Security: Whom Does One Trust?
September 19, 2017
I read “The Market Can’t – and Won’t – Deal with IT Security, It Must Be Regulated, Argues Bruce Schneier.” The write up is about online, which is of interest to me. I found the summary of the remarks of Bruce Schneier, a security expert, interesting.
The main point is that government must regulate security. I highlighted this passage:v”The market can’t fix this. Markets work because buyers choose between sellers, and sellers compete for buyers. In case you didn’t notice, you’re not Equifax’s customer. You’re its product.
Several questions occurred to me:
- Which government? Maybe the United Nations?
- What’s the enforcement mechanism? Is after-the-fact “punishment” feasible?
- What’s the end point of security regulation?
Here in rural Kentucky security boils down to keeping an eye on the two brothers who live in a broken down trailer next to the crazy people who have a collection of wild animals. The wild animals are less threatening than these fine examples of Appalachian oak.
In the larger world which includes a number of nation states which are difficult to influence, how are the regulations to be enforced. What if one of these frisky nation states is behind the headline making security breaches?
Answers to this question are likely to be cause for discussion. Talk is easy. Remediation may be a bit more difficult. Perhaps the barn has burned and the horses already converted to glue and dog food?
Fixes are hard. Talk, well, just talk.
Stephen E Arnold, September 19, 2017
Google Invests Hefty Sums in Lobbying Efforts
September 19, 2017
Since Microsoft was caught flat-footed by antitrust charges in 1992, the tech industry has steadily increased its lobbying efforts. Now, The Guardian asks, “Why is Google Spending Record Sums on Lobbying Washington?” Writer Johathan Taplin describes some reasons today’s political climate prompts such spending and points out that Google is the “largest monopoly in America,” though the company does its best to downplay that trait. He also notes that Google is libertarian in nature, and staunchly advocates against regulation. Looking forward, Taplin posits:
Much of Google’s lobbying may be directed toward its future business. That will be running artificial intelligence networks that control the transportation, medical, legal and educational businesses of the future. In a speech last Saturday to the National Governor’s Conference, the tech entrepreneur Elon Musk stated: ‘AI is a rare case where I think we need to be proactive in regulation instead of reactive.’ Coming from a Silicon Valley libertarian, this was a rare admission, but Musk went on to say: ‘There certainly will be job disruption. Because what’s going to happen is robots will be able to do everything better than us … I mean all of us.’ Both Google and Facebook pushed back hard against Musk’s remarks, because they have achieved their extraordinary success by working in an unregulated business environment. But now, for the first time in their histories, the possibility of regulation may be on the horizon. Google’s response will be to spend more of its $90 bn in cash on politicians. K Street is lining up to help.
We are reminded that, for many industries, lobbying Congress has long been considered a routine cost of doing business. The tech industry is now firmly in that category and is beginning to outspend the rest. See the article for more details.
Cynthia Murrell, September 19, 2017
Watson Seeks to Fix Legal System
September 19, 2017
The United States imprisons more people than any other country in the world. The justice system, however, is broken and needs to be repaired. How can this be done? IBM’s Watson might have the answer. Engadget shares that: “Watson Is Helping Heal America’s Broken Criminal-Sentencing System” and it could be the start of fixing the broken system. One of the worst problems in the US penitentiary is overcrowding and that most of the incarcerated people are in a minority ethnic group.
Watson is being implemented to repair this disparity. Human judgment can be swayed by the smallest item, so implementing artificial intelligence may make the justice system more objective. AI is not infallible is can wrongly sentence convicts. The best solution right now is to use a mixture of AI and real human logic. IBM works hand and hand with Ohio’s Montgomery County Juvenile Court System to start a pilot program that provides a judge a summary of a child’s life in order to make better choices for his/her care.
Judge Anthony Capizzi is eager to use the AI care-management system, because it will help him synthesize information better and hopefully make more informed decisions.
