Online Bookstore and Health Services: No Problem
September 1, 2022
After getting a taste of delectable patient data, Amazon is ready to leap headlong into the healthcare field by purchasing primary-care service One Medical. What could go wrong? Time reporters Roger McNamee and Johnny Ryan answer that rhetorical question in, “Amazon’s Dangerous Ambition to Dominate Healthcare.” Amazon has repeatedly shown it cannot be trusted with personal information, despite its avowals to the contrary. Why would a trove of the most sensitive, and potentially lucrative, data be any different? The article observes:
“Recent scandals revealed that Amazon uses the data collected for supposedly innocent reasons in ways that betray our trust. Amazon staff say there are no limits on how Amazon uses this data internally. According to Amazon’s former head of information security: ‘We have no idea where our [freaking] data is.’ One Medical receives health information about children, families, the elderly, and vulnerable. That includes information about substance abuse, mental health issues, and other intimate conditions. We cannot be confident that Amazon will treat this new data any better than it has treated its existing data hoard. Our secrets are not safe inside Amazon. And it is not just consumers who are at risk. Other companies that compete with or sell through Amazon will almost certainly be harmed. Amazon uses data collected from one part of its business to help other parts. For example, it competes with retailers that sell on its platform by exploiting its insider data about their businesses. More data – especially intimate data – increases Amazon’s market power over consumers and competitors.”
There is one potential obstacle to this deal: the FTC has yet to approve it. The authors urge the commission to nip this especially troublesome tendril of surveillance capitalism now. It would be a welcome sign, they say, that the government is finally ready to protect citizens from big tech’s growing abuse of personal data. One can dream.
Cynthia Murrell, September 1, 20221
US High Tech Outfits Innovate by Copying
June 29, 2022
Several amusing anecdotes about US innovation. (Remember the comments about Japanese knockoff and Chinese Gucci purses?)
ITEM 1: “Google Public Sector Is a New Subsidiary Focused on US Government, Education” Google has been pushing itself as an alternative to Apple, Microsoft, and any other outfit standing in the way of education and government data involvement. Original? Answer: Nah. I love the Madison Avenue “new” word.
ITEM 2: “Facebook Groups Are Being Revamped to Look Like Discord.” The title pretty much sums of this bold move. The gamer fave which is also being used by assorted crypto kiddies and online fraudsters will be the fresh, youthful face of the Zuck stuff. Original? Answer: Sure, if you are Rip Van Winkle and like Slack.
ITEM 3: The “new” Gmail. The explanation of Gmail’s somewhat clumsy transition from sending email to a wonky super app continues. You can read one explanation in “Gmail’s Resigned Interface Including Chat and Meet Is Now the New Default.” Is this new? Answer: Way to go or is it Weibo? You may have to opt out to this “innovation,” not opt in. That’s not new either, however.
I want to highlight one semi-innovative idea. Amazon may allow your dead grandmother to remind you of her birthday. For details, see this story. An innovation? Answer: Of course not. Check out this Amazon video.
Brilliant stuff flowing from the high tech innovation labs!
Stephen E Arnold, June 29, 2022
Facebook: Maybe Thinking about Superapps?
May 23, 2022
The idea of popping up a level is a good one. Examples range from companies offering ways to manage multiple APIs to services hooking consumers with individual providers, regardless of where the providers call home.
“Wikipedia Over WhatsApp” explains:
If the wifi is letting WhatsApp messages through, what if we used WhatsApp as a vehicle for the information we really care about? Much like we encapsulate the rest of our networking objects in higher-level objects, we could encapsulate web pages inside of WhatsApp messages.
Okay, who is really excited about reading Wikimedia’s entry about my relative Vladimir Igorevich Arnold, a mathematician, which is an exciting profession to be sure? Not too many people.
The idea of using WhatsApp as a mechanism for other services is a good one. Is it Facebook’s attempt to become a superapp or allow others to use WhatsApp as a superapp.
