Google and Identity Management
April 17, 2019
Google kills products. More than 100 since I did my last count. With that fact in mind, I read a second time “Google, Hyperledger Launch Online Identity Management Tools.” At first glance, the idea of a slightly different approach to identify management seems like a good but obvious idea. (Does Amazon have thoughts about identify management too?)
The write up explains:
Google unveiled five upgrades to its BeyondCorp cloud enterprise security service that enables identity and access management for employees, corporate partners, and customers.
Google wants to be the go to cloud provider of identity management services. Among the capabilities revealed, Google’s Android 7 and higher can be used as a two factor authentication dongle.
However, in the back of my mind is the memory of failed products and Google engineers losing interest in certain projects. No promotion, no internal buzz, then no engineers. The Google Search Appliance, for example, was not a thriller.
The idea that Google can and does lose interest in projects may provide a marketing angle Amazon can exploit. If Amazon ignores this “short attention span” issue, perhaps other companies will be less reluctant to point out that talk and a strong start are not finishing the race.
Stephen E Arnold, April 17, 2019
Amazonia for April 15, 2019
April 15, 2019
An interesting week in Amazon’s ebookstore. Jeff Bezos’ annual shareholder letter contains many nuggets. The one DarkCyber found thought provoking was also noted by ZDNet. “In Amazon Shareholder Letter, Bezos Says AWS Targeting Specialized Databases for Specialized Workloads”, I noted this passage:
AWS itself – as a whole – is an example. No one asked for AWS. No one. Turns out the world was in fact ready and hungry for an offering like AWS but didn’t know it. We had a hunch, followed our curiosity, took the necessary financial risks, and began building – reworking, experimenting, and iterating countless times as we proceeded.
ZDNet’s story adds:
From there, Bezos drops a few lines that make AWS a bit of an obsession for Oracle, a database giant. Bezos said the AWS army of databases has been informed by enterprise customers “constrained by their commercial database options and had been unhappy with their database providers for decades.
The idea is that outfits like Oracle Database, IBM DB2, and to some degree Microsoft with its SQLServer construct have offered an engine. Happy licensees and database administrators would dutifully write scripts and use vendor-certified tools.
The future, as DarkCyber understands it, is many different databases, each with different capabilities. Once these are in the AWS environment, AWS developers and their customers can pick a tool and get on with real work.
Want SQL? Amazon has Aurora. Want to make Elasticsearch grunt through log files? AWS can do that with its own stretchy search engine and log file tools. Want to do Googley-things? AWS offers DynamoDB.
Other points:
- Third party resellers are making money even though Amazon could fall behind in the revenue and profit department
- Amazon wants, needs, has to fail
- Pesky customers don’t know what they want
- Amazon is not big in retail
- Amazon has raised its minimum wage so the competition can follow the leader.
Chug, chug, chug goes the Bezos bulldozer. Like some big machines, sometimes ants, jaguars, and the odd competitor gets crushed.
JEDI Squash Game: Final Match
Amazon and Microsoft are the finalists in the squash game for the JEDI contract. Microsoft got some love with its virtual reality award. Plus many DoD professionals cannot live without PowerPoint. Amazon has some government work too. GeekWire reports:
it will be interesting to see how public the companies are willing to be in pursuit of the deal.
Yes, it will be interesting. For the government, for the companies, and for the lawyers representing the outfit which loses the contract.
AWS Deep Learning Containers
Containers make it easy to put related stuff in one place. The holiday ornaments go in Box A, and the old kitchen items go in box 2. Amazon’s deep learning containers are smarter. InfoQ reveals:
AWS DL [Docker] Containers were created by Amazon to remove the “undifferentiated heavy lifting” for customers who regularly use Amazon EKS and ECS to deploy their TensorFlow workloads to the cloud. Amazon has also optimized the images for use on AWS to reduce training time and increase inferencing performance.
You can read the Amazon write up at this link. The main idea is that setting up and doing smart software is getting easier, better, faster, cheaper (allegedly). Just fill in the blanks:
Want more? Search Amazon for cloud. Helpful tip.
Building Bridges to Oman
Amazon visited Oman.The subject of the visit was sales and probably some chatter about other Amazon services. Was policeware on the agenda? DarkCyber does not know. According to Zawya, the reason for the meeting was:
to explore the investment opportunities in the field of information and communication technology and eCommerce as well as identifying the promising markets in the Sultanate.
