There Is a Hole in the Cloud
January 11, 2016
Everyone is running to the cloud to reserve their own personal data spot. Companies have migrated their services to the cloud to serve a growing mobile clientele. If you are not on the cloud, it is like you’re still using an old flip phone. The cloud is a viable and useful service that allows people to access their data anytime and anywhere. Business Insider reveals that cloud usage is heavily concentrated in the US: “Latest Data From The Valley’s Oldest VC Firm Shows One Big Flaw In The Hype Around The Cloud.”
Bessemer Venture Partners is the longest running venture capitalist company in Silicon Valley. To celebrate its 100th cloud investment, it surveyed where the company’s cloud investments are located. Seventy-six of the startups are in the US, eleven are in Israel, and four are in Canada.
“The fact that less than one-quarter of BVP’s cloud investments are in non-US startups shows the adoption of cloud technologies is lagging in the rest of the world. It’s also a reminder that, even after all these years of cloud hype, many countries are still concerned about some aspects of cloud technology.”
Cloud adoption around the world is slow due to the US invents a lot of new technology and the rest of the world must catch up. Security is another big concern and companies are hesitant to store sensitive information on a system with issues.
The cloud has only been on the market for ten years and has only gained attention in the past five. Cell phones, laptops, and using open source software took time to catch on as well.
Whitney Grace, January 11, 2016
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
Google Clamps down on Surprise Costs in BigQuery
December 23, 2015
The article titled Google Promises to Rein in Runaway Query Costs on Fortune discusses the obstacles facing Google’s BigQuery data tool. Google hopes to make BigQuery a major resource for big companies considering cloud technology, but unpredictable costs are getting in the way of the “low-cost big data analytics option” marketing that Google has deployed. Hence, the introduction of “custom quota” and Query Explain,
“Google is now offering potential inquisitors a way to set a “custom quota” to ensure that the number crunching on a specified project does not exceed a pre-set daily limit. In addition, a Query Explain feature promises to lay out, how BigQuery will go about processing the question on the table in advance. That way, in theory, you can see if your questions will be “write, read, or compute heavy” and better anticipate where performance bottlenecks could lurk…”
One might fairly ask why there was any delay in these services, since customers are not known for their fondness of mobile phone type billing surprises. Amazon is also standing next to Google waving at RedShift, a BigQuery competitor in the air. But the simpler pricing and efficiency of BigQuery might be more appealing to many companies, especially with the more controlled processes now available.
Chelsea Kerwin, December 23, 2015
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
Bye-Bye Paid Reviews
December 22, 2015
One has to admit that this sounds like a sweet way to make a few quick dollars: write a fake online review about a product or service highlighting good points and sellable features, post it on your social media accounts, Amazon, your blog, Yelp, TripAdvisor, and then collect a few bucks. While Twitter might slowly be losing the social media race against Facebook and Instagram, the UK Telegraph says that the social network has another useful purpose: “Has Twitter Finally Killed The Mess Of The False Online Review?”
Fake reviews cost consumers millions of dollars each year, because they believe that first hand accounts from regular people trump a corporate advertising account. However, it spawned a big market for people to spend a few dollars to pay someone write a fake review and give a product/service a positive spin. The consumer is getting tired of fake reviews, as are online retailers like Amazon and the US government, which has even drafted the Consumer Review Freedom Act.
Twitter is jumping into action using big data moves like real time data sentimental analysis, location-based apps that search social media content for content, and algorithms to analyze tweets
“Chief executive Giles Palmer believes that apps such as Twizoo are only the start of how products and businesses are evaluated, especially as social media continues to evolve. ‘Until recently, social media monitoring has been a listening business where companies and brands have kept an eye on what their customers are doing, but not doing too much about it…But with mobile customers are after products and goods where they want to make an instant decision based on instant data. What’s more they want that data to be reliable and to be truthful; Twitter provides that.’”
Consumers are being more discerning about the products and services they purchase, but they also trust reviews to help them evaluate them so they will not be duped. High praise for Twitter for proving how social media is valuable as a learning tool and also for proving it is still a worthwhile network.
Whitney Grace, December22, 2015
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
Google Continues to Improve Voice Search
November 5, 2015
Google’s research arm continues to make progress on voice search. The Google Research Blog updates us in, “Google Voice Search: Faster and More Accurate.” The Google Speech Team begins by referring back to 2012, when they announced their Deep Neural Network approach. They have since built on that concept; the team now employs a couple of models built upon recurrent neural networks, which they note are fast and accurate: connectionist temporal classification and sequence discriminative (machine) training techniques. The write-up goes into detail about how speech recognizers work and what makes their latest iteration the best yet. I found the technical explanation fascinating, but it is too lengthy to describe here; please see the post for those details.