Some encrypted end to end messaging services include a number of useful functions now. But what if almost any traditional browser based function could be supported within a messaging app on one’s mobile phone. Apple uses a “up a level” method with its requirement that browser developers honor and respect the wonderful WebKit thing.
Interesting if true.
Stephen E Arnold, May 23, 2022
Kyndi: Advanced Search Technology with Quanton Methods. Yes, Quonton
April 29, 2022
One of my newsfeeds spit out this story: “Kyndi Unveils the Kyndi Natural Language Search Solution – Enables Enterprises to Discover and Deliver the Most Relevant and Precise Contextual Business Information at Unprecedented Speed.” The Kyndi founders appear to be business oriented, not engineering focused. The use of jargon like natural language understanding, contextual information, artificial intelligence, software robots, explainable artificial intelligence, and others is now almost automatic as if generated by smart software, not people who have struggled to make content processing and information retrieval work for users.
The firm’s Web site does not provide much detail about the technical pl8umbing for the company’s search and retrieval system. I took a quick look at the firm’s patents and noted these. I have added bold face to highlight some of the interesting words in these documents.
- A method using Birkhoff polytopes and Landau numbers. See US11205135 “Quanton [sic] Representation for Emulating Quantum-lie Computation on Classical Processors,” granted December 21, 2021. Inventor: Arun Majumdar, possibly in Alexandria, Virginia.
- A method employing combinatorial hyper maps. See US10985775 “System and Method of Combinatorial Hypermap Based Data Representations and Operations,” Granted April 20, 2021. Inventor: Arun Majumdar, possibly in Alexandria, Virginia. (As a point of interest the document Includes the word bijectively.)
- A method making use of Q-Medoids and Q-Hashing. See US10747740 “Cognitive Memory Graph Indexing, Storage and Retrieval,” granted August 18, 2020. Inventor: Arun Majumdar, possibly in San Mateo, California.
- A method using Semantic Boundary Indices and a variant of the VivoMind* Analogy Engine. See US10387784 “Technical and Semantic Signal Processing in Large, Unstructured Data Fields,” granted August 20, 2019. Inventor: Arun Majumdar, possibly in Alexandria, Virginia. *VivoMind was a company started my Arun Majumdar prior to his relationship with Kyndi.
- A method using rvachev functions and transfinite interpolations. See US10372724 “Relativistic Concept Measuring System for Data Clustering,” granted August 6, 2019. Inventor: Arun Majumdar, possibly in Alexandria, Virginia.
- A method using Clifford algebra. See US10120933 “Weighted Subsymbolic Data Encoding,” granted November 6, 2018. Inventor: Arun Majumdar, possibly in Alexandria, Virginia.
The inventor is not listed on the firm’s Web site. Mr. Majumdar’s contributions are significant. The chief technology officer is Dan Gartung, who is a programmer and entrepreneur. However, there does not seem to be an observable link among the founders, the current CTO, and Mr. Majumdar.
The company will have to work hard to capture mindshare from companies like Algolia (now working to reinvent enterprise search), Mindbreeze, Yext, and X1 (morphing into an eDiscovery system it seems), among others. Kyndi has absorbed more than $20 million plus in venture funding, but a competitor like Lucidworks has captured in the neighborhood of $200 million.
It is worth noting that one facet of the firm’s marketing is to hire the whiz kids from a couple of mid tier consulting firms to explain the firm’s approach to search. It might be a good idea for the analysts from these firms to read the Kyndi patents and determine how the Vivomind methods have been updated and applied to the Kyndi product. A bit of benchmarking might be helpful. For example, my team uses a collection of Google patents and indexes them, runs tests queries, and analyzes the result sets. Almost incomprehensible specialist terminology is one thing, but solid, methodical analysis of a system’s real life performance is another. Precision and recall scores remain helpful, particularly for certain content; for example, pharma research, engineered materials, and nuclear physics.