Ecommerce was a focal point. Policeware? Not mentioned in the source report.
First, It Was Hollywood. Now It Is Big Oil
The Brownsville Herald reported:
Amazon is getting cozy with the oil industry — and some employees aren’t happy about it…
The company is now courting oil producers to Amazon Web Services, which offers cloud computing services to government agencies and major companies, such as video-streaming service Netflix and digital scrapbooking site Pinterest. AWS is one of Amazon’s biggest money makers, accounting for more than 70% of Amazon’s total profit last year.
What’s the angle? Amazon sells its data analytics and other services to Shell and BP. Amazon wants more big oil customers. Is an employee protest percolating?
More Robotics
Business Insider, an outfit seemingly desperate for email addresses and money, reported that Amazon acquired Canvas Technology. The Colorado robot shop makes a robot cart. The cart “carts”. Robots do not require bathroom breaks, meals, or psychological counseling yet.
Amazon Employees Want Climate Change Policies
Herald and News reported that Amazon is into wind energy. But Amazon employees want more climate action from Amazon. This is not save Amazon the company. This is save Amazon the jungle. The newspaper said:
In an unprecedented public push to change Amazon policies, nearly 4,500 employees have put their names to a letter asking CEO Jeff Bezos and the commerce giant’s board of directors to become global leaders in fighting climate change.
Now about the big boxes to send little products? No information, but Amazon has signed three wind farm deals. Those megawatts come online by 2021, In the meantime, chug chug chug does the bulldozer which runs on diesel fuel.
Partner and Developer Quick Clicks
Some items which provide some information about the growing reach of Amazon is the community of vendors of which most people have never heard:
- Napatech. A line of FPGA (floating point gate array) hardware for Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud. The “solution” provides network encryption and description. Source: PR Newswire
- Prancer. A new cloud validation framework. This is a connector to make it possible to check up on Amazon AWS if you are a client of the bulldozer. Source: Yahoo Finance
- ZephyrTel. A strategic collaboration with Amazon AWS. Source: Business Wire on Yahoo
Amazon Cash Pivot
The no people, no cash approach may not be working. Pesky humans and their resistance to change. Yahoo reported that Amazon’s automated stores may start accepting cash. Soon. Source: Yahoo
Amazon: Now a VC Broker
CNBC reported in “AWS Bets on Services Portfolio Amidst Increasing APAC Cloud Competition”:
Amazon is testing a new way to bolster its relationship with start-ups and possibly bring in more capital to the ecosystem. The fledgling effort, known as the Amazon Web Services Pro-Rata Program, is designed to link private investors with companies that use AWS, as well as venture funds whose portfolios are filled with potential cloud customers. Amazon is not investing money through the program.
Didn’t Mr. Bezos work on Wall Street? He probably is no longer influenced by that work. What do you think?
One More Thing…
Apple Insider reports that Bezos bulldozer operators listen to Echo audio. For the allegedly true real news story navigate to “Thousands of Amazon Workers Are Listening In On Echo Audio, Report Says.” We believe reports.
Stephen E Arnold, April 15, 2019
IBM and Oracle: Losers?
April 11, 2019
I found a bit of irony in the revelation that IBM and Oracle are big losers in the US government’s JEDI procurement. If there ever were an old school, doddering outfit, it is the New York Times. Yet without much self awareness, the dead tree crowd puts a jab at IBM and Oracle in their report that two horses are approaching the finish line. “Amazon and Microsoft Are 2 Finalists for $10 Billion Pentagon Contract” makes this point:
IBM and Oracle had also bid for the project, known as the joint enterprise defense infrastructure, or JEDI. But the Defense Department concluded that they did not meet the minimum requirements for the program.
After looking at the NYT’s “Internetting” section, the newspaper, I asked, “What’s the minimum requirement for technology related information?” No one from Amazon, Microsoft, IBM, or Oracle would comment? Former employees out too? What about one of the Beltway Bandits? How about an IBM Federal Systems’ retired person? A former DoD officer?
What about IBM and Oracle? Any business impact of this negative information about these companies? A business school professor? A Beltway bandit?
