Rediscovering What Once Was Taught: Why Software Goes the Wrong Way
March 27, 2020
DarkCyber spotted a link to an essay called “The Expert Blind Spot In Software Development.” The write up states:
I stumbled upon the theory of the expert blind spot…
What’s the blind spot? DarkCyber knows that Microsoft cannot update Windows 10 without creating problems for some users. Google cannot update Chrome without wizards in the office. Apple cannot update the iPhone without breaking things like the hot spot function. In fact, software pretty much is one set of things that don’t work. Some large, some small—Most are friction, costing money, slowing down actions.
Modern software development explains why Amazon, Google, IBM, and Microsoft make their cloud technologies complex and opaque. Increasing friction generates revenue, not happy users. The image is from Go Physics’ depiction of entropy.
The article explains that beginners operated with the “illusion of competence.” What’s omitted is that institutional pressure forces beginners to operate as if they were chock full of information germane to a task. Managers don’t want to manage, and most managers know that their responsibilities exceed their competence. But that’s the way the world works: Everyone is an expert, and the leaders lead, or that’s the theory in many organizations. The managerial forces create Brownian motion in which those creating software operate like sailboats, each generally heading in some direction: Just with poorly defined rules of the road.
The write up works through an interesting explanation of how “memory” works. But the core of the essay is that “expert blind spots” exist, and those blind spots are problems. The article states:
The best way to be aware of somebody’s level of knowledge in some precise areas is simply to speak with him. In my experience, informal, relaxed conversations, around a cup of coffee, a tea or whatever you like, is the best way to do so.
The idea is that interaction and talking fill in some of the knowledge gaps between those who work together to achieve a goal. There are a number of tips; for example:
- Map your schemata which seems to edge close to the idea of taking notes
- Write a journal which seems to be taking notes, just on a time centric trajectory
- Writing a blog, which seems to be converting the two previous ideas into a coherent essay.
What’s quite interesting about this write up is that the core idea was well stated in “On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings,” an essay / lecture by William James, yeah, the novelist’s brother.
James wrote:
And now what is the result of all these considerations and quotations? It is negative in one sense, but positive in another. It absolutely forbids us to be forward in pronouncing on the meaninglessness of forms of existence other than our own; and it commands us to tolerate, respect, and indulge those whom we see harmlessly interested and happy in their own ways, however unintelligible these may be to us. Hands off: neither the whole of truth nor the whole of good is revealed to any single observer, although each observer gains a partial superiority of insight from the peculiar position in which he stands. Even prisons and sick-rooms have their special revelations. It is enough to ask of each of us that he should be faithful to his own opportunities and make the most of his own blessings, without presuming to regulate the rest of the vast field.
Several observations:
- A certain blindness defines the human condition
- Technical people are rediscovering why their software sucks but lack an pre-conditioning or early alert about why their work product is half baked or just good enough
- A flawed mechanism for creating the fuel for the 21st century guarantees that the friction will wear down the parts; that is, software becomes more and more of a problem for its users.
What’s the fix? On one hand, there is no fix. On the other, a more comprehensive education might reduce the frustration and time consuming rediscovery of what’s been known for many years.
Now about those new nVidia drivers which cause crashes when a cursor is repositioned…
Stephen E Arnold, March 27, 2020
Cellebrite: Low Profile Outfit Shares Some High Value Information
March 27, 2020
Cellebrite, now owned by Japanese interests, is not a household word. That’s good from DarkCyber’s point of view. If you want to know more about this company, navigate to the company’s Web site.
“Cellebrite Unveils the Top Global Digital Intelligence Trends for 2020” provides observations / finds in its Annual Digital Intelligence Industry Benchmark Report for 2020. Our video program will consider some of these findings in the context of cyber intelligence. However, there are four items of interest which DarkCyber wants to highlight in this short article.
Intelligence and other enforcement agencies are slow to adapt. This finding is in line with DarkCyber’s experience. We reported on March 24, 2020, in our DarkCyber video that the Canadian medical intelligence firm Bluedot identified the threat of the corona virus in November 2019. How quickly did the governments of major countries react? How is the US reacting now? The “slowness” is bureaucratic friction. Who wants to be identified as the person who was wrong? In terms of cyber crime, Cellebrite’s data suggest “43 percent of agencies report either a poor or mediocre strategy or no digital intelligence strategy at all.” [emphasis added].
