The Internet Is Once Again Anonymous
January 19, 2017
Let us reminiscence for a moment (and if you like you can visit the Internet archive) about the Internet’s early days, circa late 1990s. It was a magic time, because there were chatrooms, instant messaging, and forums. The Internet has not changed these forms of communication much, although chatrooms are pretty dead, but one great thing about the early days is that the Internet was mostly anonymous. With the increase in tracking software, IP awareness, and social media, Internet anonymity is reserved for the few who are vigilant and never post anything online. Sometimes, however, you want to interact online without repercussions and TechCrunch shares that “Secret Founder Returns To Anonymous Publishing With Launch Of IO.”
David Byttow, Secret co-founder, started the anonymous publishing app IO that is similar to Postcard Confessions. IO’s purpose is to:
IO is a pseudo-resurrection of Secret that Byttow told us in November came into being partly because “the downsides of current social media products MUST be addressed,” an imperative he felt was especially urgent following the results of the last U.S. election. IO’s stated mission is to achieve “authentic publishing,” by which Byttow means that he’s hoping users having an option to publishing either anonymously, using a pseudonym or as their actual selves will allow for easier sharing of true thoughts and feelings.
IO really does not do much. You can type something up, hit publish, but it is only shared with other people if you attach social media links. You can remain anonymous and IO does include writing assistance tools. I really do not get why IO is useful, but it does allow a person to create a shareable link without joining a forum, owning a Web site, etc. Reddit seems more practical, though.
Whitney Grace, January 19, 2016
Another Untraceable Dark Web Actor Put Behind Bars
January 19, 2017
A prison librarian in England who purchased drugs and weapons over the Dark Web for supplying them to prisoners was sentenced to 7-years in prison.
The Register in a news report Prison Librarian Swaps Books for Bars After Dark-Web Gun Buy Caper says:
Dwain Osborne, of Avenue Road, Penge, in London, was nabbed in October of 2015 after he sought to procure a Glock 19 – a staple of police and security forces worldwide – and 100 rounds of ammunition on the dark web. A search of Osborne’s house revealed the existence of a storage device, two stolen passports, and a police uniform.
Osborne was under the impression that like other Dark Web actors, he too is untraceable. What made the sleuths suspicious is not known, however, the swift action and prosecution are commendable. Law enforcement agencies are challenged by this new facet of crime wherein most perpetrators manage to remain anonymous.
Most arrests related to the purchase of arms and drugs over Dark Web were result of undercover operations. However, going beyond this type of modus operandi is the need of the hour.
Systems like Apacke Teka seem to be promising, but it is premature to say how such kind of systems will evolve and most importantly, will be implemented.
Vishal Ingole, January 19, 2017
DARPA Open Catalog
January 18, 2017
If you are interested in DARPA’s open catalog of open source software, you can find the pointers at this link. The public facing Web site does not provide the names of the companies or research organizations working on the software. The cyber-related listings available in 2015 and early 2-16 no longer appear. Links do point to the program manager for specific projects; for example, the office responsible to ADAMS which detects anomalies in Big Data sets. For generalists interested in DARPA Dark Web projects, the information is difficult to locate using open source tools. The change in the scope of the public facing Open Catalog appears to have taken place July 2016. Some information about specific software can be located if one knows the name of a research entity involved in the Memex project; for example, a query for Stanford University’s DeepDive which was updated in early 2016. One use of DeepDive is to identify spouses in the news.
Stephen E Arnold, January 18, 2017
Palantir Technologies: A First for a Content Processing Outfit
January 18, 2017
Palantir Technologies visibility has an upside and a downside. The upside is that the company’s brand, its Gotham system, and its Metropolis are gaining traction among executives in a range of disciplines, not just the heady world of Wall Street or the less well travelled pathways of law enforcement and intelligence professionals.
I read “Tech Workers Are Protesting Palantir’s Involvement with Immigration Data.” If accurate, the write up is one of the first reports of people getting antsy about systems and methods which are going on 30 years old. FYI I did a tiny bit of work for i2 Group, the outfit which developed Analyst’s Notebook in the 1990s. That system used techniques known to researchers in the UK, France, and elsewhere for decades. The point is that the “protest” is something that companies involved in data analysis have not experienced. I am not bringing a dog to this fight. I think it is intersting that awareness of what one can accomplish using graph analysis, centuries old math, and basic information access methods is now triggering what may be a potentially contentious public protest. (Get those permits, folks.)
