts, and uncut hair will match up to the average Cannes citizen. More information is available at Cannes Lion.
Partner and Integrator Activity
More companies with which DarkCyber is familiar has jumped on the Amazon bandwagon. Some representative examples:
- Advertity is now certified to Amazon digital customer experience work. No, DarkCyber does not know what that means. It’s probably important once one is trapped in the labyrinth of AWS.
- HyTrust has expanded its CloudControl system to handle AWS. Source: Eweek
- Metova is now an AWS advanced partner. Source: Csion
Stephen E Arnold, May 20, 2019
The Rapid Growth of AWS
May 14, 2019
The business of cloud hosting continues to heat up, we learn from The Register’s article, “Big Cloud Gets Bigger: AWS’s Growth Alone in 2018 Matched Google’s Total Haul—But Bezos Beast Is Still on the Hunt.” Writer Paul Kunert cites Canalys as he reports that AWS received $2.3 billion in infrastructure services alone in 2018, the same amount Google made overall that year. That is a 41% increase, to $7.6 billion. He writes:
“However, the first section of the battle has only just begun. The fight for enterprise customers’ wallets will intensify in 2019 as those companies try to maintain aggressive expansion by extending their cloud business into physical environment, shipping hardware to clients’ data centers. ‘The cloud infrastructure market is moving into a new phase of hybrid IT adoption, with businesses demanding cloud services that can be more easily integrated with their on-premises environment,’ said Canalys chief analyst Alastair Edwards. ‘Most cloud providers are now looking at ways to enter customers’ existing data centers, either through their own products or via partnerships,’ he added.
Kunert gives us a peek at where each major player in the cloud stands, noting that Microsoft got the jump with its launch of Azure Stack in 2017. He points out the recent release of Google’s multi-cloud rig Anthos. We’re also told that China’s huge population boosted that country’s Alibaba into fourth place, over IBM. Though the gap remains wide between AWS and these competitors, Amazon just might be able to catch up.
Cynthia Murrell, May 14, 2019
Edge AI Edges Closer
May 13, 2019
The smart software and artificial intelligence “thing” is repetitive, less than forthcoming, and overhyped. No, Amazon, I don’t want to read mysteries written by European writers. That’s my wife’s interest, not mine. We share an account. AI, even Amazon’s is not that intelligent. Plus, Amazon, despite the hyperbole, is evolving into a 21st century version of the venerable IBM mainframe of the late 1950s and 1960s. The people in white lab coats have been replaced with individuals wearing faded jeans and T shirts, but the arcane lingo, the “specially approved” consultants, and the PR obfuscation have brought my thinking back to the good old days.
But there may be a development which could cause either an Amazon acquisition or a Google panic attack. Navigate to “How Unreal AI Is Using Proprietary Algorithms To Turn Videos Into Usable Data.” The write up explains that Edge AI has developed a method
to run machine learning models on low-cost edge devices so as to reduce their dependence on the cloud for intelligence.
I noted this statement offered by an Edge AI founder:
“AI on the edge is the next frontier in AI. Just like with the advent of PCs in 70s decentralized computing power from mainframe computers we believe that our proprietary AI methods can help decentralize AI and make every device intelligent in itself,” Saurabh Singh, Co-Founder of Unreal AI said when asked about the motivation behind establishing the startup.
Might be worth following this outfit.
Stephen E Arnold, May 13, 2019
Amazonia for May 13, 2019
May 13, 2019
Amazon had an interesting week. Not many companies have a senior manager who wants humans on the moon. DarkCyber wonders if Amazon’s one day delivery will work for these civilization savers. We found a number of Amazon items interesting in the last week.
Killer Pencils? Yes, and Other School Supplies Too
The attorney general in the great State of Washington and proud possessor of the not so great city of Seattle is going to save lives. “Amazon Must Remove Toxic School Supplies, Kid’s Jewelry from Marketplace Nationwide” revealed that:
at least 15,188 purchases of products with illegal levels of lead and cadmium from Amazon.com.
