Bezos-tics: A Billionaire and an Alleged Political Alignment
February 6, 2020
Jeff Bezos heads Amazon, but he allegedly has goals beyond changing the face of retail. The Strategic Culture Foundation examines Bezos’s political views in the article, “Jeff Bezos’s Politics.” Heads up. DarkCyber thinks this “strategic culture” write up is a one-sided argument about Mr. Bezos’ goals to spread American imperialism, control other nations, and spread the ideals of neo-conservatism.
Bezos’s political power exploded when he purchased the Washington Post from Donald Graham (Washington D.C.’s daily newspaper) and negotiated with CIA Director John Brennan a ten-year cloud computing contract hosted by Amazon. As this quote says he is definitely wise about business:
“He was now the most influential salesman not only for books, etc., but for the CIA, and for such mega-corporations as Lockheed Martin. US imperialism has supercharged his wealth, but didn’t alone cause his wealth. Jeff Bezos might be the most ferociously gifted business-person on the planet.”
The article continues that Bezos, like all of American billionaires, ally themselves with neo-conservatism and imperialism. They seek to preserve these systems at all costs. Also Bezos has this going for him:
“Bezos also wants to privatize everything around the world that can become privatized, such as education, highways, health care, and pensions. The more that billionaires control those, the less that everyone else does; and preventing control by the public helps to protect billionaires against democracy that would increase their taxes, and against governmental regulations that would reduce their profits by increasing their corporations’ expenses. So, billionaires control the government in order to increase their takings from the public.”
But, use the word coined by DarkCyber, the Amagenic responses to Amazon a moving, just slowly. With employee push back and dissention in a close friend’s brother sister bond, is negativism being pulled to the man and the Amazon machine.
Worth monitoring to see if this “house divided against itself” is a myth or a reality.
Whitney Grace, February 6, 2020
Google: Changes Coming and Steadily
February 4, 2020
Google’s financial results suggest that the company’s advertising business is facing some headwinds. “Google Lifts Veil on YouTube, Cloud Units” states:
Meanwhile, the company reported disappointing results in its core online advertising operations.
The “meanwhile” is a “nice” way of suggesting that Google’s good news about YouTube and its baby cloud endeavors were supposed to distract from that ominous line:
disappointing results in its core online advertising operations.
And the word “operations.” That is a pregnant choice. The problem perhaps is deeper than softness in companies’ ad spending, more problematic than Amazon’s and Facebook’s expanding advertising initiatives, and more troublesome than the withdrawal of the Silicon Valley sultans, Messrs. Brin and Page.
What is caused the spangled juggernaut to wobble in its “core business”?
DarkCyber’s early morning thoughts include:
- Google’s rush to mobile created an ad inventory gap; that is, more ads for a small space. The fixes have not been satisfying to users or to consumers.
- Trading off relevance for broader results so more ads can be shown in relation to content which is not germane to what the user wanted information about. Even the most jaded consumer of Neverthink content, sort of wants ads relevant to their interests when using Google.
- Overhead is tough to control. Yep, that means productivity from human resources and efficiency in use of capital have to take precedent over moon shots, solving death, and dealing with litigation related to interesting staff issues.
- The Steve Ballmer “one trick pony” assessment of Google is proving accurate. Billions spent and the Google sells ads.
Net net: Worth monitoring the company’s performance and actions whether one has shares, works there, or is just mildly interested in what has defined “search” for billions of people.
Can these people find relevant information online? Nope. That’s probably part of the problem. Can cleverness address the issue? Sure but at what cost. Can Jeff Dean save the overdone cookies? Maybe.
Stephen E Arnold, February 4, 2020
Cellebrite Has Capabilities: Now It Has More
February 4, 2020
Forensic tools firm Cellebrite is broadening its range with an upcoming acquisition. AppleInsider reveals, “Cellebrite Expands to Mac Forensic Tools with $33M BlackBag Purchase.” The Israel-based company is owned by Japan’s Sun Corp. It received an influx of $110 million in June from IGP Capital and is expected to make more acquisitions soon. Until now, Cellebrite has specialized in forensic tools for smartphones and tablets, especially iOS devices. Writer Malcolm Owen writes:
“Its clients largely consist of law enforcement agencies and other government organizations. Cellebrite is thought to have been the firm that provided the FBI with assistance in the San Bernardino investigation in 2016, with it allegedly receiving $900,000 for helping crack the shooter’s iPhone.