Forget interviews.
What about the also ran when the US government goes with Microsoft and its cloud confection or Amazon with its bulldozer approach to online?
Which does one short? The NYT does the “Internetting” thing. Not even particularly well.
Stephen E Arnold, April 11, 2019
Amazon Moved a Knight. Google Pushes a Pawn
April 10, 2019
If you care about search and retrieval, you may be interested in the chess game underway between Amazon and Google. Amazon seized the initiative by embracing the open source Elasticsearch. Google, an outfit whose failures in search are known to anyone who licensed a Google Search Appliance, has responded. The pawn Google nudged forward is Elastic, the outfit which has been a big dog in search and retrieval for several years.
According to “Elastic and Google Cloud Expand Elasticsearch Service Partnership”:
Elastic (NYSE: ESTC) and Google Cloud (GCP) announced the expansion of their managed Elasticsearch Service partnership to make it faster and easier for users to deploy Elasticsearch within their Google Cloud Platform (GCP) accounts. Building upon the partnership to deliver Elastic’s Elasticsearch Service on GCP, the companies announced a fully managed, cloud-native integration for discovery, billing, and support for Elasticsearch Service within the GCP Console.
We also circled this statement, which is quite fascinating when interpreted in the context of Amazon’s open source tactic:
Elastic’s Elasticsearch Service on GCP gives users a turnkey experience to deploy powerful Elastic Stack features of Elasticsearch and Kibana, including proprietary free and paid features such as security, alerting, machine learning, Kibana spaces, Canvas, Elasticsearch SQL, and cross-cluster search. In addition, users can deploy new curated solutions for logging, infrastructure monitoring, mapping and geospatial analysis, and APM; optimize compute, memory, and storage workloads using Elastic’s customizable deployment templates such as hot-warm architecture for the logging use case; and upgrade to the latest version of Elasticsearch and Kibana as soon as it is released with a single click.
The chess timer is Amazon’s. Will the company make a lucid move?
Stephen E Arnold, April 10, 2019
Making, Not Filtering, Disinformation
April 8, 2019
I spotted a link to this article on Sunday (April 7, 2019). The title of the “real news” report was “Facebook Is Asking to Be Regulated but Wants to Choose How.” The write ostensibly was about Facebook’s realization that regulation would be good for everyone. Mark Zuckerberg wants to be able to do his good work within a legal framework.
I noted this passage in the article:
Facebook has been in the vanguard of creating ways in which both harmful content can be generated and easily sent to anyone in the world, and it has given rise to whole new categories of election meddling. Asking for government regulation of “harmful content” is an interesting proposition in terms of the American constitution, which straight-up forbids Congress from passing any law that interferes with speech under the first amendment.
I also circled this statement:
Facebook went to the extraordinary lengths of taking out “native advertising” in the Daily Telegraph. In other words ran a month of paid-for articles demonstrating the sunnier side of tech, and framing Facebook’s efforts to curb nefarious activities on its own platform. There is nothing wrong with Facebook buying native advertising – indeed, it ran a similar campaign in the Guardian a couple of years ago – but this was the first time that the PR talking points adopted by the company have been used in such a way.
From Mr. Zuckerberg’s point of view, he is sharing his ideas.
From the Guardian’s point of view, he is acting in a slippery manner.
From the newspapers reporting about his activities and, in the case of the Washington Post, providing him with an editorial forum, news is news.
But what’s the view from Harrod’s Creek? Let me share a handful of observations:
- If a person pays money to a PR firm to get information in a newspaper, that information is “news” even if it sets forth an agenda
- Identifying disinformation or weaponized information is difficult, it seems, for humans involved in creating “real news”. No wonder software struggles. Money may cloud judgment.
- Information disseminated from seemingly “authoritative” sources is not much different from the info rocks from a digital slingshot. Disgruntled tweeters and unhappy Instagramers can make people duck and respond.
For me, disinformation, reformation, misinformation, and probably regular old run-of-the-mill information is unlikely to be objective. Therefore, efforts and motivations to identify and filter these payloads is likely to be very difficult.
Stephen E Arnold, April 8, 2019
Amazonia for April 8, 2019
April 8, 2019
The Bezos bulldozer was grinding along last week. The big celebrity news was the creation of a new world billionaire once married to the online bookstore’s founder. There were some less interesting developments the DarkCyber research team spotted. Here’s a selection of semi-interesting items.