How did these “deadly” products find their way into Amazon’s inventory? DarkCyber assumes that Amazon assumed that its vendors were not selling products that could harm a child or other buyer. DarkCyber further assumes that the vendors assumed their suppliers were not mixing lead and other interesting compounds into their manufacturing process. Yep, that’s a lot of assumes.
The attorney general wants this to change:
Any future sellers must provide this certification before listing their products for sale. Moreover, if the Attorney General or Washington Department of Ecology advise Amazon of any children’s school supplies or jewelry that exceed safe levels, Amazon must remove the product from its online marketplace within two business days.
Yes, would an MBA describe these pencils and book covers as killer products? DarkCyber is not sure.
Amazon: Another HR Flap
If you are interested in how high-technology companies manage their organizations, you may find “Three Muslim Amazon Workers Allege They Were Unfairly Punished for Raising Workplace Discrimination Concerns.” DarkCyber has no way of knowing if the report is accurate. Read the cited article and decide for yourself.
On a related note, the HR aware may want to note that Amazon advertising has triggered a problem which could spill over into company meetings. CNBC reported in “Amazon Mistakenly Told Some Sellers That It’s Now Blocking Ads with Religious Content” and is now saying, “We did not change anything.” Just a item to file away in case further management issues arise.
Amazon’s Security Gap
DarkCyber learned from Bloomberg, a real news outfit, that Amazon was “hit by extensive fraud with hackers siphoning merchant funds.” Hackers compromised about 100 accounts (a number which strikes DarkCyber as a modest one) as “unidentified hackers were able to siphon funds from merchant accounts over six months last year [2018].” Bloomberg is quite forgiving, offering this comment:
The case highlights how the world’s biggest online retail platform — designed to be automated with minimal human input — can be misused and how difficult it is for Amazon to find perpetrators.
DarkCyber believes that increased risk and vulnerability are baked into the online systems. Remedies are reactive. Amazon is in the policeware business and cannot protect itself from fraud. How will Amazon secure Alexa data? What about the information flowing into Amazon from its more than 60,000 home device support operations?
Alexa, Can You Delete Recordings and Transcripts?
The answer to the question is, “No.” The popular home surveillance and convenience device has more than 80,000 “skills.” Protecting privacy may not be one of the ones which performs reliably. ZDNet reported that Amazon is working on a fix. Here’s the key passage from the write up:
Amid new complaints that parents can’t delete what their children say to Echo Dot Kids Edition, Amazon has admitted it doesn’t really give Alexa users the ability to truly delete what they say to Echo devices.
Privacy? Less important than one day delivery perhaps?
Convenience Stores: An Endangered Species
One consolation is that Amazon, so far, has not figured out how to sell gasoline to consumers. That’s on the radar of some. For now, the one-day delivery push may push the thin-margin outfits over the cliff and into a sea of red ink. “Amazon Prime’s One-Day Shipping Could Devastate Convenience and Drug Stores” explains that speedier shipping may make the local retailer obsolete.
Amazon and Meds
Amazon’s push into health care is not grabbing headlines this week. We did spot a story on CNBC titled “The Inside Story of Why Amazon Bought PillPack in Its Effort to Crack the $500 Billion Prescription Market.” After a weird business school case study introduction, the guts of the write up seems to be:
The value for Amazon is in the promise of plugging the delivery network into the giant e-commerce machine, especially when considering that the average PillPack user in 2018 was worth $5,000 in revenue, through insurance payments and patient co-pays…
With lots of Americans taking medicine, Amazon may see a low margin, growth business which snaps into its other infrastructure and convenience plays. Amazon generic drugs? Amazon “doc in the box” facilities? Amazon health insurance? Many possibilities, and these are not mentioned by CNBC. The personal details about eye glasses are okay, but there may be more to PillPack than pills.
Amazon can at this time reach 72 percent of people living in the lower 48 states at this time. Why go to the pharmacy already struggling to survive when you can go to your front door?