We also note:
“While Cellebrite is focused on mobile devices and cloud, BlackBag instead centers its work on computer forensics, including tools for quickly searching through volumes of data stored on servers. The purchase of BlackBag increases the capabilities of Cellebrite, making it capable of operating on more platforms. Part of BlackBag’s work includes accessing Macs and MacBooks, with its MacQuisition tool claimed to perform live data acquisition, targeted data acquisition, and forensic imaging of macOS devices. The tool is said to be the first and only one capable of creating images of Macs equipped with Apple’s T2 chip, which handles encryption and other security-related tasks.”
Those wondering if certain devices and systems can be compromised, ask your Cellebrite contact. For those unaware of Cellebrite’s capabilities, contact the company directly. For some in the US government, awareness of Cellebrite’s new services and products is not apparently up to date.
Cynthia Murrell, February 4, 2020
Amazon and Open Source: A Wee Bit Sensitive
January 31, 2020
Amazon Web Services (AWS) is one of the nation’s leading cloud computing services and its dominance increases every day. Computer Weekly commented on how AWS might be taking advantage of open source technology in the article, “AWS Hits Back At Open Source Theft Allegations.” Throughout 2019, AWS undermined open source software companies by “stealing” the free version of their software, then hosting it on their cloud computing service.
The actuations were so bad that The New York Times picked up the story and stated that in 2015 AWS integrated Elasticsearch from Elastic into their offerings, now Elastic and AWS are now rivals for customers. MongoDB and Redis have had to alter their open source software and licensed software so their customers know the difference. For example, the free version of MongoDB is integrated into AWS, but the licensed version is not, so it lacks certain features.
AWS responded with:
“In October 2018, Eliot Horowitz, chief technology officer and founder of MongoDB, changed the open source licensing used for MongoDB to reflect the risk of the company’s service revenue being gobbled up by public cloud providers. In response, AWS introduced a MongoDB-compatible service, DocumentDB, in January 2019.”
While open source technology is free, developers behind such offerings usually offer a licensed version with more bells and whistles. These include customer support, free upgrades, patches, and specific features.
AWS is strip mining the open source technology’s source code, then reconfiguring it their services. AWS Vice President of Analytics and ElastiCache states that AWS is only responding to their clients’ demands and their clients want open source software in AWS. He also said that AWS does give back to the open source community:
“AWS contributes mightily to open source projects such as Linux, Java, Kubernetes, Xen, KVM, Chromium, Robot Operating System, Apache Lucene, Redis, s2n, FreeRTOS, AWS Amplify, Apache MXNet, AWS SageMaker NEO, Firecracker, the OpenJDK with Corretto, Elasticsearch, and Open Distro for Elasticsearch. AWS has not copied anybody’s software or services.”
Many of the projects aim to make it easier for developers to build on top of AWS services. SageMaker is its machine learning cloud service; Greengrass extends the AWS cloud to the internet of things (IoT) edge and Firecracker is its kernel virtual machine. However, the s2n project is an open source implementation of the TLS encryption protocol, which AWS made publicly available under the terms of the Apache Software License 2.0.”
While AWS might be a singular provider for multiple services and products, organizations do not want to be locked into one supplier.
Whitney Grace, January 31, 2020
Former Amazonian Suggests the Pre Built Models Are Pipe Dreams
January 30, 2020
I read a PR-infused write up with some interesting presumably accurate information. The article is from ZDNet.com (an outfit somewhat removed from Mr. Ziff’s executive dining room.) Its title? “Reality Engines Offers a Deep Learning Tour de Force to Challenge Amazon et al in Enterprise AI”. Here’s a passage which warranted an Amazon orange highlighter circle:
The goal, Reddy told ZDNet, is a service that “automatically creates production-ready models from data in the wild,” to ease the labor of corporations that don’t have massive teams of data scientists and deep learning programmers. “While other companies talk about offering this service, it is still largely a pipe-dream,” wrote Reddy in an email exchange with ZDNet. “We have made significant strides towards this goal,” she said.