Eero: A Deal?
If the information in “Amazon Bought Eero for $97 Million and Employees Still Got Screwed” is accurate, the easy networking outfit made some of its employees unhappy. Here’s the passage we noted:
According to confidential documents viewed by Mashable, Amazon acquired Eero for $97 million. Eero executives brought home multi-million dollar bonuses and eight-figure salary increases. Everyone else, however, didn’t fare quite so well. Investors took major hits, and the Amazon acquisition rendered Eero stock worthless: $0.03 per share, down from a common stock high of $3.54 in July 2017. It typically would have cost around $3 for employees to exercise their stock, meaning they would actually lose money if they tried to cash out.
Didn’t venture capitalists pump more money into the company? Maybe employees and investors got a lesson in how to be a billionaire?
Amazon in Space
Google does Loon balloons. Facebook likes gliders. Amazon wants to put 3,000 satellites in space to deliver Internet connectivity to those who want to buy a Kindle ebook. We learned:
The effort, code-named Project Kuiper, follows up on last September’s mysterious reports that Amazon was planning a “big, audacious space project” involving satellites and space-based systems. The Seattle-based company is likely to spend billions of dollars on the project, and could conceivably reap billions of dollars in revenue once the satellites go into commercial service.
DarkCyber wants to know, “Will Amazon use the Bezos space rocket to put these devices into orbit?” Source: Geekwire. As a prank a clever person created a mock up of an Amazon blimp or Loon balloon deploying drones.
Rekognition Facial Recognition May Face a “Rekoning”
DarkCyber does not know much about shareholder meetings. Apparently the subject of Amazon’s licensing of its facial recognition technology to law enforcement and government agencies is an issue for some. We learned that shareholders will have an opportunity to vote on where Amazon can sell its FAR systems. Who decided? Mr. Bezos? Nope, the Securities & Exchange Commission. Google has sparked some fierce discussion with its refusal to work on a government project. What will happen if Amazon disables its FAR systems? DarkCyber believes that some entities will be unhappy. Source: Verge
Hello, Air Pods the Amazon Basics Way
Poor Apple. It cannot make butterfly keyboards. The Cupertino giant cannot craft a wireless charging mat. The spirit of Jobs seems to have departed with version two of its wireless ear phones. Never fear. Amazon is going to release its own version, which will interact with Amazon’s services. DarkCyber is more interested in possible LE and intel applications of this particular chunk of Amazon’s technology. Source: Bloomberg
Amazon and Health Care
Google and Microsoft have bailed out of their health care initiatives. Not Amazon. DarkCyber learned that Alexa will be gussied up with medical expertise. Interested in what Amazon allegedly will do? DarkCyber is too. Information about certain medical conditions could be useful in some investigations. Source: Venture Beat
Amazon and Fairness Research
DarkCyber did not spot too many tweets about Amazon’s sponsoring research about fairness. A newspaper reported:
Amazon has partnered with the taxpayer-funded National Science Foundation on a three-year, $20 million program to fund basic research into fairness in artificial intelligence systems, which are under increasing scrutiny as they spread in society and sometimes amplify existing biases.
“Fair” is a word like “quality.” Tough to define. So far the company has not abandoned the project. Google jettisoned its public ethics group. But Amazon may be paid for this effort to tackle a very fuzzy concept. DarkCyber asks, “What’s “fair” when it comes to lavatory breaks in an Amazon warehouse? Source: Seattle Times
Amazon Reduces Some Prices at Whole Foods
We don’t have a Whole Paycheck (sorry, I meant Whole Foods) here in Harrod’s Creek. We do have a saloon, a bar, a restaurant and bar, a filling station with a wood stove and old times. No Whole Feeds. The new reported in “Amazon Slashes Prices on Hundreds of Whole Foods Items” was greeted with silence. The local Kroger manager asked one of the DarkCyber research team, “What’s a Whole Foods?”