Stephen E Arnold, April 29, 2022
Is It Party Time for STM Professional Publishers?
March 4, 2022
I spotted a TorrentFreak write up called “FBI Gains Access to Sci-Hub Founder’s Google Account Data.” The article explains that investigators are gathering information about Alexandra Elbakyan, the founder of what the article references as the “Pirate Bay of Science.”
The idea behind the service is to make paywall protected content available without the paywalls. The article explains what agencies have been involved and some of the legal procedures followed. These are routine but may be surprising to those who think about new recreational vehicles and the new pizza place.
What makes the investigation interesting is that references are made to Ms. Elbakyan’s alleged links to other governmental entities.
Several observations:
- Alleged links to a foreign power engaged in hostile actions move the story from scientific, technical and medical content made available without the pro9fessional publishers permission to a higher level of security concern.
- Professional publishers have not been happy campers since Sci-Hub became available. (Is this because the service has chewed into some revenues for these commercial enterprises? My guess is, “Yep.”)
- Allegedly, Ms. Elbakyan lives in Russia and, if the Wikipedia is spot on, she is studying philosophy at the Russian Academy of Sciences. (Will extradition be possible? My view is that the process will be interesting.)
When I read the story, I thought about one professional publishing big wig who said off the record, “That crazy Kazakh has to be shut down?”
Is it party time in the world of STM professional publishing? Not yet, but some may want to buy foil party hats and cheap kazoos.
Stephen E Arnold, March 4, 2022
Elbakyan: A Slippery Online Service
March 2, 2022
Paywalls stink. The justification for paywalls is that they keep organizations and publications funded and this makes sense. However, most independent researchers cannot afford the often high fees that educational institutes and corporations have no choice but pay. Other than expensive fees, paywalls prevent important research from being shared.
Alexandra Elbakyan decided to circumvent paywalls as she pursued knowledge and became an expert programmer at a young age. The reason she became an expert programmer was her desire to create her own Tamagotchi program. She failed creating a digital pet, but she did succeed in gathering lots of information and the desire to share it.
Elbakyan designed Sci-Hub, a scientific database that:
“Sci-Hub collected a database of 88,343,822 research documents, freely available for download. Around 80% of the collection are research articles published in journals, 6% are papers from conference proceedings, 5% are book chapters, the rest are other types of documents. 77% of the documents available through Sci-Hub were published between 1980 and 2020, and 36% between 2010 and 2020. The coverage is > 95% for all major scientific publishers. The total size of Sci-Hub database is about 100 TB.”
Elbakyan’s Sci-Hub is an excellent tool for researchers who do not have the privilege of a bypassing paywalls through an educational institute or corporations. Knowledge does need to be shared, especially if it can assist in benefiting humanity.
The only problem is Elbakyan’s questionable celebration of communism and Josef Stalin. She also believes in astrology. It is a stereotype that programmers are oddballs, but applauding the dictator who is second only to Mao in murdering the most people in history and a market system theory that has been proven not to work is not good. Also astrology is junk science.
Whitney Grace, March 2, 2022
MSFT Insemination Algorithm: Too Much Herbe Matte and Twisted Bolos?
February 28, 2022
Microsoft, what were you thinking? Wired describes “The Case of the Creepy Algorithm that ‘Predicted’ Teen Pregnancy.” Creepy is right. The setting is 2018 Argentina, as legislators were debating whether to decriminalize abortion. (It did finally become legal there in 2020.) We learn:
“The Ministry of Early Childhood in the northern province of Salta and the American tech giant Microsoft presented an algorithmic system to predict teenage pregnancy. They called it the Technology Platform for Social Intervention. … The stated goal was to use the algorithm to predict which girls from low-income areas would become pregnant in the next five years. It was never made clear what would happen once a girl or young woman was labeled as ‘predestined’ for motherhood or how this information would help prevent adolescent pregnancy. The social theories informing the AI system, like its algorithms, were opaque. The system was based on data—including age, ethnicity, country of origin, disability, and whether the subject’s home had hot water in the bathroom—from 200,000 residents in the city of Salta, including 12,000 women and girls between the ages of 10 and 19. Though there is no official documentation, from reviewing media articles and two technical reviews, we know that ‘territorial agents’ visited the houses of the girls and women in question, asked survey questions, took photos, and recorded GPS locations.”
