Google: A Good Digital Neighbor
June 20, 2018
Amazon’s retail and technology power daily grows. The only way to compete with Amazon is to have products, power, money, and exposure. Other companies have the money and products, while Google has the power and exposure. With their powers combined, Amazon might start to quack…just a little. Engadget reports on, “Google Plans To Boost Amazon Competitors In Search Shopping Ads.”
Target, Home Depot, Walmart, Costco, Ulta and other retailers are allowing Google to index their catalogs and will appear in search results. Instead of getting an ad fee, Google will get a cut from the sale. The immediate concern is that this will pollute organic search results, but Google will separate the targeted sale searches in a sidebar
Google is selling this package as an anti-Amazon tool:
“The report claims that Google is selling its new anti-Amazon tools on the basis that it is utterly dominant in the search world. Not to mention that, as voice becomes a more important component of people’s lives, Google’s reach here will help beat back Alexa. The project’s genesis was reportedly down to the company noticing that people were image searching products, or asking where they could buy an item. And it wasn’t small numbers of folks, either, but tens of million of people, a big enough market to make anyone excited.”
The brick and mortar retailers can steal back some of their customers by embedding their results in Google searches. According to the research, most searches start with Google, but they end up on Amazon. Google has seen a modest 30 percent increase retailer sales in another shopping project, Google Express, and those results could increase with this new endeavor. Google anti-Amazon sales kit is made for the changing world, where shopping is easier with your voice or from a computer.
Amazon has a reasonable position in the retail market, which could be seen as a positive or a negative, depending on one’s point of view. Google is just trying to be a good digital neighbor. Fences, digital fences.
Whitney Grace, June 20, 2018
DarkCyber, May 29, 2018, Now Available
May 29, 2018
Stephen E Arnold’s DarkCyber video news program for Tuesday, May 29, 2018, is now available.
This week’s story line up is:
- The “personality” of a good Web hacker
- Why lists are replacing free Dark Web search services
- Where to find a directory of OSINT software
- A new Dark Web index from a commercial vendor.
You can find this week’s program at either www.arnoldit.com/wordpress or on Vimeo at https://vimeo.com/272088088.
On June 5, 2018, Stephen will be giving two lectures at the Telestrategies ISS conference in Prague. The audiences will consist of intelligence, law enforcement, and security professionals from Europe. A handful of attendees from other countries will be among the attendees.
On Tuesday, June 5, 2018, Stephen will reveal one finding from our analysis of Amazon’s law enforcement, war fighting, and intelligence services initiative.
Because his books have been reused (in several cases without permission) by other analysts, the information about Amazon is available via online or in person presentations.
The DarkCyber team has prepared short video highlighting one research finding. He will include some of the DarkCyber research information in his Prague lectures.
The Amazon-centric video will be available on Tuesday, June 5, 2018. After viewing the video, if you want the details of his for fee lecture, write him at darkcyber333@yandex dot com. Please, put “Amazon” in the subject line.
Several on the DarkCyber team believe that most people will dismiss Stephen’s analysis of Amazon. The reason is that people buy T shirts, books, and videos from the company. However, the DarkCyber research team has identified facts which suggest a major new revenue play from the one time bookseller.
Just as Stephen’s analyses of Google in 2006 altered how some Wall Street professionals viewed Google, his work on Amazon is equally significant. Remember those rumors about Alexa recording what it “hears”? Now think of Amazon’s services/products as pieces in a mosaic.
The picture is fascinating and it has significant financial implications as well.
Enjoy today’s program at this link.
Kenny Toth, May 29, 2018
One View of the Amazon Game Plan
May 27, 2018
I read “Invisible Asymptotes.” Job One for me was trying to match the meaning of “asymptote” with the research my DarkCyber team has conducted into one slice of Amazon’s business roll outs in the last three years.
As you know, an “asymptote” is a mathy way of saying “you can’t get from here to there.” According to Wolfram Mathword:
An asymptote is a line or curve that approaches a given curve arbitrarily closely.
Here’s a diagram. No equations, I promise.
This diagram suggests a business angle to the “asymptote” reference: No matter what you do, it requires effort and a commitment to “quality”. The good news is that although one can quantify time, one cannot quantify “quality” or “perfection.” Okay, gerbil, run in that Ferris wheel gizmo in your cage.