I am still struck when I see any article mention that an algorithm has taken the initiative. This time, researchers had to rein in their model’s insightful decision:
“We now had a faster and more accurate acoustic model and were excited to launch it on real voice traffic. However, we had to solve another problem – the model was delaying its phoneme predictions by about 300 milliseconds: it had just learned it could make better predictions by listening further ahead in the speech signal! This was smart, but it would mean extra latency for our users, which was not acceptable. We solved this problem by training the model to output phoneme predictions much closer to the ground-truth timing of the speech.”
At least the AI will take direction. The post concludes:
“We are happy to announce that our new acoustic models are now used for voice searches and commands in the Google app (on Android and iOS), and for dictation on Android devices. In addition to requiring much lower computational resources, the new models are more accurate, robust to noise, and faster to respond to voice search queries – so give it a try, and happy (voice) searching!”
We always knew natural-language communication with machines would present huge challenges, ones many said could never be overcome. It seems such naysayers were mistaken.
Cynthia Murrell, November 5, 2015
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
Latest Global Internet Report Available
October 30, 2015
The Internet Society has made available its “Global Internet Report 2015,” just the second in its series. World-wide champions of a free and open Internet, the society examines mobile Internet usage patterns around the globe. The report’s Introduction explains:
“We focus this year’s report on the mobile Internet for two reasons. First, as with mobile telephony, the mobile Internet does not just liberate us from the constraints of a wired connection, but it offers hundreds of millions around the world their only, or primary, means of accessing the Internet. Second, the mobile Internet does not just extend the reach of the Internet as used on fixed connections, but it offers new functionality in combination with new portable access devices.”
It continues with this important warning:
“The nature of the Internet should remain collaborative and inclusive, regardless of changing means of access. In particular, the mobile Internet should remain open, to enable the permission-less innovation that has driven the continuous growth and evolution of the Internet to date, including the emergence of the mobile Internet itself.”
Through the report’s landing page, above, you can navigate to the above-cited Introduction, the report’s Executive Summary, and Section 2: Trends and Growth. There is even an interactive mobile Internet timeline. Scroll to the bottom to download the full report, in PDF, Kindle, or ePub formats. The download is free, but those interested can donate to the organization here.
Cynthia Murrell, October 30, 2015
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
Compare Cell Phone Usage in Various Cities
October 8, 2015
Ever wonder how cell phone usage varies around the globe? Gizmodo reports on a tool that can tell us, called ManyCities, in their article, “This Website Lets You Study Cell Phone Use in Cities Around the World.” The project is a team effort from MIT’s SENSEable City Laboratory and networking firm Ericsson. Writer Jamie Condliffe tells us that ManyCities:
“…compiles mobile phone data — such as text message traffic, number of phone calls, and the amount of data downloaded —from base stations in Los Angeles, New York, London, and Hong Kong between April 2013 and January 2014. It’s all anonymised, so there’s no sensitive information on display, but there is enough data to understand usage patterns, even down the scale of small neighbourhoods. What’s nice about the site is that there are plenty of intuitive interpretations of the data available from the get-go. So, you can see how phone use varies geographically, say, or by time, spotting the general upward trend in data use or how holidays affect the number of phone calls. And then you can dig deeper, to compare data use over time between different neighbourhoods or cities: like, how does the number of texts sent in Hong Kong compare to New York? (It peaks in Hong Kong in the morning, but in the evening in New York, by the way.)”
The software includes some tools that go a little further, as well; users can cluster areas by usage patterns or incorporate demographic data. Condliffe notes that this information could help with a lot of tasks; forecasting activity and demand, for example. If only it were available in real time, he laments, though he predicts that will happen soon. Stay tuned.
Cynthia Murrell, October 8, 2015
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
Legacy Servers: Upgrade Excitement
October 2, 2015
Enterprise management systems (ECM) were supposed to provide an end all solution for storing and organizing digital data. Data needs to be stored for several purposes: taxes, historical record, research, and audits. Government agencies deployed ECM solutions to manage their huge data loads, but the old information silos are not performing up to modern standards. GCN discusses government agencies face upgrading their systems in “Migrating Your Legacy ECM Solution.”
When ECMs first came online, information was stored in silos programmed to support even older legacy solutions with niche applications. The repositories are so convoluted that users cannot find any information and do not even mention upgrading the beasts:
“Aging ECM systems are incapable of fitting into the new world of consumer-friendly software that both employees and citizens expect. Yet, modernizing legacy systems raises issues of security, cost, governance and complexity of business rules — all obstacles to a smooth transition. Further, legacy systems simply cannot keep up with the demands of today’s dynamic workforce.”
Two solutions present themselves: data can be moved from an old legacy system to a new one or simply moving the content from the silo. The barriers are cost and time, but the users will reap the benefits of upgrades, especially connectivity, cloud, mobile, and social features. There is the possibility of leaving the content in place using interoperability standards or cloud-based management to make the data searchable and accessible.
The biggest problem is actually convincing people to upgrade. Why fix what is not broken? Then there is the justification of using taxpayers’ money for the upgrade when the money can be used elsewhere. Round and round the argument goes.