Good Bye, Oracle
Amazon once was a good Oracle customer. Oracle license fees. Oracle add ons. Oracle data base administrators. Oracle World speaking opportunities. If an Amazonia were lucky, a nifty Oracle hat. No more. Amazon uses its “own” database technology now, thank you, very much Larry Ellison. According to one British computer publication, Amazon’s database team held a “thank heavens, it is outta here” party. Don’t let the PL/SQL documentation fall on your head. Source: Computing
Hi, Microsofties. We’re Neighbors
Some Amazon employees will be relocating their offices to Bellevue, Washington. We learned from Geekwire:
Amazon plans to relocate its entire Seattle-based worldwide operations team to Bellevue, Wash., by 2023, adding thousands of employees to its new campus just across Lake Washington, according to an internal email obtained by GeekWire.
Yeah, about that security for corporate email? If true, Seattle’s city fathers may want to ask themselves, “What did we do wrong?” On the other hand, Microsoft may have its own questions. One big winner will be the Bellevue real estate specialists. Let’s not overlook this Amazon initiative: “Amazon Web Services Sharpens Its Focus on Cloud Security.” Internal email included or not?
An Amazon Alexa Robot May Be Developed
DarkCyber noted that a walking Alexa may be developed by Amazon’s engineers. We noted this passage in “Alexa’s Chief Scientist Wants to Give the Voice Assistant a Robot Body”:
Speaking at The EmTech Digital A.I .Conference held by MIT Technology Review in San Francisco, Prasad raised the idea of letting Alexa learn about the world by experiencing it like a human might. “The only way to make [a]smart assistant really smart is to give it eyes and let it explore the world,” he said. That would include giving Alexa a physical form. While the idea might seem a little out there, we’re already closer to the possibility than one might imagine. In some cases, Alexa already has access to “eyes” of sorts, as some devices with Alexa installed include cameras that the A.I. can access. A body would be a considerable jump in progression, of course, but it is a possibility. That said, Prasad didn’t confirm whether Amazon is already working on building a body for its voice assistant.
Source: Digital Trends
Jim Henson Shows on Amazon, Just Not in the US
We learned in “Jim Henson Shows Come to Amazon Prime Video, but Not in the US” that licensing spoils the fun:
Amazon has added a lot more Jim Henson Company programs to Prime Video after rolling out all four season of sci-fi series Farscape for the platform. Starting today, you’ll be able to access 2,500 hours of child-friendly shows with Muppets and other Henson puppets if you have a Prime or a standalone Prime Video subscription. That is, depending on where you’re located — unfortunately, most of those programs won’t be available in the US due to licensing issues.
Source: Engadget
Audio Watermarking
Was that secret recording subsequently modified? Amazon may have technology which could answer this question. An Amazon ebook lover wrote a journal article with the alluring title “Audio Watermarking over the Air with Modulated Self Correlation.” You can find a copy of the free article at this link.
Amazon Gets More Twitchy
“AWS Introduces API Specification for Securing On-Demand and Live Video” reveals that its the Secure Packager and Encoder Exchange (SPEKE) for video are available. DarkCyber noted:
The SPEKE specification aims to eliminate this one-off, customization requirement and replace the old with a standardized method. SPEKE-enabled servers and encryptors should greatly improve time to market for services regardless of consumption method (on-premises, cloud, hybrid, etc.). SPEKE is built on the DASH Industry Forum’s Content Protection Information Exchange Format (CPIX) standard. The API specification supports HLS, MSS and DASH packaging. Many DRM platforms (e.g. Apple FairPlay Streaming, Microsoft PlayRead, Google Widevine, AES-128 and more) are already supported.
Could the best of YouTube find its way to an Amazon Twitch-like service. Some disenchanted Vimeo customers might find this information interesting as well.
Amazon May Gun for Roku
Medium (an outfit which wants email addresses in exchange for articles) published “Amazon Asks Advertisers to Pledge Millions for Roku Rival.” Makes sense. Amazon wants to gobble revenue, and advertising seems to be an obvious money spout. Read the write up in Medium. Nothing like trading a story told in a headline for an email.
Amazon Complexity
Skimfeed published an interesting statement. Here it is:
@jeffbigham: The 2nd day of the month is my favorite day because it’s when I get a $9.95 bill from AWS for something I can’t figure out how to shut down.
If you want a free run down of “everything” Amazon, you may find “Amazon AWS: Complete Business Guide to the World’s Largest Provider of Cloud Services” helpful. Or not. The write up is short, incomplete, and generally without the information @jeffbigham requires.