Who will care about this assertion? Since the founder of the company is a former top dog of “AI verticals” at Amazon’s AWS cloud service”, Amazon may care. Amazon asserts that SageMaker and related tools make machine learning easier, faster, better (cheaper may depend on one’s point of view). A positive summary of some of Amazon’s machine learning capabilities appears in “Building Fully Custom Machine Learning Models on AWS SageMaker: A Practical Guide.”
Because the sweeping generalization about “pipe dreams” includes most of the machine learning honchos and honchettes, Facebook, Google, IBM, and others are probably going to pay attention. After all, Reality Engines has achieved “significant strides” with 18 people, some adviser, and money from Google’s former adult, Eric Schmidt, who invested $5.25 million.
The write up provides a glimpse of some of the ingredients in the Reality Engines’ secret sauce:
… The two pillars of the offering are “generative adversarial networks,” known as “GANs,” and “network architecture search.” Those two technologies can dramatically reduce the effort needed to build machine learning for enterprise functions, the company contends. GANs, of course, are famous for making fake faces by optimizing a competition between two neural networks based on the encoding and decoding of real images. In this case, Reality Engines has built something called a “DAGAN,” a GAN that can be used for data augmentation, the practice of making synthetic data sets when not enough data is available to train a neural network in a given domain. DAGANs were pioneered by Antreas Antoniou of the Institute for Adaptive and Neural Computation at the University of Edinburgh in 2018. The Reality Engines team has gone one better: They built a DAGAN by using network architecture search, or “NAS,” in which the computer finds the best architecture for the GAN by trying various combinations of “cells,” basic primitives composed of neural network modules.
For those not able to visualize a GAN and DGAN system, the write up includes an allegedly accurate representation of some of the Reality Engines’ components. The diagram in the write up is for another system, and authored in part by a wizard working at another firm, but let’s assume were are in the ballpark conceptually:
It appears that there is a training set. The data are fed to a DenseNet classifier and a validator. Then the DEGAN generator kicks in, processes data piped from the data sources. What’s interesting is that there are two process blocks (maybe Bayesian at its core with the good old Gaussian stuff mixed in) which “discriminate”. DarkCyber thinks this means that the system tries to reduce its margin of error for metatagging and other operations. The “Real Synthetic” block may be an error checking component, but the recipe is incomplete.
The approach is a mash up: Reality Engines’ code with software called Bananas,” presumably developed by the company Petuum and possibly experts at the University of Toronto.
How accurate is the system? DarkCyber typically ignores vendor’s assertions about accuracy. You can make up your own mind about this statement:
“The NAS-improved DAGAN improves classification accuracy on the target dataset by as much as 20.5% and can transfer between tasks,” they write.
The “reality” of most machine learning systems is that accuracy of 85 percent is attainable under quite specific conditions: Content from a bounded domain, careful construction of training data, calibration, and on-going retraining when what DarkCyber calls Bayesian drift kicks in. If a system is turned on and just used, accuracy degrades over time. At some point, the outputs are sufficiently wide of the mark that a ZDNet journalist may spot problems.
What does the system output? It seems to DarkCyber that the information in the write up focuses on classifiers. If our interpretation is narrowed to that function, content is dumped into buckets. These buckets make it easy to extract content and perform additional analysis. If each step in a work flow works, the final outs will have a greater likelihood of being “accurate” or “right.” But there are many slips between the cup and the lip as a famous plagiarizer once repeated.
What type of data can the system process? The answer is structured data, presumably cleansed and validated data.
If the Reality Engines’ approach is of interest, the company’s Web site offers a Web site with a “Request Access” button. Click it and you are probably free to test the system or kick its off road tires.
Will bananas and backpropagation be on your machine learning menu in the future?