The write up points out:
We focus so much on product-market fit, but once companies have achieved some semblance of it, most should spend much more time on the problem of product-market unfit.
I am not exactly sure what “unfit” means. The author provides a hint:
For me, in strategic planning, the question in building my forecast was to flush out what I call the invisible asymptote: a ceiling that our growth curve would bump its head against if we continued down our current path.
Okay, the idea seems to be that if Amazon enters a new market, the “invisible asymptote” is what slows growth or stops it completely. (Is this the Amazon phone’s and the slowing sales of Alexa in the face of competition from the Google Home device?)
The reason Amazon cannot grow ever larger is because of an “invisible asymptote”; that is, a factor which prevents Amazon from becoming a company that Vanderbilt, JP Morgan, and John D. Rockefeller would have wished they had.
The write up does not discuss Amazon’s semi-new entrance into the law enforcement and intelligence market. That’s a push I am exploring in my lecture at the Telestrategies ISS conference in early June.
The focus shifts to a more mundane and increasingly problematic aspect of Amazon’s business: Shipping fees. Fiat, law, and the costs of fuel are just a few of the challenges Amazon faces. I am not sure these are “invisible”, but let’s trudge forward.
Twitter becomes that foundation for social media. I noted this passage:
No company owes it to others to allow people to build direct competitors to their own product.
If Amazon wants to make law enforcement and intelligence services into a major revenue stream, I think the first evidence of this intent will be cutting off the vendors using Amazon’s infrastructure to serve their clients now. (Keep in mind that most of the specialist vendors in the LE and intel space use Amazon as plumbing. To cite one example, Marinus, the anti human trafficking group, follows this approach.
The author brings up Snapchat and other social media companies. I find this example important. Amazon’s facial recognition capabilities hit out radar when my team was assembling “CyberOSINT: Next Generation Information Access”, written in 2014 and published in 2015.
We did not include Amazon in my review of LE and intel tools because I had only references in some Amazon conference videos, a few patent applications which were particularly vague about applications in the Background and Claims sections of the documents, and chatter at meetings I attended.
The American Civil Liberties Union has made a bit of noise about Amazon’s facial recognition system. Recognition is spelled “rekognition”, presumably to make it easy to locate in the wonky world of Bing and Google search. The reason is that Amazon’s facial recognition system can identify individuals and cross tabulate that piece of information with other data available to the Amazon system.
Instant bubblegum card.
The write up “Invisible Asymptote” talks about social content and social rich media without offering any comment about the importance of these types of data to Amazon’s intelligence services or its marketplace.
The conclusion of the 10,000 word essay is more “invisible asymptote”. Is this Amazon’s the secret sauce:
Lastly, though I hesitate to share this, it is possible to avoid invisible asymptotes through sheer genius of product intuition.
Here’s a diagram from the essay which looks quite a bit like the self help diagram I included at the top of this Beyond Search post:
Several observations:
- The write up makes clear that if anyone thinks Amazon’s platform is neutral, think again.
- Strategists at Amazon are not able to “see” and “explain” the nuts and bolts of the “we may be a monopoly but” approach of the Big Dog of the Amazon
- The long, long essay does not stray very far from selling stuff to consumers who love free shipping.
Taken as a group of three perceptions, what does this say about Amazon?
For me, I think companies using Amazon’s plumbing will want to do a bit of strategizing using “What if” questions to spark discussion.
For companies behind or beneath the curve, there will be a ceiling, and it will not be easy to break through.
Amazon, on the other hand, may have break through and then replace the old ceiling with a nifty new one made of sterner stuff.
For information about our lectures about Amazon’s Next Big Thing: Intelligence Services, write me at benkent2020@yahoo.com. Put Amazon Streaming Marketplace in the subject line, please.
We now offer for fee webinars and on site consulting sessions. On June 5, 2015, coincident with my two lectures in Prague before an audience of LE and intel professionals, I will release a nine minute DarkCyber video exploring some of the inventions Amazon disclosed in an April document not widely reported in the media. Watch this blog for a link.
