Not Everyone Is Nervous about Google
April 3, 2018
Over at the Android Authority, writer Tristan Rayner has crafted a counter argument to former Google engineer Steve Yegge’s criticism of the company. Yegge spent 13 years at Google, after a 6-year stint at Amazon, and claims Google is suffering from a profound failure to innovate. Rayner disagrees, mostly, countering the departing engineer’s assertion with specific points. See the write-up for the details of those defenses, including shifting perceptions of what is “innovative” and considerations of scale. A list of several areas where Google is in the lead rounds out Rayner’s case, beginning with AI:
“A short and incomplete list of things Google is leading in starts with AI. Google Assistant dominates everything other than Alexa. The DeepMind acquisition has famously beaten Go, and also improved energy efficiency at global data centers, and their photo and image AI is world class. Of course, that’s only scratching the surface. It’s very hard to see what’s changing in Search, which raises an important point. First we see the big innovations, such as Search, Gmail, YouTube, Maps, and StreetView. The curse of such successful innovation is that it grows to become enormous. The Google Search codebase is more than two billion lines of code. Search is locked into first place, and decades of fine-tuning — more than 50 million commits — have kept Google in front. That’s innovation we’ll rarely see any hint of beyond better results. Most of us use Google Maps as a boring-but-necessary utility, rather than a source of delight. It isn’t exciting anymore, but Google is so far ahead of other map services it’s ridiculous. … “With the new AI-powered Clips camera, Google Photos will offer amazing AI insight into your photos, as well as free storage and a host of new experimental Photos apps. Google AMP was a response to Facebook Instant Articles and it won — AMP is now a significant part of the web for publishers.”
Speculation about certain personalities involved and inter-corporate rivalry conclude the write-up. Rayner makes a point of his respect for Yegge as a professional, but is firmly convinced he is mistaken on this one.
Cynthia Murrell, April 3, 2018
Cambridge Analytica: The April 3, 2018, DarkCyber Report Is Now Available
April 3, 2018
DarkCyber for April 3, 2018, is now available. The new program can be viewed at www.arnoldit.com/wordpress and on Vimeo at https://vimeo.com/262710424.
This week’s program focuses on the Facebook, GSR, Cambridge Analytica data controversy. The 12 minute video addresses the role of GSR and the Cambridge professor who developed a personality profile app. The DarkCyber program outlines how raw social data is converted into actionable, psychographic “triggers.” By connecting individuals, groups, and super-groups with “hot buttons” and contentious political issues, behaviors can be influenced, often in an almost undetectable way.
The DarkCyber research team has assembled information from open source coverage of Cambridge Analytica and has created a generalized “workflow” for the Facebook-type data set. The outputs of the workflow are “triggers” which can be converted into shaped messages which are intended to influence behaviors of individuals, groiups, and super-groups.
The program explains how psychographic analyses differ from the more well known demographic analyses of Facebook data. The link analysis or social graph approach is illustrated in such a way that anyone can grasp the potential of this data outputs. The program includes a recommendation for software which anyone with basic programming skills can use to generate “graphs” of relationships, centers of influence, and individuals who are likely to take cues from these centers of influence.
DarkCyber’s next special feature focuses on the Grayshift GrayKey iPhone unlocking product. The air date will appear in Beyond Search.
Kenny Toth, April 3, 2018
Google Amp: Good for Google. Others? Hmmm.
April 2, 2018
Google Amp receives a bit of lab testing from TimKadlec.com. The article is “How Fast Is Amp Really?”
The write up, complete with hard data and graphs, is worth reading. Google Amp is supposed to speed up the mobile Web for those who view pages on mobile phones. (That’s about 60 percent of the world by some estimates.)
Here’s a snippet from this useful analysis:
If we’re grading AMP on the goal of making the web faster, the evidence isn’t particularly compelling. Every single one of these publishers has an AMP version of these articles in addition to a non-AMP version. Every. Single. One. And for more often than not, these non-AMP versions are heavy and slow. If you’re reading news on these sites and you didn’t click through specifically to the AMP library, then AMP hasn’t done a single thing to improve your experience. AMP hasn’t solved the core problem; it has merely hidden it a little bit.
Beyond Search believes that Amp is good for the Google, maybe not so much for the user geese.
Stephen E Arnold, April 2, 2018
Will Google Management Face a Pullman Moment?
April 2, 2018
We noted “Exclusive: Google Employees Organize to Fight Cyber Bullying at Work.” When I first scanned the headline, I wondered if Google was taking a stand to minimize social media users from beating up on people. Then I wondered if Google employees were trying to curb bullying at and within the Alphabet Google itself.
Could Google employees strike for better treatment of lower tier elite employees?