Stephen E Arnold, January 30, 2020
China Software Numbers: Suggestive If Accurate
January 28, 2020
DarkCyber spotted “China’s Leading Software Companies Report Rising Income.” The write up included some interesting, but difficult to verify, numbers:
- The companies in the sample generated US$118.5 billion of revenue from software business in 2018, 6.5 percent up from that of the top 100 companies a year ago.
- More than 30 companies saw revenue surging by more than 20 percent
- 14 of the companies in the sample had revenues above US$1.4 billion
- Aliyun, Alibaba’s cloud computing subsidiary, was number three on the list of 100 companies
- In the same period, these companies invested about US$25 billion in research and development, 12.6 percent higher than that of the top 100 companies in 2018.
And the killer number was, “Their average R&D intensity, the proportion of R&D expenditure to main business revenue, reached 10.1 percent, 2.2 percentage points higher than the average level of the software industry, the ministry’s data showed.”
Stephen E Arnold, January 28, 2020
Amazon: 2020 Begins with Problems Penetrating the Company Membrane
January 28, 2020
DarkCyber coined a work to capture what seems to be happening to Amazon. That word is “amagenic.” The idea is that external factors which previously bounced off the online bookstore are now getting through.
A more MBA type of phrasing might be “amagenesis”; that is, the conditions under which external factors penetrate an organization, its management team, and its business activities. An example of an amagenic event is the mobile phone “event.”
The information about the alleged hacking of Mr. Bezos’ iPhone X is difficult to interpret. A consulting firm doing business as FTI issued a report. That report suggests that a third party compromised Mr. Bezos’ mobile phone. You can download and read the allegedly original and complete report at this link. Critical discussion of the FTI report may be located at this link.
Other facets of the story include allegations that a specialized software vendor in Israel provided the tool used to compromise Mr. Bezos’ mobile phone. A number of sources link the assault on the phone to the government of Saudi Arabia. The reason? Dissatisfaction with Amazon’s blockchain technology? No, the country took action to find out if there was information related to the murder of Jamal Khashoggi, a journalist who provided some stories to the Washington Post. Other sources say that Mr. Bezos’ mobile was compromised in 2008. (Yep, a decade ago.)
To muddy the water, information has been pulled from the “real” journalism archives; specifically, Mr. Bezos’ found himself the victim of a leak of information from a member of his “close friend’s” family. That information circulated, it is rumored, among the tabloids. Some of the “leaked information” presented Mr. Bezos in situations which were of a private nature.
But this Amagenic event is just one of a string of digital and real life viruses penetrating the juggernaut. Others include:
- An increasing tension between Amazon and Facebook. The vector of attack allegedly was WhatsApp.
- Amazon faces employees going public with information about alleged climate-hostile policies and actions. (Details are at this link.)
- Amazon workers are grousing about their work. An interesting example is the alleged Amazon truck driver who had to drive for 30 hours. (Allegation is summarized here.)
- Amazon is working hard to block Microsoft from beginning work on the $10 billion JEDI project. Did Amazon hire Department of Defense professionals in order to get an inside edge? Good question.
- Some US elected officials want an anti trust investigation of the company. (Some additional information is at this link.)
- Google and Microsoft poaching some Twitch stars.
Plus, there are continued complaints about knock offs (shanzai adherents) sold as the real deal on the Amazon eCommerce site, third-party sellers’ allegations that Amazon watches for hot products and then introduces its own product undercutting the Amazon seller, and other assorted hisses and boos.
Stepping back, DarkCyber believes these issues may illustrate amagenesis presenting itself in the Amazon construct.
Is this type of amagenic reaction curable? DarkCyber suggests taking two aspirin, getting a good night’s sleep, and checking in the morning.
Stephen E Arnold, January 28, 2020
Library Software Soutron Version 4.1.4 Now Available
January 17, 2020
Library automation and cataloging firm Soutron introduces its “Latest Software Update—Soutron Version 4.1.4.” The announcement describes the updates and features, complete with screenshots. The introduction reveals:
“This update provides an eagerly awaited new ‘Collections’ feature, refinements to both the Search Portal, updates to the new Admin pages and further language support. Details can be found below. These latest updates are the results of our agile development process and by working closely with, and listening to, our clients’ needs. The results are an industry leading world class library, archive and information management solution.”