With this system, however, the judge is afforded a more-complete view of the child’s life, her essential information displayed on a dashboard that can be updated in real-time. Should the judge need additional details, he can easily have it pulled up. [Capizzi said], ‘If I have 10 care providers in my region, can Watson tell me — because of where that child lives, their educational background, their limitations, their family — is there a better one for that child versus the nine others?’
The Watson-based system will deliver more accurate answers the more information fed into it. The hope is that it will be implemented in the other Ohio counties and other systems will be developed for other justice systems. There is still the potential that the Ai could become biased, but there is always a learning curve to make the system work and build a better justice system for the future.
Whitney Grace, September 19, 2015
Amazon Factoids: Match Game for Google, IBM, and MSFT?
September 18, 2017
I am not sure if the data in this Amazon write up are accurate. Navigate to “Prime Day 2017 – Powered by AWS” and make your own decision. I noted these “factoids” about Amazon’s cloud Olympic winning dead lift:
Block Storage – Use of Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) grew by 40% year-over-year, with aggregate data transfer jumping to 52 petabytes (a 50% increase) for the day and total I/O requests rising to 835 million (a 30% increase). The team told me that they loved the elasticity of EBS, and that they were able to ramp down on capacity after Prime Day concluded instead of being stuck with it.
NoSQL Database – Amazon DynamoDB requests from Alexa, the Amazon.com sites, and the Amazon fulfillment centers totaled 3.34 trillion, peaking at 12.9 million per second. According to the team, the extreme scale, consistent performance, and high availability of DynamoDB let them meet needs of Prime Day without breaking a sweat.
Stack Creation – Nearly 31,000 AWS CloudFormation stacks were created for Prime Day in order to bring additional AWS resources on line.
API Usage – AWS CloudTrail processed over 50 billion events and tracked more than 419 billion calls to various AWS APIs, all in support of Prime Day.
Configuration Tracking – AWS Config generated over 14 million Configuration items for AWS resources.
Is Amazon reminding customers or competitors that it does more than sell books and buy grocery stores? Is Amazon doing PR?
Stephen E Arnold, September 18, 2017
Old School Publishing: On the Ropes?
September 18, 2017
If you are interested professional publishing, you will want to read “We’ve Failed: Pirate Black Open Access Is Trumping Green and Gold and We Must Change Our Approach.” The “colorful” metaphors aside, there are some interesting statements in the article, which is available online without a fee.
I noted this passage:
Not for the first time, pirates are delivering where the established players and legal channels are not.
I also highlighted this idea for professional publishers:
What if, like the airline industry, publishers unbundled their product and started to test the value of some of the elements that form the bundle?
Please, read the full article, which is free I wish to reiterate, and think about the business decisions companies dependent on the business model for professional information services.
There’s nothing like an uncomfortable coach class seat.
Stephen E Arnold, September 18, 2017
A Write Up about Facebook Reveals Shocking Human Weakness
September 18, 2017
What do I need with another write up about Facebook? We use the service to post links to stories in this blog, Beyond Search. My dog has an account to use when a site demands a Facebook user name and password. That’s about it. For me, Facebook is an online service which sells ads and provides useful information to some analysts and investigators. Likes, mindless uploading of images, and obsessive checking of the service. Sorry, not for a 74 year old in rural Kentucky, thank you very much.
I did read “How Facebook Tricks You Into Trusting Algorithms.”
I noted this statement, which I think is interesting:
The [Facebook] News Feed is meant to be fun, but also geared to solve one of the essential problems of modernity—our inability to sift through the ever-growing, always-looming mounds of information.
Why use Facebook instead of a service like Talkwalker? Here’s the answer:
Who better, the theory goes, to recommend what we should read and watch than our friends? Zuckerberg has boasted that the News Feed turned Facebook into a “personalized newspaper.”
Several observations:
- The success of Facebook is less about “friends” and more about anomie, the word I think used by Émile Durkheim to describe one aspect of “modern” life.