Amazon Goes to Bogota
Bogota has an excellent climate. It will also have an Amazon infrastructure facility. According to “Amazon Web Services to Open Infrastructure Location in Colombia”:
Amazon Web Services (AWS), a unit of Amazon.com Inc, said … it will open a Latin America infrastructure location in Colombia and help train 2,000 students in cloud technology. The company will team up with Colombia’s public technical education institute to train students in cloud computing, Jeffrey Kratz, AWS’ general public sector manager for Latin America, the Caribbean and Canada, said in a government statement.
Fleets of EC2 Instances. Fleets!
If you are a government agency and have a great deal of data to crunch, EC2 fleets may be of interest. The idea is that one can automate the creation of multiple instances. The method is to fill in a form. We learned:
hen you create a fleet, the virtual machine (VM) instances within the fleet will be based on a launch template. Launch templates are used to create VM instances in a standardized way. A launch template might, for instance, define the network interfaces, storage volumes and tags that are to be used by EC2 instances created from the template.
More information is available in Virtualization Review’s explanation “Use Amazon EC2 Fleets to Create Collections of EC2 Instances”, which is handier than Amazon’s documentation.
More Partners and Integrators
We jotted down the names of partners and integrators of things AWS not appearing in our files; to wit:
Stephen E Arnold, April 8, 2019
Expert System: Interesting Financials
April 6, 2019
Expert System SpA is a firm providing semantic software that extracts knowledge from text by replicating human processes. I noticed information on the company’s Web site which informed me:
- The company had sales revenues of 28.7 million euros for 2018
- The company’s growth was 343 percent compared to 2017
- The net financial position was 12.4 million euros up from 8.8 million euros in March 2017.
Remarkable financial performance.
Out of curiosity I navigated to Google Finance and plugged in Expert System Spa to see what data the GOOG could offer.
Here’s the chart displayed on April 6, 2019:
The firm’s stock does not seem to be responding as we enter the second quarter of 2019.
Deep Video Fakes: Getting Easier and Better, Much Better
April 4, 2019
You may have seen one of the news stories explaining that unwanted artifacts can be removed from video. The magic is one of the features of Adobe After Effects, an application which requires some effort to learn. “Adobe Creative Cloud Updates – New Features for Video Post Production” stated:
[A] new feature for Adobe After Effects is the Content-Aware Fill. It enables users to automatically remove unwanted objects from the footage. Content-Aware Fill for video is powered by Adobe Sensei and it was first introduced in Photoshop. It automates the process of removing visual elements like boom mics, signs, logos and even people from footage, which should save hours of manual work.
Zap. Reality or lousy video footage “fixed.”
You can get a rundown of other tools which can help out, improve, or alter reality in “Top 5 AI-Powered Video Editing Tools.”
Will non US propaganda agencies find these tools useful?
Yep.
Stephen E Arnold, April 4, 2019
Thoughts about Search: A Word That Means Almost Anything
April 3, 2019
We have long been frustrated that search technology has not come very far since its early days. Sure, Google has made tweaks over the years, but even many of those incremental changes are designed to maximize that company’s ad revenue. Now, though, AI technology may fundamentally change how we find information online. Forbes asks, “Might AI Spell the Death of Search?” Writer Michael Ashley observes:
“‘This is the first time since 1994 when the search paradigm has changed,’ says David Seuss, CEO of Northern Light, a Boston-based strategic research portal provider I consult with that offers a cloud-based SaaS to global enterprises. ‘In 1994, you went to a search box, filled in a query, hit the search button, and received a list of documents. You manually reviewed these, picking the most relevant item to download. Fast forward to 2019 and it’s still the same thing. Find me one other part of the tech landscape that has not changed since the ’90s, whether it be broadband, wireless, mobile cloud computing, artificial intelligence—everything has changed. Everything except search.’”