Stephen E Arnold, May 27, 2018
Amazon: A New Revenue Stream Begins to Flow
May 23, 2018
Amazon is a bit of an exception when compared to Facebook and Google. In general, Amazon’s business has cruised along without eliciting the criticism which swarms around Facebook.
Yesterday I had an experience which revealed how strongly some companies feel that Amazon is in some way sacrosanct. There is an outfit which Jessica B., one of the investigative journalists who worked for me before I retired, used PRUnderground to put out news releases about my books, speeches, and my various projects. One of the young people who help me drafted a 500 word news release about one of the research findings which I will present at the upcoming Telestrategies ISS conference in Prague. The attendees will be active law enforcement, intelligence, and security professionals. The release was a summary of one of the new services which Amazon has begun to introduce.
The PRUnderground professionals informed me that what the person wrote and submitted for release on June 5 was not permissible. The angle was that PR about another company was not PR. Amazon is probably happy that my news release is not news. (We also encountered another instance of censorship with this story. The LinkedIn system blocked this write up, presumably because the writer who did the story was not treating Microsoft in a proper manner. Interesting.)
I read “Amazon Is Selling Facial Recognition to Law Enforcement for a Fistful of Dollars.” The source is the Washington Post which may be a project favored by Jeff Bezos, the big Amazonian.
Several observations:
I have been reporting about Chinese and Israeli facial recognition systems in my weekly DarkCyber videos. I generally prefer to report about non US companies, but here is the Washington Post reporting about facial recognition sold to government entities. I wonder if the professionals at PRUnderground would have run a news release about the story. I suppose I could ask help@prunderground.com, but I think I will conserve my energy for my research and analysis of what some youngsters call the “actual factual.”
What happens if one combines the story about Rekognition, which has been around since 2015 when I heard about the system with the information which I will present in my “Deanonymizing Digital Currency Transactions”?
My hunch is that some stock market types, a handful of specialist vendors serving the LE and intel communities, and a few people in the US government who have attended my lectures this year might find the two items of significant interest.
On June 5, 2018, I will include some of the information in the DarkCyber released coincident with my speeches in Prague.
In the meantime, Amazon is an interesting company and one that is positioned to disrupt a reasonably large market for investigative tools and services. To give one example, what if the crowd facial recognition feature is cross correlated with purchase history, banking information, and other data housed by Amazon?
Think about that idea. Think about cross correlation in real time of multiple streams of data. I did.
I won’t be doing a PRUnderground release. I will just plug along, content in the knowledge that the Washington Post three years after Rekognition moved from idea to buggy beta tuned into what I think is now old news.
My hunch is that this item will not appear in my LinkedIn feed either. The shaping of fact based information must continue.
Perhaps I will ask Alexa. “Why is Amazon pushing so hard to land a large Department of Defense contract?” and “Why is Amazon dipping its Bezos sized toe into the law enforcement services market?”
I will share my hypothesis with the 200 or 300 LE and intel professionals who attend my two lectures. I will be offering for fee webinars and in person training on this subject later this year. Who knows? I might even write a short analytic white paper.
Publicity on LinkedIn and PRUnderground. Probably unlikely.
Stephen E Arnold, May 23, 2018
Bing Keeps on Trying
May 21, 2018
Ah, Bing.
Microsoft has struggled to garner the respect in the search engine world that its software has commanded.
Bing is often seen as the Avis to Google’s Hertz. Maybe a stepchild of the search game patriarchs, Sergey and Larry.
Microsoft is not blind to these views, which is resulting in some interesting innovations to close the gap between it and Google. We learned about these steps from a recent TechRadar story, “Microsoft Unveils New Features for Bing in Bid to Make You Switch from Google.”
The biggest upgrade? The fact that Bing now gives you an “Intelligent Answer” and not just the one that ranks first. It seems like a good move, which the article highlights:
“We’re pleased to see Microsoft attempt to win over users by adding more features (which you can read about more on the Bing blog), rather than trying to strong-arm people who use Windows 10 into using the search engine, but will this be enough to make people switch?”
We’re going to go out on a (not very long) limb and suggest, no. This isn’t enough to make people switch. That’s especially true when we see news like this, that claims that Google’s Assistant is the most accurate. Looks like the game board is shifting beneath Microsoft’s feet as they try to catch up. How does one find information available on the Internet?