Whitney Grace, October 2, 2015
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
Harsh Criticism of Yahoo
September 24, 2015
Kill dear old Yahoo? IBTimes reports on some harsh words from an ivory-tower type in, “NYU Professor: Yahoo Ought to Be ‘Euthanised’ and Marissa Mayer’s Pregnancy Saved her Job.” It seems marketing professor Scott Galloway recently criticized the company, and its famous CEO, in a televised Bloomberg interview. In his opinion, any website with Yahoo’s traffic should be rolling in dough, and the company’s struggles are the result of mismanagement. As for his claim that the “most overpaid CEO in history” only retains her position due to her pregnancy? Reporter Mary-Ann Russon writes:
“Galloway says that Yahoo would not be willing to face the public backlash that would come from firing a woman in such a position of power who has just announced she is pregnant.
“This is not a stretch since there are still far fewer women in leadership positions than men – as of March 2015, only 24 of the CEOs in Fortune 500 companies are women – and the issue with how companies perceive family planning remains a sore point for many career-minded women (Read: Gamechangers: Why multimillionaire ‘mom’ Marissa Mayer is damned if she does and damned if she doesn’t).
“However, Galloway also pointed the finger of blame for Yahoo’s woes at its board, which he said has been a ‘lesson in poor corporate governance,’ since there have been five CEOs in the last seven years.”
Though Yahoo was a great success around the turn of the millennium, it has fallen behind as users migrate their internet usage to mobile devices (with that format’s smaller, cheaper ads). Though many still use its free apps, nowadays most of Yahoo’s revenue comes from its Alibaba investment.
So what does Galloway recommend? “It should be sold to Microsoft,” he declared. “We should put a bullet in this story called ‘Yahoo’.” Ouch. Can Yahoo reverse their fortunes, or is it too late for the veteran Internet company?
Cynthia Murrell, September 24, 2015
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
Bing Snapshots for In-App Searches
September 9, 2015
Developers have a new tool for incorporating search data directly into apps, we learn in “Bing Snapshots First to Bring Advanced In-App Search to Users” at Search Engine Watch. Apparently Google announced a similar feature, Google Now on Tap, earlier this year, but Microsoft’s Bing has beaten them to the consumer market. Of course, part of Snapshot’s goal is to keep users from wandering out of “Microsoft territory,” but many users are sure to appreciate the convenience nevertheless. Reporter Mike O’Brien writes:
“With Bing Snapshots, developers will be able to incorporate all of the search engine’s information into their apps, allowing users to perform searches in context without navigating outside. For example, a friend could mention a restaurant on Facebook Messenger. When you long-press the Home button, Bing will analyze the contents of the screen and bring up a snapshot of a restaurant, with actionable information, such as the restaurant’s official website and Yelp reviews, as well Uber.”
Bing officials are excited about the development (and, perhaps, scoring a perceived win over Google), declaring this the start of a promising relationship with developers. The article continues:
“Beyond making sure Snapshots got a headstart over Google Now on Tap, Bing is also able to stand out by becoming the first search engine to make its knowledge graph available to developers. That will happen this fall, though some APIs are already available on the company’s online developer center. Bing is currently giving potential users sneak peeks on its Android app.”
Hmm, that’s a tad ironic. I look forward to seeing how Google positions the launch of Google Now on Tap when the time comes.
Cynthia Murrell, September 9, 2015
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
Freedom Versus Fear
September 4, 2015
The Ashley Madison data breach has understandably been getting a lot of press, but what does it portend for the future of the Internet? Computerworld’s Tech Decoder predicts far-reaching consequences in, “Here’s Why the Dark Web Just Got a Lot Darker.” Security experts predict a boom in phishing scams connected to this data breach, as well as copycat hackers poised to attack other (more legit) companies.
Reporter John Brandon suspects such activity will lead to the government stepping in to create two separate Internet channels: one “wild and unprotected” side and a “commercial” side, perhaps sponsored by big-name communications companies, that comes with an expectation of privacy. Great, one might think, we won’t have to worry if we’re not up to anything shady! But there’s more to it. Brandon explains:
“The problem is that I’m a big proponent of entrepreneurship. I won’t comment on whether I think Ashley Madison is a legitimate business. … However, I do want to defend the rights of some random dude in Omaha who wants to sell smartphone cables. He won’t have a chance to compete on the ‘commercial’ side of the Internet, so he’ll probably have to create a site on the unprotected second-tier channel, the one that is ‘free and open’ for everyone. Good luck with that.
“Is it fair? Is it even (shudder) moral? The commercial side will likely be well funded, fast, reliable, government-sanctioned, and possibly heavily taxed. The free side will be like drinking water at the local cesspool. In the end, the free and open Internet is that way for a reason. It’s not so you can cheat on your wife. Frankly, people will do that with or without the Internet. The ‘free and open’ bit is intended to foster ideas. It’s meant to level the playing field. It’s meant to help that one guy in Omaha.”
Yes, security is important, but so is opportunity. Can our society strike a balance, or will fear reign? Stay tuned.
Cynthia Murrell, September 4, 2015
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
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