The man has a point. He also claims it is Millennials that are pushing for change. Older users were just so happy to search from their desks instead of in the library stacks, he posits, that most of them remain satisfied with 90s-style online search. The younger generation, though, find manually reviewing search results inefficient, and they recognize that a lot of good information tends to get buried later in the search results—especially as paid listings claim the top spots. Ashley writes:
“With the help of A.I., tasks once relegated to flesh and blood researchers can be now accomplished by computers. Drawing on the latter’s pattern-forming and predictive abilities, it can observe users’ actions, discerning their interests based on what they download, share, comment on or bookmark. Informed by this knowledge, an A.I. can proactively—and without manual prompting—recommend relevant content to users. Disrupting the traditional search model to its page ranking core, content can seek out the user instead of the other way around.”
Ah, Northern Light sails again with the AI flag whipping in the marketing breeze with help from puffs of insight in “Why Are So Many People Wasting Their Time with Web Search?” Trim the jib!
Cynthia Murrell, April 3, 2019
Amazonia for April 1, 2019
April 1, 2019
These are not April Fool items. Each appeared before publication in the sources identified below. If some of the items seem wonky, not my doing.
Was Bezos a Victim of Policeware?
Is this true or false? We don’t know. The Daily Beast reported on March 30, 2019, that an Amazon investigation suggested that Jeff Bezos was a victim of policeware spying. The story “Bezos Investigation Finds the Saudis Obtained His Private Data” contains the allegedly accurate details. Thinking about the political and legal implications of the information in the allegedly accurate article is outside the scope of this humble run down of news items about everyone’s favorite online bookstore. Perhaps others can answer such questions as when, who, why and how?
Amazon and Its Economists
Economists and I assume behavioral psychologists are surprised at the attention each professional group receives from the tech savvy crowd. According to “Amazon Gets an Edge with its Secret Squad of PhD Economists”:
Amazon is now a large draw from the relatively small talent pool of PhD economists, which in the United States grows by about only 1,000 new graduates every year. Although the definition of “economist” is fuzzy, the discipline is generally understood as the study of how people use resources and respond to incentives.
Amazon allegedly has on its team more than 150 economists. If the economists are students of The Age of Surveillance Capitalism,” staff meetings may be more thrilling than a mid term lecture in Economics 101.
Will one of these professionals become a Hal Varian-scale thinker?
Apple Leaves Amazon an Opening, Free and Clear
The Verge reported that Amazon is “working on a free Fire TV news app.” Free may be more appealing that $120 a year for 300 magazines. Some in the weird scrollable PDF like format and others in Apple’s own proprietary format. The Verge sees the inspiration as Roku. Amazon may know that print centric services are not selling like hot cakes on the Amazon online store; thus, the focus is on where the eyeballs are—video. But there’s more free stuff from Amazon. If you are a Prime member, you get Switch online. Free is a compelling value proposition, or it is if you are into Nintendo games.
Africa and Amazon’s Banking Play
In my lectures about Amazon’s policeware, I described the financial information flowing through the firm’s infrastructure. It is interesting that Amazon is becoming more overt in its efforts to become a global financial systems. The company has cut a deal to become what Forbes called “Africa’s first bank in the cloud.” Amazon’s partner is Standard Bank. Note that Microsoft has been chugging away in Africa as well. Google, the Chinese, and assorted colonial nations are making moves as well. The financial services angle is an important one because Amazon has kept its financial moves under wraps for some time. Are regulators on top of this?
Amazon and Cost Management
Amazon received some coverage in the Seattle Times in the story “Amazon Finds an Alternative Workforce through Northwest Center, a Seattle Nonprofit Helping People with Disabilities.” The story explains Amazon’s employment of people with disabilities. I noted this statement:
In 2015, 22 people with disabilities were hired for part-time jobs in Amazon’s Kent sortation center as part of the pilot program. Their performance was tracked against the general employee population on retention, safety, productivity, quality and attendance.
The information in the article seemed dated and did not provide much data about pay and current number of individuals with disability engaged at Amazon.
Does Amazon Have a Lock on the CIA Cloud Business?
The answer may be, “Nope.” According to Bloomberg, a real news service which sometimes does not have sources for its information:
The CIA is preparing to significantly increase its reliance on cloud-computing services, with plans to solicit tens of billions of dollars of work divided among multiple tech companies.
Source: Bloomberg
Amazon and Columbia
South America is on the economic and political radar for 2020. Amazon has announced that it will open an infrastructure operation in Columbia. The region is unsettled in some ways, but Amazon obviously believes the risk is minimal. More information is available from Reuters. Reuters links do go dead, so you may be on your own if this source does not resolve. Complain to Thomson Reuters, not to me, please.