The targets of these intrusions were all poor, and many are members of immigrants or indigenous peoples. Such overbearing treatment is nothing new for those communities, nor is it unusual for Argentina’s women and girls in general. While the government positioned the technology as a way to combat teen pregnancy, it never described how that would work. Critics insist it was actually a way to blame girls and women for their situations with no consideration for context. Like the high rate of sexual violence, for example. In theory, the subjects could have declined to participate, but that would mean defying the ministry that provides them with free vaccinations and milk. A collaboration of journalist Diego Jemio, anthropologist Alexa Hagerty, and Argentine feminist activist and researcher Florencia Aranda, the article provides a detailed historical backdrop against which this affront should be viewed. Navigate to the article for that compelling, and at times enraging, account.
Argentina is eager to become a leader in the AI field. However, unlike the US or the EU, Argentina has no process to determine the impact of AI systems on citizens, never mind adequate regulations. As a result, no formal review of the Technology Platform for Social Intervention’s impact on women and girls was ever produced nor data on its accuracy or outcomes ever published. The authors could not even determine whether the program is still in operation. We suppose transparency is too much to ask from Argentina’s Ministry of Early Childhood. Microsoft, what do you have to say?
Cynthia Murrell, February 28, 2022
Professional Publishing and Academic Standards: A Low Water Mark?
January 20, 2022
Ah, professional publishing in action. Retraction Watch reports, “‘This is Really Ridiculous’: An Author Admitted Plagiarism. His Supervisor Asked for a Retraction. The Publisher said, ‘nah.’” We wish we were surprised by an academic journal’s disinterest in veracity. The write-up largely consist of excerpts from emails between the submitting author, his supervising professor, the co-authors he admitted to plagiarizing from, and editors at the journal (IEEE Access). In setting up those quotations, the article explains:
“Behrouz Pourghebleh is perplexed. And also exasperated. Pourghebleh, of the Young Researchers and Elite Club at the Urmia branch of Islamic Azad University in Iran, noticed a paper published on December 15, 2020 in an IEEE journal that overlapped 80 percent with an article he’d co-authored the year before. Pourghebleh wrote to Zakirul Alam Bhuiyan, the associate editor who had handled the paper, on December 31, 2020, expressing concern. Bhuiyan responded the same day, saying the paper hadn’t been flagged in a similarity check, and that he would contact the authors for a response. The first author, Karim Alinani, wrote to Pourghebleh less than two weeks later, admitting the plagiarism but citing personal circumstances.”
Those personal circumstances are heartbreaking, to be sure, and the consequences editor Bhuiyan notes can befall those called out for plagiarism are indeed ruinous. Given the potential aftermath, Bhuiyan pleaded with Pourghebleh, can’t we just let this one slide? (That is a succinct paraphrase.) Both authors of the plagiarized paper strongly disagreed, but were willing to pursue a less disastrous route to retraction by appealing to Alinani’s postdoctoral supervisor. Even at the professor’s request, though, retraction was a no-go for the publication. The curious can navigate to the write-up for the details in that trail of email excerpts.
Despite our sympathy for Alinani, we think the time to consider consequences is before submitting a paper for publication. Or at least it should be. We agree with Pourghebleh when he called the journal’s outright refusal to retract the paper “really ridiculous.” Retraction Watch notes that the problematic paper has been cited at least once. We doubt that will be the last time.