Amazon Is Gunning for the Google
BusinessInsider (registration and/or pay wall in place) snagged an Amazon PowerPoint deck. (DarkCyber understood that the great flywheel did not permit the use of slide decks.) The idea is that the eyeballs on Amazon’s devices and Web pages want and need ads. There’s even the NFL’s Thursday Night Football eyeballs. How remarkable is the presentation? Standard “look how many eyeballs we can deliver.” One interesting factoid is that Amazon sales people like to mention that 80 percent Fire TV owners have a premium Prime account. This means to the tense, sometimes insecure Madison Avenue types one thing — Buyers who purchase stuff. If you are a member of Microsoft LinkedIn, you can download an OTT slide deck at this link.
If you don’t know what OTT means, you can get a handy definition omitted from the BusinessInsider and the Zohar Urian post on LinkedIn. OTT is a reference to streaming media available when one owns a box like Roku or Amazon’s gizmos.
Amazon is able to:
- Provide tracking data
- Provide behavioral data
- Provide contextual data
- Identify “similar to” buyers
- Suggest where to put ads to sell older products
- Deliver slices and dices to make target oriented marketers happy.
The idea is that Amazon can “prove” ads work. Google, well, displaying ads next to children on park swing sets is a bit of an issue for some would be Google advertisers.
The Google has an Amazon problem with two pointy things welded to the front of the Bezos bulldozer. First, Amazon is sucking away product searches from the Google. Double digit product search declines, one disgruntled Web site operator smirked at lunch. This fellow added, “Good for Amazon.” The second problem is that buying an ad on a Google property may place the message for a wholesome product next to questionable content. YouTube does have quite a bit of interesting content, and some advertisers remain wary of the GOOG’s smart software and human editor filtering process.
Amazon: Bring Cash
How about those empty store fronts on Fifth Avenue? There will be more space available as Amazon’s brick-and-mortar push expands. “Amazon Go’s First NY Store Is Also the First to Accept Cash” reports:
what’s new at this [Amazon Go Store] location is actually something Amazon Go was invented to get rid off: a cash register.
The problem is, according to CNet:
While Amazon gained loads of attention for this reinvention of shopping, the nascent trend of cashless stores has already faced blowback from local and state governments. Cashless store operators, which include the salad chain Sweetgreen and restaurant Dig Inn, say going cashless made their checkout lines faster and most of their customers didn’t pay in cash anyways.
The tracking technology is still in place in Go Stores. So bring cash.
Amazon Advertises Itself (Just Like Leo LaPorte’s Twit.tv Network)
Vox reported that “Amazon wants to pay the New York Times and BuzzFeed to Expand So It Can Reach More Shoppers Outside the US.” DarkCyber learned that Amazon sees Amazon as equals for this type of promotion. Vox points out:
Amazon is specifically interested in publishers that have built up significant affiliate link units and would be paying them to build out those groups. That includes BuzzFeed, which has made e-commerce a significant part of its revenue strategy and has hired a team of writers to create shopping-friendly content; the Times, which bought the Wirecutter shopping guide for around $30 million in 2016; and New York Media, which has turned New York Magazine’s “Strategist” shopping section into a meaningful part of its online business mix.
Now how does Google’s quality measures deal with this type of overt, large scale search engine optimization approach to links and traffic? DarkCyber’s view is, “Not very well.” Perhaps the GOOG will have to filter Amazon links because the tactics could be considered those of black hat SEO operators. Filtering links will further erode Google’s product search traffic. Yep, this is an issue and one not addressed in the real news Vox write up.
How Amazon Terminates Old Fashioned AWS Services
Amazon sure seems to be nice. A good example is a blog post called “Amazon S3 Path Deprecation Plan – The Rest of the Story.” Unlike the Google, which just up and kills products and services, Amazon walks slowly toward the “terminate with extreme prejudice button.” Amazon wants to herd its customers toward the new and improved versions of Amazon’s technology; for example, getting rid of paths. How old school! The new approach involves object keys, which Jeff Bezos really likes. You will have the opportunity to experience this new approach yourself — whether you like it or not. That’s a Googley touch.