Government agency managers want modernization to help attract new officers. The Cellebrite study reports, “Most agency managers believe police forces that embrace mobile tech to collect digital evidence in the field will help reduce turnover and be significantly more prepared to meet the digital evidence challenges of 2020.” DarkCyber wants to point out that skilled cyber professionals do not grow on trees. Incentives, salaries, and work magnetism are more important than “hopes.”
Budgets are an issue. This is a “duh” finding. DarkCyber is not being critical of Cellebrite. Anyone involved directly or indirectly in enforcement or intelligence knows that bad actors seem to have infinite scalability. Government entities do not. The report says, “With the deluge of digital devices and cloud data sources, examiners face an average 3-month backlog and an average backlog of 89 devices per station. The push for backdoors is not designed to compromise user privacy; it is a pragmatic response to the urgent need to obtain information as close to real time as possible. Cellebrite’s tools have responded to the need for speed, but for many governments’ enforcement and intelligence agencies, a 90 day period of standing around means that bad actors have an advantage.
DarkCyber will consider more findings from this report in an upcoming video news program. Watch this blog for the release date for the program.
Stephen E Arnold, March 27, 2020
Microsoft Azure: A Capacity Problem?
March 27, 2020
In a conversation earlier this week, an expert in Microsoft Azure pointed out that Azure, despite its technical challenges, was pretty good at billing.
There are other challenges at Microsoft too. How about those Windows 10 updates, bugs, and delays?
The Register reports that there is another Microsoft hitch in the gitalong. “Azure Appears to Be Full” states:
Customers of Microsoft’s Azure cloud are reporting capacity issues such as the inability to create resources and associated reliability issues.
And what about Microsoft Teams, which is another attempt by Microsoft to pile more utensils in its digital kitchen sink. The article includes this paragraph:
Is it possible that resource capacity allocated to Teams is affecting customers of other kinds of resource? We have asked Microsoft for any information it can share and will report back.
Is Microsoft up to the task of becoming the go to vendor for the US government? Sure, good enough technology may be what the procurement system is designed to deliver.
But the company’s billing system seems to be working just fine.
PS: The Register is offering free job ads. For information, send email to regjobs@sitpub.com.
Stephen E Arnold, March 28, 2020
Fours Hours to Learn IBM Watson and Microsoft Azure. Believe It or Not. Hint: Not
March 26, 2020
DarkCyber believes that online instructional videos are useful. However, DarkCyber believes that overstatement, hyperbole, and general buzzword craziness undermine the credibility of those offering a program.
An excellent example of basic marketing information packaged like a six figure F.P. Journe Tourbillon Souverain Vertical watch, navigate to “Machine Learning with Watson and Azure.” You can download a four hour chunk of video which presents 20 lectures. That works out to 12 minute videos at which time, you
would be able to develop and deploy your applications over IBM Cloud- Bluemix. and having command over the Watson services and tools available.
Now what will you learn? Here’s the line up:
- Cognitive Computing and how Watson changes the game
- Using Watson Visual Recognition to tag and classify visual content using machine learning
- Capabilities of the Watson API and how to choose the best features for your task
- Using Watson Assistant to build an AI assistant (ChatBot)
- Using Watson Watson Discovery to unlock hidden values to find answers , monitor trends and surface patterns
- Using Watson Natural Language Understanding for advanced text analysis
- Using Watson Knowledge Studio to discover meaningful insights in unstructured text.
- Using Watson Speech to Text to easily convert audio and voice into written text
- Using Watson Text to Speech to convert text into natural-surrounding audio
- Using Watson Language Translator to translate from one language to another
- Using Watson Natural Language Classifier to interpret and classify natural language with confidence
- Using Watson Personality Insights to predict personality characteristics through text
- Using Watson Tone Analyzer to understand emotions and communications style in text
- Text Analytics
- Detecting Language
- Analyze image and video
- Recognition handwritten from text
- Generate Thumbnail
- Content Moderator
- Custom Vision
- Translate
But wait!
The programs will also explain Microsoft Azure services; for example:
- Computer Vision
- Content Moderator
- Custom Vision
- Text Analysis
- Translator.
You will not need an IBM account, but you will need a Microsoft Azure account.
This seems like an interesting program. Perhaps the overselling contributes to some of IBM’s more interesting deployments?