- The human mind, it seems, can form attachments to inanimate objects like Teddy Bears, animate objects like a human or dog, or to simulacra which intermediate for the user between the inanimate and the animate.
- Assembling large populations of “customers”, Facebook has a way to sell ads based on human actions as identified by the Facebook monitoring software.
So what?
As uncertainty spikes, the “value” of Facebook will go up. No online service is invulnerable. Ennui, competition, management missteps, or technological change can undermine even the most dominant company.
I am not sure that Facebook “tricks” anyone. The company simply responds to the social opportunity modern life presents to people in many countries.
Build a life via the gig economy? Nah, pretty tough to do.
Generate happiness via Likes? Nah, ping ponging between angst and happiness is the new normal.
Become a viral success? Nah, better chance at a Las Vegas casino for most folks?
Facebook, therefore, is something that would have to be created if the real Facebook did not exist.
Will Facebook gain more “power”? Absolutely. Human needs are forever. Likes are transient. Keep on clicking. Algorithms will do the rest.
Stephen E Arnold, September 18, 2017
SEO Write Up Explains How to Create a Web Page within Google Local
September 18, 2017
Blogger.com may be sitting on the sidelines. An injured thigh muscle maybe? How can a business create a presence in Google results without a Web page?
That’s the question “Local SEO” tries to answer. And answer the question it does.
The write up does a good job of explaining how to create a “free” Web page about your business complete with images.
My thought is that the Google may be enriching its trove of information with free services that foreshadow content creation.
Instead of searching for user-created blog content in Google News via a wonky hidden option, the user created content can just “live” within the Google Local system.
That’s one way to deliver “unified search.” Remember that concept from the universal search assertions from about 10 years ago.
Fragmentation in Google services? What fragmentation? There’s no fragmentation in Android and there is no fragmentation in Google search results as long as one runs separate, serial queries across Google Books, Google News, et al. Oh, and Blogger.com. Perhaps not for long?
Stephen E Arnold, September 18, 2017
Twitch Incorporates ClipMine Discovery Tools
September 18, 2017
Gameplay-streaming site Twitch has adapted the platform of their acquisition ClipMine, originally developed for adding annotations to online videos, into a metadata-generator for its users. (Twitch is owned by Amazon.) TechCrunch reports the development in, “Twitch Acquired Video Indexing Platform ClipMine to Power New Discovery Features.” Writer Sarah Perez tells us:
The startup’s technology is now being put to use to translate visual information in videos – like objects, text, logos and scenes – into metadata that can help people more easily find the streams they want to watch. Launched back in 2015, ClipMine had originally introduced a platform designed for crowdsourced tagging and annotations. The idea then was to offer a technology that could sit over top videos on the web – like those on YouTube, Vimeo or DailyMotion – that allowed users to add their own annotations. This, in turn, would help other viewers find the part of the video they wanted to watch, while also helping video publishers learn more about which sections were getting clicked on the most.
Based in Palo Alto, ClipMine went on to make indexing tools for the e-sports field and to incorporate computer vision and machine learning into their work. Their platform’s ability to identify content within videos caught Twitch’s eye; Perez explains:
Traditionally, online video content is indexed much like the web – using metadata like titles, tags, descriptions, and captions. But Twitch’s streams are live, and don’t have as much metadata to index. That’s where a technology like ClipMine can help. Streamers don’t have to do anything differently than usual to have their videos indexed, instead, ClipMine will analyze and categorize the content in real-time.
ClipMine’s technology has already been incorporated into stream-discovery tools for two games from Blizzard Entertainment, “Overwatch” and “Hearthstone;” see the article for more specifics on how and why. Through its blog, Twitch indicates that more innovations are on the way.
Cynthia Murrell, September 18, 2017
Yandex Adds Deep Neural Net Algorithm
September 18, 2017
One of Google’s biggest rivals, at least in Asia, is Russian search engine Yandex and in efforts to keep themselves on top of search, Yandex added a new algorithm and a few other new upgrades. Neowin explains what the upgrades are in the article, “Yandex Rolls Out Korolev Neural Net Search Algorithm.” Yandex named its upgraded deep neural network search algorithm Korolev and they also added Yandex. Toloka new mass-scale crowdsources platform that feeds search results into MatrixNext.