More Partners and Integrators
It is difficult to keep track of the companies joining the AWS bandwagon. Here are a few of the more interesting ones.
- Arcadia Data is an Advanced Amazon Partner. Source: MarketWatch
- Cherwell Software now delivers integrated cloud management services via Amazon Quick Start. Source: Yahoo
- CloudBees now allows AWS customers to deploy CloudBees on AWS. A CloudBee deployment is a cloud native, continuous delivery (CD) solution that can be hosted on-premise or in the cloud. It provides a shared, centrally managed, self-service experience for development teams. Source: Help Net Security
- CloudKnox is now an AWS Advanced Technology Partner. Source: Digital Journal
- CoreSite offers higher bandwidth for AWS Direct Connect. Source: MarketWatch
- Cypherium teams up with Amazon to offer blockchain as a service. See Businesswire’s story on Yahoo.
- Digital Reality provides AWS Direct Connect services. Source: Yahoo
- Digital Reasoning, once a gung ho IBM affiliate, has shifted gears with “Conduct Surveillance.” This appears to include the search and retrieval function plus lots of middleware. The company provides is solution via Amazon. Google gets some DR love too. Source: Virtual Strategy. (Every time I type “virtual strategy” I think, “Why bother with a real strategy when one can have a virtual strategy.” Source: Virtual Strategy
- eCloudValley is allegedly the world’s only AWS premier consulting partner with certifications for China and the rest of the world. Ah, yes, China, the land of surveillance. Source: Cision
- ExtraHop has joined Amazon’s AWS consulting program. Source: Digital Journal
- Getronics and HeleCloud team up to launch an Amazon Center of Excellence; that is, a consulting operation. Source: Virtual Strategy
- Intent Solutions is a partner and one recognized by Amazon itself. Source: PR.com
- Isaca (a global association helping individuals and enterprises achieve the positive potential of technology) has introduced an AWS Audit Program. Source: Security Info Watch
- The great state of Louisiana has partnered with Amazon for “AWS Educate.” More about an Amazon branded state appears in The Advocate.
- Mission, a managed services and consulting company for Amazon Web Services (AWS), has met the requirements of the AWS Managed Services Provider (MSP) Partner Program. Source: Global News Wire
- Nutanix now runs on AWS Xi clusters. Source: CRN
- SGX, a blockchain outfit, is moving its platform to AWS. Source: Finextra
- SmartShift has partnered with Amazon in order to move SAP to AWS. I know that SAP is an interesting outfit and its software can be particularly exciting to configure. But SmartShift will knock that S/4 Hana stuff out of the park. SAP is embracing the Bezos bulldozer. SAP evolved from a former IBM professionals desire to reinvent IBM. A Bakersfield.com report.
- Tantus Technologies is an AWS Select Consulting Partner. Source: Yahoo
- Ventech Solutions is now an Amazon Advanced Consulting Partner. Source: BusinessInsider. No registration required for a recycled news release unlike the recycled OTT article.
Moving Mainframe Code to AWS
Impossible you say. You are wrong, pilgrim. Navigate to the AWS success story of the week, “Automated Refactoroing of a US Department of Defense Mainframe to AWS.” The main point is that it took place and worked. The actual grunt work was handled not by the online bookstore or the wizards in the DoD’s numerous information technology departments. The outfit which pulled off most of the work was Array. When did this take place? In 2018, but it takes some time for certain examples to surface. You can read more about this migration in the AWS Partner Network Blog here.
Amazon Servers: Where in the World Are They, Jeff Bezos?
The Verge’s story “Mapping Out Amazon’s Invisible Server Empire” provides a link to the map that Amazon won’t provide. Well, the map is a link to a sketchy document available in WikiLeaks. The Wikileaks’ map is at this link. The Verge contributes this remarkable “real news” observation:
most of the AWS footprint consists of overseas hubs in colocation centers run by companies like Equinix or Securus.
Yeah, that’s tough to figure out.
Stephen E Arnold, May 13, 2019
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