The write up points out:
As Trump prepares to take office, a Silicon Valley group demands Palantir account for systems that could be used for mass deportation.
From elected officials who disavow the president elect to skilled professionals who are worried about what the president elect “may” do, search and content processing has only rarely faced a group of concerned people. Even Autonomy, an early player with BAE Systems in data analysis for government tasks, is essentially invisible despite a high profile lawsuit with Hewlett Packard. There was a protest more than a decade ago in front of Autonomy’s Cambridge offices, but I can’t recall why a group of about a dozen people showed up and then dispersed. Outfits like FinFisher or Vupen make news in specialist publications. The idea of a mass protest in front of the Gamma Group offices in the UK is a rare event.
The Palantir to-be protest reported in the article pivots on what might happen in the future. Future reporting is an interesting genre. The write up states:
Due in part to a Verge report from last month, a group of tech workers in Silicon Valley has announced that it will hold a demonstration outside the headquarters of Palantir Technologies in Palo Alto next Wednesday to protest the company’s involvement in intelligence systems used by federal immigration authorities.
The news service takes some credit as a catalyst and writes about what will happen on Wednesday, January 18, 2017, in a write up published online on January 13, 2017. (Where are these folks at Kentucky Derby time when I have to pick a horse for the big race?)
I learned (I think this is the correct tense for writing about reporting the future):
We want to make it clear that the overall tech community is watching what Palantir does,” says Jason Prado, a software engineer at Facebook and member of the Tech Workers Coalition, the group organizing the Palantir demonstration. “And we want to hold the tech community overall accountable for the values that we as a community have.”
The write up does some more tense dancing with this statement in the write up:
This week, both Thiel and Palantir’s CEO, Alex Karp, separately pledged that Palantir will not be used to build a Muslim registry — a demand listed by Prado’s group. “We think that’s fantastic,” says Prado, “but we’re also interested in their possible involvement in what we see as mass deportation and we plan to continue pushing on that.”
More interesting for me was or is this statement in the write up:
Last month, I reported for The Verge that Palantir had provided largely-secret assistance to the US Customs and Border Protection agency in administering a complex intelligence platform known as the Analytical Framework for Intelligence, or AFI, which collects and analyzes troves of information on immigrants and other travelers entering, exiting, and moving within the United States.
The “I” refers to Spencer Woodman, who is both a trigger and a documenter of the present and the future.
The president elect seems to know about Palantir’s platform or “Analytical Framework for Intelligence.” I interpret Palantir’s approach as a series of components which go beyond what the 1990s-anchored i2 system does.
The write up by Mr. Woodman states:
Last month, I also reported that Palantir had signed a $34,650,000 in contracts with ICE to help build and maintain a large database and analytics platform called FALCON, which contains employment information, criminal records, immigration history, family connections, as well as home and work addresses. According to Department of Homeland Security oversight documents, FALCON is meant for use by ICE’s Office of Homeland Security Investigations, which pursues serious cross-border crimes such as human trafficking, drug interdiction, and child pornography and is a separate entity from ERO. Tasked with enforcing unverified employment, HSI has conducted some of ICE’s most controversial recentimmigration raids on businesses employing undocumented Immigrants — the sort of operations that many immigrant advocates fear will expand under Trump.
From my point of view, I made a mental note of several points:
- The article or wrtie up as I term these online news/opinion/commentary essays makes it clear that what will happen in the future is due in part to the information presented in the author’s articles present and past. That’s very interesting.
- The technology revealed as a source of concern is, at least to me, very old news. There are newer and more more effective systems than those offered by Palantir. (No, I will not identify these vendors nor will I respond to email or telephone inquiries on these matters unless the call comes from a present or former client or via a referral from a trusted source. Do your own homework, gentle reader.) Palantir acquiores companies because it must or has to juice up is decade old system.
- The blurred role of the author and the write up as a “report” and a “prediction” makes it difficult for me to know why the article is not labeled as content marketing. I made a mental sticky note, however.