Korolev was designed to handle long-tail queries in two new ways its predecessor Palekh could not. Korolev delves into a Web page’s entire content and also it can analyze documents a thousand times faster in real time. It is also designed to learn the more it is used, so accuracy will improve the more Korolev is used.
Korolev had an impressive release and namesake:
The new Korolev algorithm was announced at a Yandex event at the Moscow Planetarium. Korolev is of course named after the Soviet rocket engineer, Sergei Korolev, who oversaw the Sputnik project, 60 years ago, and the mission that saw Yuri Gagarin get to space. Yandex teleconferenced with Fyodor Yurchikhin and Sergey Ryazansky who are currently representing Russia on the International Space Station.
Yandex is improving its search engine results and services to keep on top of the industry and technology.
Whitney Grace, September 18, 2015
Product Search: Hard Numbers or Flights of Fancy?
September 16, 2017
I read “Amazon Shakes Up Search, Again.” I was not aware of Amazon’s shaking up search because there are numerous ways to define the term. The write up narrows “search” to people in three countries who buy products or look for product information online. Ah, good, I think.
My hunch is that the “shake up” is related to the data that suggests Amazon has three times as many product searches than Google. The assertion did not “shake” me up because Google’s product search is not particularly useful. I thought that Froogle had a shot at becoming a daughter-of-Amazon, but the GOOG lost interest. Sure, I can search for a product using Google, but the results are often not what I want. Your mileage may vary.
But back to the write up. I noted some factoids which may be useful to those who are giving talks about product search, those who work for a consulting firm and must appear super smart, or folks like me who collect data, no matter how wild or crazy.
Here we go with the “shake up” from 3,100 consumers in the US, Germany, and the UK:
- 72 percent use Amazon to research a product before buying the product
- 51 percent use Amazon as a way to get “alternative ideas”
- 26 percent use Amazon to get information and price when they plan on visiting a real store
- 84 percent of “searchers” in the US use Google
- 71 percent of “searchers” in the US use Amazon
- 36 percent use Facebook in the US use Amazon
- 24 percent use Pinterest in the US use Amazon
- 31 percent use eBay in the US use Amazon
- 80 percent in the UK use Google
- 73 percent use Amazon in the UK
- 9 percent use Bing in France
- 6 percent us Bing in the UK
- 6 percent use Bing in Germany
- 20 percent of searchers use Bing
- Amazon stocks or “carries” 353 million products. Put aside the idea that percentages usually work on a scale of zero to 100, please:
- 59 percent are “health and beauty”
- 57 percent are “music, movies, or games”
- 55 percent are “books”
- 52 percent fashion or clothing
- 46 percent are home appliances
- 40 percent are furniture and home furnishings
- 39 percent are toys
- 34 percent are sports equipment and clothing
- 26 percent are garden equipment and furniture (?)
- 26 percent are food and grocery
- 9 percent are beer, wine and spirits.
So if there are 353 million products and the percentage data are correct, the total percentage of products is 443 percent. I did not the duplicate furniture entry but counted the percentage anyway. Also, there was no value for garden equipment and furniture so I used “26 percent”. Close enough for millennials steeped in new math.
My math teacher (Verna Blackburn) in my freshman year of high school in 1958 had an dunce cap. I think I can suggest one research report author who might have been invited to wear the 24 inch tall cap. The 443 percent would shake up deal Miss Blackburn. She also threw chalk at students when they made errors when solving on the blackboards which were on three walls of her classroom. The fourth wall looked out over asphalt to the smokestacks of the former RG Letourneau mortar factory. Getting math wrong at that outfit could indeed shake up some things.
Stephen E Arnold, September 16, 2017
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