Regarding that shiny new Collections feature, part of the Search Portal, we learn:
“This feature empowers users to select records from within Search Results and to assign them to a ‘Collection’. A user who is logged in may create their own Collection, adding and removing items as needed. A Collection can be easily managed, shared and organized in a tree view as shown below. This makes it easy for users, researchers or lawyers to quickly reference items of use that have been found, creating their own ‘Bento Box’ of records and materials, avoiding the need to keep performing searches or looking through saved searches for multiple relevant records.”
That does sound helpful. Other upgrades include enhanced organization for saved searches, improved viewing on mobile devices, easier search-template management, and the addition of a Default Availability status configuration option. See the write-up for more details.
Based in Derby, United Kingdom, Soutron has been creating library management systems for corporations and other organizations since 1989. The company continues to flourish by proudly embracing technological advances like automation and cloud-based systems.
Cynthia Murrell, January 16, 2020
A Taxonomy Vendor: Still Chugging Along
January 15, 2020
Semaphore Version 5 from Smartlogic coming soon.
An indexing software company— now morphed into a semantic AI outfit — Smartlogic promises Version 5 of its enterprise platform, Semaphore, will be available any time now.
The company modestly presents the announcement below the virtual fold in the company newsletter, “The Semaphore—Smartlogic’s Quarterly Newsletter—December 2019.” The General Access release should be out by the end of January. We’re succinctly informed because in indexing succinct is good:
“Semaphore 5 embodies innovative technologies and strategies to deliver a unified user experience, enhanced interoperability, and flexible integration:
*A single platform experience – modules are tightly integrated.
*Intuitive and simplified installation and administration – software can be download and configured with minimal clicks. An updated landing page allows you to quickly navigate modules and monitor status.
*Improved coupling of classification and language services, as well as improved performance.
*Updated the linguistic model and fact extraction capabilities.
*New – Document Semantic Analyzer – a performant content analyzer that provides detailed classification and language services results.
*New branding that aligns modules with capabilities and functionality.
“Semaphore 5 continues to focus around 3 core areas – Model & collaborate; fact extraction, auto-classification & language services; and integrate & visualize – in a modular platform that allows you to add capabilities as your business needs evolve. As you upgrade to Semaphore 5, you will be able to take advantage of the additional components and capabilities incorporated in your licensed modules.”
Semaphore is available on-premise, in the cloud, or a combination. Smartlogic (not to be confused with the custom app company Smartlogic) was founded in 2006 and is based in San Jose, California. The company owns SchemaLogic. Yep, we’re excited too. Maybe NLP, predictive analytics, and quantum computing technology will make a debut in this release. If not in software, perhaps in the marketing collateral?
Cynthia Murrell, January 15, 2020
Amazon: Maybe a Restraining Order to Halt JEDI Deal?
January 15, 2020
We noted “Amazon to Seek Order to Block Microsoft From Working on US DoD’s JEDI Contract.” The story appears to have originated with Thomson Reuters, so we assume its ethical and accurate and other good Thomsony stuff.
Here’s the passage we circled in true blue marker:
Amazon.com will ask a judge to temporarily block Microsoft from working on a $10 billion cloud contract from the Pentagon, a court filing showed on Monday [January 13, 2020]. Amazon, which was seen as a favorite for the contract, plans to file a motion for a temporary restraining order on January 24 and a federal court will issue its decision on February 11, according to the filing.
After years on the trail, if true, Amazon may be paying a visit to the Last Chance Saloon. The interaction may go something like this:
Barista or baristo: What will you have, partner?
Amazonian: One JEDI, please.
Barista or baristo: You are out of luck. The last one went to those nice people over there. They’ve been fussing with a Windows 10 laptop for nigh on one hour.
Amazonian: What else you got?
Barista or baristo: The next big shipment don’t arrive until October 1, 2020. Wanna wait, partner?
Amazonian: Nope. [Sound of a Bezos bulldozer starting up and grinding toward the Middle East.]
Stephen E Arnold, January 15, 2020
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