Cynthia Murrell, January 20, 2021
ShadowDragon Profiled by Esteemed Tech Expert Kim Komando
January 13, 2022
This is an interesting turn of events. Policeware vendor ShadowDragon has been profiled by computer guru-ette Kim Komando on her Tech Refresh podcast episode, “Software Tracking Everything You Do, New iPhone, Alexa on Wheels.” The video’s description reads:
“Have you heard of ShadowDragon? It collects data from 120 major sites going back a decade. Yes, 10 years of info about YOU. Plus, the iPhone 13 and iOS 15 are here, along with Amazon’s new smart home gear, including Astro, the Echo on wheels.”
Yes, we have heard of ShadowDragon. The security company mines data from more than 120 social-media websites, archives results for a decade, and shares the information with its law-enforcement clients around the world. ShadowDragon boasts its software can take an investigation down “from months to minutes.” The podcast starts discussing the company at timestamp 13:05, warning one would have to refrain from social media altogether to avoid its reach. The inclusion seems to support our prediction that reporters are becoming more aware of, and reporting more on, such specialized service vendors. This will make it harder for such firms to keep their generally preferred low profiles. Based in Cheyenne, Wyoming, ShadowDragon was founded in 2015.
For those curious, that podcast episode also discussed the newest iPhones, covered some weird news stories, and reviewed smart floodlights, among other wide-ranging topics. Their coverage of Amazon’s Astro home robot caught the attention of this Alexa-wary writer—apparently the device is so thirsty to identify folks with facial recognition it will (if left in “patrol” mode) follow guests around until it can identify them. It also, according to Motherboard, tracks everything owners do.
Cynthia Murrell, January 13, 2021
Amazon: A Decision Imposed and A Practice Challenged
January 12, 2022
Alexa.com, purportedly named for legendary bastion of knowledge the Library at Alexandria, has been a go-to tool for traffic-based web rankings, APIs, and other website information for 25 years. Now, however, Amazon is pulling the plug on the subsidiary. Bleeping Computer announces, “Amazon Is Shutting Down Web Ranking Site Alexa.com.” Perhaps Alexa the AI assistant wanted the name all to itself. New subscriptions have been halted, but existing subscribers will have access to Amazon data and SEO tools until May 1, 2022. Amazon APIs will be retired on December 8, 2022. Writer Mayank Parmar reports:
“In addition to the global website ranking system, Amazon’s Alexa.com also offers a full suite of SEO and competitor analysis tools with its paid subscriptions. In a new support document, Amazon says that it will be discontinuing the Alexa.com platform in May 2022 and no new monthly stats will be released going forward. ‘Twenty-five years ago, we founded Alexa Internet. After two decades of helping you find, reach, and convert your digital audience, we’ve made the difficult decision to retire Alexa.com on May 1, 2022. Thank you for making us your go-to resource for content research, competitive analysis, keyword research, and so much more,’ the company stated.”
Meanwhile, Reuters tells us good old Italy is trying to fight back against the Amazon behemoth in, “Italy Fines Amazon Record €1.3 Bln for Abuse of Market Dominance.” Reporters Elvira Pollina and Maria Pia Quaglia write:
“Italy’s watchdog said in a statement that Amazon had leveraged its dominant position in the Italian market for intermediation services on marketplaces to favor the adoption of its own logistics service – Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA) – by sellers active on Amazon.it. The authority said Amazon tied to the use of FBA access to a set of exclusive benefits, including the Prime label, that help increase visibility and boost sales on Amazon.it. … The antitrust authority also said it would impose corrective steps that will be subject to review by a monitoring trustee.”
This comes as the EU Commission is pursuing two of its own investigations into Amazon. One involves the use of sensitive data from independent retailers. The other considers whether the company elevated its own retail offers and those of sellers that use its logistics and delivery services over offers from other vendors. The €1.13 billion fine is one of the largest to be levied on a US tech company by a European entity, but will it be enough to give Amazon pause? Along with its compatriots/rivals Google and Facebook, the company has a history of shrugging off what seem to most like large fees and carrying on with business as usual.
Cynthia Murrell, January 12, 2022
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