Amazonia for April 22, 2019
April 22, 2019
Amazon continues to grind forward.
Amazon Fails Where Google Struggled: China
China is a big market. China is a country. Armies, police, regulators, and a history of following its leaders. Amazon learned that it, like Google, could not change China. This is a surprise? “Amazon Plans to Shut Down China Marketplace in Rare Retreat” reports:
In a rare retreat for Amazon.com Inc., the e-commerce giant plans to shut down its Chinese marketplace business in July as it shifts its focus to offering mainland consumers overseas products rather than goods from local sellers.
But Amazon will not give up. Even Mark Zuckerberg learned to speak Chinese so he could continue to spread the word about Facebook goodness.
Amazon will keep running its other businesses in China, including Amazon Web Services, Kindle e-books, and cross-border operations that help ship goods from Chinese merchants to customers abroad. Starting on July 18, customers logging in to Amazon’s Chinese web portal, Amazon.cn, will only see a selection of goods from its global store, rather than products from third-party sellers.
Will Amazon triumph in China? That depends on what one means by identifying a victory. DarkCyber does not think the definition will include impinging on Alibaba and JD.com, among other China favorites.
Amazon and Google: Learning to Coexist
DarkCyber noted that the high school science club spat with the high school mathematics club has ended. Amazon’s FireTV will show YouTube videos. Peace in our Time reported:
In a mutual announcement, the two online giants have revealed that they’re collaborating on bringing their services to the other’s devices. “In the coming months,” the YouTube app will be coming back to the Fire TV (Amazon’s devices and Fire TV Edition smart TVs). It will be followed later this year by the YouTube TV and YouTube Kids apps as well. On Amazon’s side, the Prime Video app will add support for casting “in the coming months,” thus supporting Google’s first-party Chromecasts and other Chromecast built-in devices.
Ah, beautiful music to some ears. But wait. Music is not included. The two clubs are likely to meet up in the high school cafeteria to talk about tunes, DarkCyber opines.
Amazon: Staff Management: Energy and Green Edition
Several thousand Amazon staff want Amazon to do more for saving the planet. The issue is not resolved. What triggered the pushback from happy, content, sleek, and well benefited employees. DarkCyber suggests that the firm’s commitment to renewable energy farms half a world away from Seattle were insufficient. Amazon has some deals with Big Energy to help these oil and gas outfits extract carbon sources from Mother Earth. See “Amazon Employees to Execs: Do More on Climate Change” for some exhaust on the subject. Key point: Amazon management faces a management hot spot. First, a supermarket magazine dust up, then the China problem, and now people one pays to do the company’s honest, meaningful labor. Perhaps a Harvard Business School podcast will offer the online bookstore some advice?
Amazon Partners: Implementing the New, Improved IBM Approach to Sales Continues
Some partners of Amazon revealed some of the Amazon plans. Here’s a few which caught our eye:
- Antian offers its compliance services via Amazon. Source: Geekwire
- AzCopy has improved its S3 data transfer service. Source: Redmond Magazine
- Business Software, an income tax services firm, is now an AWS believer. Source: Virtual Strategy
- Inplayer offers video monetizing services for Amazon. Source: OAOA, part of Aim Media in Texas
- Instana introduced its cloud management services for Amazon. Source: Virtual Strategy
- McAfee achieves Amazon certification. Plus, Amazon has identified McAfee as well architected. Source: Marketwatch
- Phynd, a health care transformation specialist, expanded its Amazon-centric services. The name suggests search, but it seems more of a workflow and content management play. Source: PRNewswire
- Perspectium provides customer support services via Amazon. The firm also uses Press of Atlantic City for its news releases which wants to charge for marketing information. Annoying indeed. If the link goes dead, think bush league PR play.