I think the assembly/protest is worth monitoring. I look forward to more “real” journalism on this matter. Frankly mixing up what did happen, what is happening, and what will happen in the future is somewhat confusing to me. I prefer a nice tidy timeline and outputs from a predictive analytics system like Record Future’s to help me make decisions about an event. I am also interested in making bubble gum cards for the individuals of interest, generating a graph of relationships, and pumping open source content through a series of text analysis procedures.
That, hoowever, is a great deal of work. I can understand why some “real” journalists prefer a phone call or two, some self referntial links, and Google Web searches when writing about what will happen on Janaury 18 five or more days before the 18th.
Stephen E Arnold, January 18, 2017
Are You Really Beefing up Your Search Skills?
January 18, 2017
Everyone’s New Year’s resolution is usually to lose weight. When January swings around again, that resolution went out the door with the spring-cleaning. Exercise can be a challenge, but you can always exercise your search skills by reading Medium’s article, “Google Search Tricks To Become A Search Power User.” Or at least the article promises to improve your search skills.
Let’s face it, searching on the Web might seem simple, but it requires a little more brainpower than dumping keywords into a search box. Google makes searching easier and is even the Swiss army knife of answering basic questions. The Medium article does go a step further by drawing old school search tips, such as the asterisk, quotes, parentheses, and others. These explanations, however, need to be read more than once to understand how the tools work:
My favorite of all, single word followed by a ‘*’ will do wonders. But yeah this will not narrow your results; still it keeps a wider range of search results. You’ll need to fine tune to find exactly what you want. This way is useful in case when you don’t remember more than a word or two but you still you want to search fully of it.
Having used some of these tips myself, they actually make searching more complicated than taking a little extra time to read the search results. I am surprised that they did not include the traditional Boolean operators that usually work, more or less. Sometimes search tips cause more trouble than they are worth.
Whitney Grace, January 18, 2016
Big Data Is a Big Mess
January 18, 2017
Big Data and Cloud Computing were supposed to make things easier for the C-Suites to take billion dollar decisions. But it seems things have started to fall apart.
In an article published by Forbes titled The Data Warehouse Has Failed, Will Cloud Computing Die Next?, the author says:
A company that sells software tools designed to put intelligence controls into data warehousing environments says that traditional data warehousing approaches are flaky. Is this just a platform to spin WhereScape wares, or does Whitehead have a point?
WhereScape, a key player in Data Warehousing is admitting that the buzzwords in the IT industry are fizzing out. The Big Data is being generated, in abundance, but companies still are unsure what to do with the enormous amount of data that their companies produce.
Large corporations who already have invested heavily in Big Data are yet to find any RoIs. As the author points out:
Data led organizations have no idea how good their data is. CEOs have no idea where the data they get actually comes from, who is responsible for it etc. yet they make multi million pound decisions based on it. Big data is making the situation worse not better.
Looks like after 3D-Printing, another buzzword in the tech world, Big Data and Cloud Computing is going to be just a fizzled out buzzword.
Vishal Ingole, January 18, 2017
HonkinNews for January 17, 2017 Now Available
January 17, 2017
This week’s HonkinNews takes a look at Yahoo’s post Verizon name. No, our suggestion of yabba dabba hoo or was it “hoot” was not ignored by Yahoo’s marketing wizards. We also highlight Alphabet Google’s erasure of two letters from its “alphabet.” Goners are “S” and “T”. Palantir is hiring a people centric person. The fancy title may have an interesting spin. Two enterprise search vendors kick off 2017 with a blizzard of buzzwords. The depth of the cacaphones is remarkable because search by any other name would return results with questionable precision and recall. The featured story is the Mitre’s Corporation Jason Report. If you have an interest in artificial intelligence and warfighting, the report provides some insight into what the US Department of Defense may be considering. But the highlight of the unclassified document is a helpful description of Google’s TPU. The seven minute program is at this link. For fans of XQuery, we have a bit of input for you too. Proprietary XQuery too. The program is produced in old fashioned black and white and enhanced with theme music from the days of the Stutz Bearcat. From the hotbed of search and content processing, HonkinNews is different. We’re presenting information other big time outfits ignore. Mitre is a variant of Massachusetts Institute of Technology Research. There you go. Live from Harrod’s Creek.