One doesn’t without recourse to commercial systems from vendors with low or zero profile among consumers. Money is required to find relevant information. Free stuff returns what earns money to pay for the “free lunch.”
Patrick Roland, May 21, 2018
Law Enforcement and Big Data
May 11, 2018
The job of being an officer of the law has never been harder, but many on the tech side are trying to make it easier. But, as with most innovations, this might make life harder. Confused? Join the club. A recent spate of big data law enforcement innovations are due to become a hot button issue for the foreseeable future. The latest one came from a recent Boing Boing piece, “Raleigh Cops are Investigating Crime by Getting Google to Reveal the Identity of Every Mobile User Within Acres of the Scene.”
According to the story:
“Public records requests have revealed that on at least four occasions, the Raleigh-Durham police obtained warrants forcing Google to reveal the identities of every mobile user within acres of a crime scene, sweeping up the personal information of thousands of people in a quest to locate a single perp.”
Such a double edged sword. On one hand we all want wrongdoers to be handled in a lawful way, but on the other this is all getting too close to science fiction. Couple that with the recent news that smart devices like Alexa are listening to every conversation and may some day be used as evidence in court.
In Stephen E Arnold’s “Making Sense of Chat” presentation for the Telestrategies ISS conference in Prague in June 2018, he will highlight three commercial systems which can process large flows of data. He said:
The efficiencies of the new systems means that needed information can be identified and displayed to an investigator. Smart software, not a team of analysts, scans digital information, identifies content with a probability of being germane to a case, and presenting that data in an easy-to-understand report. The result is that the hand waving about invasive analysis of information is often different from the actual functioning of a modern system. Today’s newest systems deliver benefits that were simply not possible with older, often manual methods.
He plans to offer webinars on the chat topic as well as his deanonymizing blockchain lecture. Watch for details in Beyond Search and in his weekly DarkCyber video.
Patrick Roland, May 11, 2018
Google: Innovation Desperation?
May 3, 2018
I have lost track of the ways Google tries to spark innovation. Years ago there was something called Google Ventures and before that “20 percent free time.” Today Google has demonstrated its hunger, need, and thirst for innovation by crating an investment mechanism for the Alexa killer, Google Assistant. “Google Starts Throwing Cash at Google Assistant Startups” explains:
Google is launching a new investment program for early-stage startups working to broaden Google Assistant hardware or features. The new program provides financial resources, early access to Google features and tools, access to the Google Cloud Platform, and promotional support in efforts to bolster young companies. Google says its investment program will also support startups focusing on Google Assistant‘s use in travel, hospitality, or games industries.
Like Apple, Google is watching the Alexa McLaren eat up the miles. I know it is silly to compare Amazon, Apple, and Google. Amazon sells books and plans to become a policeware hub. Apple sells hardware and wants to be a services vendor as iPhone X devices provide evidence that peak mobile phone day has arrived. And Google? It is after 20 years of trying to be different, still sells online ads.
The fix is to pay “entrepreneurs,” high school students, MBAs, and homeless FORTRAN programmers to build and expand the Google Assistant ecosystem.
Will the play work? My thought is that Google looks a bit wild eyed with its innovation efforts.
Perhaps it is true that I am worn out by Silicon Valley gyrations. Google, according to the write up, has “passion for the digital assistant ecosystem.”
That’s a plus.
But after 20 years of innovation, Google remains, as Steve Ballmer observed, a one trick pony. Throwing money at the pony is a long shot to change the beast into something different.
Worth watching the transformation attempt, however.
Stephen E Arnold, May 3, 2018
Listening and Voice Search: A Happy Tech Couple
April 26, 2018
Voice search is the next big thing in the search industry. This is a pretty universally accepted trend among tech thinkers. With that in mind, it’s a good time to look at your own personal use and your business uses for search and inquire whether or not you are ready. Chances are, you aren’t. We learned more from a recent article in The Next Web, “By 2020 30% of Search Will Be Voice Conducted. Here’s What That Means for Your Business.”