- Pyramid Systems is now an advanced consulting partner for Amazon. Sounds good thought. And, no, DarkCyber does not know what the different levels of partner mean. Source: PRNewswire
- Tetrate offers Envoy to AWS Mesh users who want micro services for their Web-accessible applications. Source: Marketwatch
- TigerGraph uses AWS for “pay as you go” graph analytics. Source: Globe News Wire
Amazon: Going the Right Direction Says Yahoo, Verizon, Oath, AOL or Whatever
Despite the mini-crises causing the Bezos bulldozer’s engine to rev, “Jeff Bezos Is Leading Amazon in the Right Direction.” And Verizon should know; it is a paragon of management excellence. According to the company which may have cribbed some ideas from Smarter Analyst:
The founder of Amazon has managed to keep an innovative culture going while they continue to disrupt e-commerce. Bezos anticipates that Amazon can continue to grow its e-commerce footprint in various markets outside the United States where there has been minimal market penetration of e-commerce in general.
Spot on, Yahoooooooo.
For Fans of Amazon’s Policeware
Amazon has added Arabic to the line up of languages which the Amazon Polly system can understand. CRN points out that the service is designed for consumer applications; for example:
The move allows developers to create applications that speak in Arabic and build speech-enabled products and services, including cars, internet of things devices, appliances, automated contact centers, language learning platforms, translation apps and newsreaders.
JEDI: A Down to Earth Battle Between Digital Super Powers
April 20, 2019
This may be good news for China and Russia. Nextgov predicts, “Without JEDI, Pentagon’s Artificial Intelligence Efforts May Be Hindered.” The Pentagon requires an enterprise cloud computing solution for its ambitious AI plans—once it gets past one little snag, that is. They had a plan, called the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure contract, but it is now on hold pending litigation. Reporter Frank Konkel writes:
“Through the JEDI contract, the Pentagon aims to put a commercial company in charge of hosting and distributing mission-critical workloads and classified data to warfighters around the globe in a single cloud computing environment. That environment would also process large swaths of military and defense data and serve as the computing and analytics workhorse for artificial intelligence applications.
Motley Fool reports in “An Unexpected Scandal Threatens To Cripple Amazon”:
the Department of Defense (DoD) cleared itself of wrongdoing following an internal investigation into the forthcoming award of the $10 billion cloud computing Joint Enterprise Defense Initiative (JEDI) program. Yet the Pentagon’s self-exoneration was not comprehensive, as Bloomberg noted that: “The investigation uncovered evidence of unethical conduct that will be referred to the DoD inspector general for a separate review.”
Nations like China will not oblige us by putting their AI plans on hold while we catch up. The DoD could try using a hardware stack instead, but that would severely constrict their plans, according to Lt. Gen. Jack Shanahan, head of the Joint Artificial Intelligence Center.
Is DarkCyber surprised? A better question, “What was the business ethos of DH Shaw when Mr. Bezos honed his financial and business skills at that Wall Street firm?”
DarkCyber does not know.
Cynthia Murrell, April 20, 2019
Phishers Experience Some Tiny Google Pushback
April 17, 2019
Hiding urls is a phisher’s best friend. Google wants to eliminate those pesky urls. The problem is that spoofing a Web site is easier when the GOOG simplifies life. There’s nothing like a PDF with malware to make one’s day.
If the information in “Google Takes a Tiny Step Toward Fixing AMP’s URL Problem” is accurate, the Google may be pushing back against the opportunities bad actors have to deceive a Web user. The write up does describe Google’s action as “tiny” and “tiny” may be miniscule. I learned:
When you click a link on your phone with a little lightning bolt next to it in Google search, you’re getting something in the AMP format. AMP stands for “Accelerated Mobile Pages,” and you’ve probably noticed that those pages load super quickly and usually look much simpler than regular webpages. You may have also noticed that the URL at the top of your browser started with “www.google.com/somethingorother” instead of with the webpage you thought you were visiting.
Yeah, about that “quickly.” Maybe not.
Phishers will be studying this alleged “tiny” change. Why? Phishing and spear phishing are one of the methods which are bring Dark Web type excitement to users of the good, old-fashioned Web. There are six or seven additional examples of metastatic technology in my keynote at the TechnoSecurity & Digital Forensics Conference in June 2019.
“Tiny”. Yep. And what about the “speed” of AMP pages?
Stephen E Arnold, April 17, 2019
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.
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