Kenny Toth, January 17, 2017
OpenText Goes Cognitive
January 17, 2017
The Canadian roll up of ageing information access products has a new angle for 2017. No, it is not the OpenText “innovation” tour. No, it is not adding Alexa to its mind boggling array of content access systems such as BRS Search and IDI Information Dimension’s Basis. Not even the historical Fulcrum product gets an Alexa skill.
The future for OpenText is … a next generation cognitive platform.
Even more fascinating is that OpenText has had a Christine Maxwell moment and named the product Magellan. Who remembers the Magellan search and content access system? Ah, no one. I am not surprised. I met a millennial who had never used a camera with roll film yesterday.
If you want to know a bit more about the exciting old-new products, navigate to this OpenText page or follow this link to a video. Yes, a video because OpenText is definitely in step with the next generation of enterprise software customers.
Stephen E Arnold, January 17, 2017
The Uncertainty for Beltway Bandits: Billions at Stake
January 17, 2017
I don’t find CNBC a source of useful information. I did notice a write up with a title which caught my attention; specifically “Trump’s Rift with Intelligence Community Is Spooking US Spy Agency Contractors.” The business of some intelligence agencies boils down to information access, search, and content processing. With digital content readily available, the Beltway Bandits (contractors, consulting outfits, and body shops which provide “services” to the US government have been, are, and should be in hog heaven. Successful Beltway Bandits wallow in money, not mud, I wish to point out.
The CNBC story asserts:
The changing political landscape in Washington and friction between President-elect Donald Trump and the U.S. intelligence community could have major implications not only for the spy agencies but for the shadow private contractors such as Booz Allen Hamilton that support them.
Yikes. The Boozer!
The idea is that
Booz Allen, which gets 97 percent of it revenue from U.S. government agencies, provides everything from cyber and IT services to work designed to enhance the nation’s intelligence capabilities.
CNBC notes:
Overall, the U.S. budget for the national intelligence program was $53 billion in fiscal 2016 and another $17.7 billion for the military intelligence program.
My view from rural Kentucky is that the “total” is probably different from what CNBC reports. One example: What about the budget for projects for the White House, what about entities with one innocuous name which perform “interesting” work. Are these figures tallied?
CNBC notes that despite the uncertainty which accompanies any new president taking office, spending for information and intelligence is likely to go up.
My thought is that Booz, Allen and similar firms are going to chug along. Information access is a tough problem. Who is the president and his appointees going to rely upon? A Yandex query? Experts in Cairo, Illinois? Nope. The Beltway crowd, a tradition for decades.
Stephen E Arnold, January 17, 2017
The Software Behind the Web Sites
January 17, 2017
Have you ever visited an awesome Web site or been curious how an organization manages their Web presence? While we know the answer is some type of software, we usually are not given a specific name. Venture Beat reports that it is possible to figure out the software in the article, “SimilarTech’s Profiler Tells You All Of The Technologies That Web Companies Are Using.”
SimilarTech is a tool designed to crawl the Internet to analyze what technologies, including software, Web site operators use. SimiliarTech is also used to detect which online payment tools are the most popular. It does not come as a surprise that PayPal is the most widely used, with PayPal Subscribe and Alipay in second and third places.
Tracking what technology and software companies utilize for the Web is a boon for salespeople, recruiters, and business development professionals who want a competitive edge as well as:
Overall, SimilarTech provides big data insights about technology adoption and usage analytics for the entire internet, providing access to data that simply wasn’t available before. The insights are used by marketing and sales professionals for website profiling, lead generation, competitive analysis, and business intelligence.
SimiliarTech can also locate contact information for personnel responsible for Web operations, in other words new potential clients.
This tool is kind of like the mailing houses of the past. Mailing houses have data about people, places, organizations, etc. and can generate contact information lists of specific clientele for companies. SimiliarTech offers the contact information, but it does one better by finding the technologies people use for Web site operation.
Whitney Grace, January 17, 2016
-
- Subscribe to Beyond Search
Feature archive
News archive
-