Stephen E Arnold, March 26, 2020
Daedalus Enterprise Search Appliance with ElasticSearch Inside
March 25, 2020
Open source software is a boon to companies and organizations that cannot afford the steep price tag of proprietary software. Open source, however, does have its drawbacks, including lack of customer support, the software is only as good as its developer, and security issues. PR Web describes how the Department of Defense is getting an overdue search upgrade: “PSSC Labs Launches Daedalus Enterprise Search Appliance.”
The Department of Defense relied on Elasticsearch for many digital tasks, including cybersecurity and logistics. Elasticsearch was providing the one and done solution the Department of Defense needed for its advanced workloads. Enter the PSSC Labs with its Daedalus Enterprise Search Appliance to the rescue. PSSC Labs designs and builds custom big data and high performance computing solutions. Daedalus Enterprise Search Appliance is a new platform powered by Elastic and compatible with Elastic Cloud Enterprise.
The Daedalus Enterprise Search Appliance will upgrade the Department of Defense’s system components. It also will not be a huge investment and will be a reasonable upgrade cost. The Department of Defense went with PSSC Labs because:
“ ‘We chose Elasticsearch as the foundation of the platform because it offers the flexibility and simplicity other application packages do not. With Elastic, everything is included in one simple per node price. This means companies can utilize the high-performance Elastic Stack for a variety of workloads including log analysis, cybersecurity, simple distributed storage, geospatial data analysis, and other concepts that are still yet to be discovered,’ said Alex Lesser, PSSC Labs Vice President.”
Other than the reasonable cost and product quality, the Department of Defense selected PSSC Labs’ Daedalus Enterprise Search Appliance because it was built on Elastic. Elastic is an open source software, but many proprietary software companies build their own products on free technology. The move to the Daedalus Enterprise Search Appliance should relatively simple as the current Department of Defense system is based on Elasticsearch.
Whitney Grace, March 25, 2020
NASA: Bad Math for Data Return
March 23, 2020
DarkCyber continues to monitor the Amazon Web Services drive train for the Bezos bulldozer. “NASA to Launch 247 Petabytes of Data into AWS – But Forgot about Eye-watering Cloudy Egress Costs before Lift-Off” reports that it is easy to get into the AWS orbit but the payload return may incur some interesting costs.
The Register article states:
“Specifically, the agency faces the possibility of substantial cost increases for data egress from the cloud,” the Inspector General’s Office wrote, explaining that today NASA doesn’t incur extra costs when users access data from its DAACs. “However, when end users download data from Earth data Cloud, the agency, not the user, will be charged every time data is egressed. “That means EDSIS wearing cloud egress costs. Ultimately, ESDIS will be responsible for both cloud costs, including egress charges, and the costs to operate the 12 DAACS.”
Simplifying: Easy in, expensive out.
The Register did some math, which apparently is unfamiliar to certain NASA professionals and consultants. The Register reports:
The Register used Amazon’s cloudy cost calculator to tot up the cost of storing 247PB in the cloud giant’s S3 service. The promised pay-as-you-go price for us on the street was a staggering $5,439,526.92 per month, not taking into account the free tier discount of 12 cents. The audit, meanwhile, suggests an increased cloud spend of around $30m a year by 2025, on top of NASA’s $65m-per-year deal with AWS. The existence of data egress costs are not obscure nor arcane knowledge. Which left The Register wondering how an agency capable of sending stuff into orbit or making marvelously long-lived Mars rovers could also make such a dumb mistake.
Net net: The Bezos bulldozer grinds forward with some clever cost wiring; that is, a 21st century variant of the IBM lock in strategy.
Stephen E Arnold, March 23, 2020
Secret No More: An Alternative to VPNs
March 20, 2020
Dor Knafo founded Axis Security. (The name may create some confusion for those familiar with an event planning outfit.) The company seeks to deliver what Tech.eu reported as:
a single managed solution for access, security, control, and scalability without the complexity…. Built on a zero trust approach, the startup’s Axis Application Access Cloud offers an agentless model that connects users on any device to private apps, without touching the network or the applications. This separation shrinks the attack surface, or reduces the chances of a cyber attack.
Don’t VPNs deliver this?
Nope.
The Axis approach is an SaaS solution. Here’s the explanation in “Israeli startup Axis Security emerges from stealth mode with $17 million Series A.”
Built on a zero trust approach, the startup’s Axis Application Access Cloud offers an agentless model that connects users on any device to private apps, without touching the network or the applications. This separation shrinks the attack surface, or reduces the chances of a cyber attack.