According to the story:
“I would also invest in trying to get clients to review my restaurant on Yelp and Tripadvisor so that when people click through, they will see relevant and recent information on my restaurant. If I were providing services, I would make an effort to get listed in Yelp and Google My Business to increase my chances of showing up.”
Another big way to prepare that experts are recommending is to think about SEO in a totally different way. The way we search through our fingertips and through our voiceboxes are totally different. In short, we tend to say less than we type when searching so SEO will have to be even more precise than before.
However, “Amazon’s Alexa Had a Flaw “That Let Eavesdroppers Listen In” reminds Beyond Search that in order to answer a question, the devices have to listen. Amazon’s Alexa had a “flaw” which allowed third parties to use the device like an old school “bug.” According to the write up, Amazon fixed this problem.
How many other always on listening devices are just listening, analyzing, and sending data into a federated database?
Toss in online search and cross correlation, and one has an intriguing way to gather intelligence.
Stephen E Arnold, April 26, 2018
Not Everyone Is Nervous about Google
April 3, 2018
Over at the Android Authority, writer Tristan Rayner has crafted a counter argument to former Google engineer Steve Yegge’s criticism of the company. Yegge spent 13 years at Google, after a 6-year stint at Amazon, and claims Google is suffering from a profound failure to innovate. Rayner disagrees, mostly, countering the departing engineer’s assertion with specific points. See the write-up for the details of those defenses, including shifting perceptions of what is “innovative” and considerations of scale. A list of several areas where Google is in the lead rounds out Rayner’s case, beginning with AI:
“A short and incomplete list of things Google is leading in starts with AI. Google Assistant dominates everything other than Alexa. The DeepMind acquisition has famously beaten Go, and also improved energy efficiency at global data centers, and their photo and image AI is world class. Of course, that’s only scratching the surface. It’s very hard to see what’s changing in Search, which raises an important point. First we see the big innovations, such as Search, Gmail, YouTube, Maps, and StreetView. The curse of such successful innovation is that it grows to become enormous. The Google Search codebase is more than two billion lines of code. Search is locked into first place, and decades of fine-tuning — more than 50 million commits — have kept Google in front. That’s innovation we’ll rarely see any hint of beyond better results. Most of us use Google Maps as a boring-but-necessary utility, rather than a source of delight. It isn’t exciting anymore, but Google is so far ahead of other map services it’s ridiculous. … “With the new AI-powered Clips camera, Google Photos will offer amazing AI insight into your photos, as well as free storage and a host of new experimental Photos apps. Google AMP was a response to Facebook Instant Articles and it won — AMP is now a significant part of the web for publishers.”
Speculation about certain personalities involved and inter-corporate rivalry conclude the write-up. Rayner makes a point of his respect for Yegge as a professional, but is firmly convinced he is mistaken on this one.
Cynthia Murrell, April 3, 2018
Google and France: A Dust Up Escalates
March 16, 2018
The addled goose knows that most Google watchers are mesmerized by the GOOG’s about face with regard to editorial responsibility. There’s the ban on crypto currency. If you missed that news, Google is doing with other firms and some governments have failed to do — taken steps to check the rampant craziness about calculated “money” designed to work around countries’ banking systems, laws, and procedure. Then there is the linkage of the ever accurate Wikipedia to some YouTube videos. The idea is to provide some sort of knowledge based balance to what is now the Alexandria of cat videos.
Put those decisions aside, gentle reader.
Tucked into the flow of news, almost hidden beneath the editorial responsibility stories, was “France Will Sue Apple and Google over ‘Abusive’ Treatment of Developers.” A article states:
Speaking on RTL Radio on Wednesday, Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire said that he “believes in an economy based on justice” and “will take Google and Apple before the Paris Commercial Court for abusive business practices”, Reuters reports. These allegedly-abusive business practices relate to the way that the tech giants impose tariffs on developers who sell their apps via the iTunes App Store and Google Play, respectively.
There are some flashpoint words in this report. We noted “abusive.” We also think the references to “tariffs” is interesting.
The signal from France merits attention. The consequences could be interesting.
Oh, the subtitle to the story is:
Firms could face fines in the ‘millions of Euros’ if found guilty
That might be why this signal cannot be dismissed with, « Bah laisse tomber ! »
Stephen E Arnold, March 16, 2018
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