The write up explains that the employees want to offer “policies” to to improve the conduct of fellow employees. I learned:
Google should tighten rules of conduct for internal forums and hire staff to enforce them. They [the employees who want to curtail bullying] said they want to stop inflammatory conversations and personal attacks on the forums and see punishment for individuals who regularly derail discussions or leak conversations. The group also wants Google to list rights and responsibilities for accusers, defendants, managers and investigators in human resources cases. The group also desires greater protection for employees targeted by what it views as insincere complaints to human resources used as a bullying tactic and goading.
As Google tries to diversify and treat people equally, some behaviors may have to be modified. In my experience, outfits which perceive themselves to be elite create micro elites within the organization. The idea obviously is to be the most elite of the elite. This approach is part of what some have called the “bro culture” and what I describe as the high school science club approach. A group of “elite”—whom some might describe as arrogant and socially flawed individuals—stick together to preserve their eliteness. I noticed this behavior among the nuclear engineers at Halliburton Nuclear when I worked there in the 1970s. Some nuclear engineers were just more special; for example, the requisite training in math, chemistry, and physics and the cachet of graduating from the Naval Academy. A mere nuclear engineer from a traditional university was a second class person. You can imagine how this crowd reacted to a person like me who indexed Latin sermons and landed in this “elite” outfit.l
There is another issue looming at Google. This problem did not crop up when I moved from the Halliburton Nuclear outfit to Booz, Allen & Hamilton (another elite-type operation).
Google may be facing a unionization moment. That would make life exciting for the elite of the elite. I know that selling ads seems a bit down market, but from this modest grousing, the Alphabet Google elite may have to manage or face a Pullman moment.
Stephen E Arnold, April 2, 2018
Can Factmata Do What Other Text Analytics Firms Cannot?
April 2, 2018
Consider it a sign of the times—Information Management reveals, “Twitter, Craigslist Co-Founders Back Fact-Check Startup Factmata.” Writer Jeremy Kahn reports:
“Twitter Inc. co-founder Biz Stone and Craigslist Inc. co-founder Craig Newmark are investing in London-based fact-checking startup Factmata, the company said Thursday. … Factmata aims to use artificial intelligence to help social media companies, publishers and advertising networks weed out fake news, propaganda and clickbait. The company says its technology can also help detect online bullying and hate speech.”
Particularly amid concerns about the influence of Russian-backed propaganda in U.S. and the U.K., several tech firms and other organizations have taken aim at false information online. What about Factmata has piqued the interest of leading investors? We’re informed:
“Dhruv Ghulati, Factmata’s chief executive officer, said the startup’s approach to fact-checking differs from other companies. While some companies are looking at a wide range of content, Factmata is initially focused exclusively on news. Many automated fact-checking approaches rely primarily on metadata – the information behind the scenes that describe online news items and other posts. But Factmata is using natural language processing to assess the actual words, including the logic being used, whether assertions are backed up by facts and whether those facts are attributed to reputable sources.”
Ghulati goes on to predict Facebook will be supplanted as users’ number one news source within the next decade. Apparently, we can look forward to the launch of Factmata’s own news service sometime “later this year.”
We will wait. We do want to point out that based on the information available to the Beyond Search and DarkCyber research teams, no vendor has been able to identify text which is weaponized at a high level of accuracy without the assistance of expensive, human, and vacation hungry subject matter experts.
Maybe Factmata will “mata”?
Cynthia Murrell, April 2, 2018
Facebook WhatsApp Seems to Be Humming Along
April 1, 2018
If anyone still had doubts that Facebook’s 2014 purchase of WhatsApp was a wise deal, this news should put them to rest. In an article at the U.K.’s Express, cryptically titled “WhatsApp Announces Huge News and Its Rivals Will Not Be Happy,” it is revealed that the messaging app now has 1.5 billion active monthly users, and transmits an astounding 60 billion messages per day. Writer David Snelling shares some more relevant facts:
“Facebook bought WhatsApp back in 2014 for $19 billion (£13.4billion) and that investment appears to have been worth every penny. Along with WhatsApp’s success, Zuckerberg also revealed that Facebook-owned Instagram is now the most popular Story-sharing product in the world. According to TechCrunch, Instagram Stories now has around 300 million daily active users, that’s compared to some 178 million who opt for rival service Snapchat. The news of these huge numbers comes as WhatsApp recently revealed another record. The messaging firm said it saw 75 billion messages sent across the service on New Year’s Eve. That number eclipses any other day in WhatsApp’s history with the previous record of 65 million on New Year’s Eve 2016 well and truly smashed. WhatsApp says that of the 75 billion messages sent, 13 billion were photos and five billion included videos.”
Now after what seems a long time when measured in Internet moments, a WhatsApp user can change the “number” to which an account is attached. We wonder how many new accounts were triggered by frustrated users who had to sign up again and again.
No fooling.
Cynthia Murrell, April 1, 2018
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