The funding comes from, according to the write up:
Ten Eleven Ventures’ Alex Doll led the round, joined by Cyberstarts, Palo Alto Networks, Check Point, Imperva, among others. Angel investors include Dan Amiga, founder of Fireglass, and board of director member Michael Fey, former president of Symantec and Blue Coat.
Note that Mr. Knafo previously Symantec.
Net net: The solution has been rumored for more than a year. With its more public approach, the company is likely to signal a flow of related start up innovations for cyber security markets.
Stephen E Arnold, March 20, 2020
Wolfram Mathematica
March 19, 2020
DarkCyber noted “In Less Than a Year, So Much New: Launching Version 12.1 of Wolfram Language & Mathematica” contains highly suggestive information. Yes, this is a mathy program. The innovations are significant for analysts and some government professionals. To cite one example:
I’ve been recording hundreds of hours of video in connection with a new project I’m working on. So I decided to try our new capabilities on it. It’s spectacular! I could take a 4-hour video, and immediately extract a bunch of sample frames from it, and then—yes, in a few hours of CPU time—“summarize the whole video”, using SpeechRecognize to do speech-to-text on everything that was said and then generating a word cloud…
DarkCyber reacts positively to other additions and enhancements to the Mathematica “system.” Version 12.1 will make it easier to develop specific functions for policeware and intelware use cases.
Remarkable because the “system” can geo-everything. That’s important in many situations.
Stephen E Arnold, March 19, 2020
AI: Big Hat, Some Cattle
March 17, 2020
Andreessen-Horowitz recently published the article: “The New Business Of AI (And How It’s Different From Traditional Software) that pulls back the curtain on AI startups. Locklin On Science delves further into AI startups with the aptly named post: “Andreessen-Horowitz Craps On ‘AI’ Startups From A Great Height.” AI startups are similar to other startups in that there is a lot of hype over a subpar product.
The biggest mistake people are making is that AI is really machine learning. Machine learning is the basis for AI and the terms should not be used interchangeably. Another problem is that AI can be treated like traditional software, however, this is far from the truth. AI software requires a cloud infrastructure which has mounds of hidden and associated costs. Also businesses believe once they launch an AI project, then humans are out of the equation. Nope!
“Everyone in the business knows about this. If you’re working with interesting models, even assuming the presence of infinite accurately labeled training data, the “human in the loop” problem doesn’t ever completely go away. A machine learning model is generally “man amplified.” If you need someone (or, more likely, several someone’s) making a half million bucks a year to keep your neural net producing reasonable results, you might reconsider your choices. If the thing makes human level decisions a few hundred times a year, it might be easier and cheaper for humans to make those decisions manually, using a better user interface.”
AI or machine learning startups also are SaaS companies disguised as a software business. They might appear to offer a one time out-of-the-box solution that only requires the occasional upgrade, but that is a giant fib. Machine learning can have a huge ROI, but all the factors need to be weighed before it is implemented. Machine learning and AI technology is the most advanced software on the market, thus the most expensive. It might be better to invest in better, experienced software and humans before trying to step foot into the future.
Whitney Grace, March 17, 2020
Click Money from Google: A Digital Dodo?
March 15, 2020
At the beginning of 2020, Google released its 2019 end of year financial report and some amazing surprises were revealed. ZDNet has the details in the article, “The Mysterious Disappearance Of Google’s Click Metric.” For the first time since acquiring YouTube, Google shared revenue for YouTube and its cloud IT business, but they removed information about how much money the company made from clicks or the Cost-per-Click (CPC) plus its growth.
What does this mean for Google? It is even more confusing that the Wall Street analysts did not question the lack of information. The truth is something that Google might not want to admit, but the key to their revenue is dying and they are not happy.
“Google has a rapidly deflating advertising product, sometimes 29% less revenue per click, every quarter, year-on-year, year after year…. Every three months Google has to find faster ways of expanding the total number of paid clicks by as much as 66%. How is this a sustainable business model? There is an upper limit to how much more expansion in paid links can be found especially with the shift to mobile platforms and the constraints of the display. And what does this say about the effectiveness of Google’s ads? They aren’t very good and their value is declining at an astounding and unstoppable pace.”
Google might start placing more ads on its search results and other services. It sounds like, however, Google will place more ineffective ads in more places. Google’s ads have eroded efficiency for years, plus there is the question of whether more bots, less humans are clicking these ads. Clicks do not create brands and most people ignore ads. Don’t you love ads?
Whitney Grace, March 15, 2015
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