Caipirinha, Anyone?
It’s official. ZDNet reports that Alexa is alive in Brazil. DarkCyber thinks that Brazil’s new president may be interested in Amazon’s policeware too.
The Great Vendor Purge: Walking the Cat Back
Digiday reported that Amazon’s vendor purge is underway in reverse. According to Digiday’s online information service:
Amazon has walked back the decision to terminate a majority of the vendor purchase orders it stopped fulfilling last Monday, but the action has served as a bit of a wake-up call to sellers who are now planning how to protect their businesses by relying less on the e-commerce retailer.
Confusion at the controls of the Bezos bulldozer?
Proprietary Alexa Skills
There’s no mention of Amazon data capture or voice analysis in “Create an Alexa Skill for Your Organization with Alexa for Business Blueprints.” Be aware that this link may not resolve. You may be able to find the post at https://developer.amazon.com/blogs/alexa and scrolling through items. The blog post states:
Private skills are voice-powered capabilities that enhance the Alexa experience while remaining private to members of an Alexa for Business organization. Skill Blueprints are so easy to use, people have used them extensively to create Alexa skills for their households. Now anyone at the office can do the same for their workplace, simply by filling in custom requests and responses in one of dozens of easy-to-use Blueprints. IT administrators can then review and enable that content for the company’s users and managed Alexa-enabled devices.
Interesting? DarkCyber wonders if the data from these private skills will flow into Amazon’s policeware system?
Why Is AWS So Appealing to Some Developer Palates?
“The #AWS EC2 Windows Secret Sauce” is a reminder that Amazon is the new Microsoft, which may come as a bit of news to Google. The online ad giant wants to be Microsoft. If you want a run down of some of the issues one may encounter with Windows in the cloud, Tehnodrone spells how Amazon handles Windows provisioning. Hint: Lots of engineering and more automated functions.
More AWS Computing Horsepower
“Nvidia’s T4 GPUs Are Coming to the AWS Cloud” reports:
The T4, which is based on Nvidia’s Turing architecture, was specifically optimized for running AI models. The T4 will be supported by the EC2 compute service and the Amazon Elastic Container Service for Kubernetes.
Your play Google.
Redshift Scales
Who knows what Redshift does? If you are on the Redshift clue train, you will be delighted to learn that Amazon’s data warehouse offer concurrency and is allegedly better and faster than alternatives. More rah rah is available in “AWS Announces General Availability of Concurrency Scaling for Amazon Redshift.”
S3 Glacier: Cheap Archiving
Amazon rolled out discounted storage. This is called Glacier, presumably because near line retrieval move slowly. More information is available in “AWS Announces General Availability of Amazon S3 Glacier Deep Archive—the Lowest Cost Storage in the Cloud.”
Amazon Aurora: Another Complexity Block to Master
If AWS is the next Windows, these components are the equivalent of the chunks of capability stuffed in a DLL. The write up in Acolyer’s blog states:
Managing quorum failures is complex. Traditional mechanisms cause I/O stalls while membership is being changed….Aurora is designed for a world with a constant background level of failure.
The idea is to improve reliability. The key point is that the AWS system generates automatic adaptive actions. Some of these may cost money. Automated services which posts increments to fees, is it?
New Partnerships
Here are some of the new partnerships and integration vendors which appear to have Amazon AWS expertise.
- Lightstream, a global leader in cloud technology solutions, network integration and managed-network services now supports Amazon Chime. Chime is a communications service that lets licensees meet, chat, and place business calls inside and outside an organization. Source: New Kerala
- Sisense delivers its analytics via the Amazon Cloud. The service is called the “Elastic Data Hub.” Please, don’t confuse this with the Elastic company or the Elasticsearch open source system. Source: New Kerala
Know What NSA NIPA Means?
Somebody thinks those on LinkedIn do. Monkton.io (no, it is not a town in Maryland and it has nothing to do with monks) said via Harold Smith III on LinkedIn “NSA NIAP compliant mobile apps in weeks, not years.” Source: LinkedIn and search for “Harold Smith III”.
Stephen E Arnold, April 1, 2019
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