Google: Office Pix
June 27, 2018
A brief write-up at the Android Police supplies a bit of PR for Google— “Tip: Google Photos Can Find All the Photos You’ve Taken at ‘Work’.” We like that “work” angle. Writer Rita El Khoury observes that one of Google’s finest products, as she sees it, has added several features since it came out, including a function that auto-groups users’ photos. It seems she and her colleagues stumbled upon one apparently unheralded feature. She writes:
“But did you know that you can search Photos for ‘work’ and get all the images you’ve snapped at work? I didn’t. We’re not sure how new or old the functionality is, but we just ran across it and it seems very helpful. If your work requires you keep tab of documents or items, or if you make creative products that you catalog, or if you snap pics at work for any other miscellaneous reason, you may want an easy way to filter those photos. You can quickly do that by typing ‘work’ in the Google Photos search field. Photos is probably using your Google location setting for home and work to quickly sift and find pictures taken at work. However, doing a search for ‘Home’ doesn’t yield results of pictures taken at home — instead it shows me all photos of houses and homes that I’ve taken.”
Perhaps Google recognizes there could be more security issues behind automatically grouping photos taken at “home” than there would be for those taken at “work.” That’s a welcome bit of common sense, but it still seems problematic to assign a “work” grouping unbidden. I suppose I’m just old-fashioned that way.
Cynthia Murrell, June 27, 2018
Google Exam Fail
June 26, 2018
On one of my jaunts to the world’s largest “search” engine, I picked up a copy of the GLAT. The Google Labs’ Aptitude Test is an interesting document. In fact, I have emailed selected questions to individuals who told me they were really good at problem solving. Here’s a representative question:
Question 10: On an infinite, two-dimensional, rectangular lattice of 1-ohm resistors, what is the resistance between two nodes that are a knight’s move away?
When I reviewed these “questions,” I realized that a computer science major with a desire to work as a comedy writer was at work. Now a “real” online news service has gathered information about Google’s “test” and “interview” questions.
“Google Admits Those Infamous Brainteasers Were Completely Useless for Hiring” states:
Google has admitted that the head scratching questions it once used to quiz job applicants (How many piano tuners are there in the entire world? Why are manhole covers round?) were utterly useless as a predictor of who will be a good employee.
Instead of a sense of humor, an expert in hiring allegedly says:
They [the questions] don’t predict anything. They serve primarily to make the interviewer feel smart.”
My observations about Google’s hiring process are uninformed. I live in rural Kentucky, which explains quite a bit about my intellectual capabilities.
I look at what’s going on in what seems to be my real world. Right now, Google’s hiring has created factions within the company. Employees who are paid to work on tasks Google gives them are demanding that the company abandon government contracts. Others are protesting social issues.
I have been out of my office since June 3, venturing into the wilds of Central Europe and the backwoods of North Carolina. I have noticed that Google has decided that some MIT videos are not suitable for distribution by YouTube. There are statements from the Google SEO expert that Google delivers great search experiences. And there are the dust ups between Google and the EU as well as a back door play to make Google a player in the Chinese market.
Judging from Google’s singular dependence on a business model artfully inspired by GoTo.com, Overture.com, and Yahoo advertising, Google’s hiring has been interesting and consistent.
Google management manifests itself via its hiring, its employees, and their actions. Tests and questions are, it seems, not particularly useful when it comes to assembling a bright, hard working, dedicated workforce.
Stephen E Arnold, June 26, 2018
Microsoft Tweaks Bing Thing
June 26, 2018
Microsoft, do you know that many non-Internet savvy people use Bing? Perhaps that is too much of a generalization, but experience will tell you that Google does deliver better results. It seems, however, that Microsoft has made a decent Bing upgrade, says the eWeek article, “Microsoft Uses Intel FPGAs For Smarter Bing Searches.”
Google has a feature where you type in a search term and it will spit out a small, informative blurb about it. Bing is “copying” that idea, so Microsoft added Intel field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) to make the search engine smarter. This endeavor is based on the deep learning acceleration platform Project Brainwave. The FPGAs allow Bing to gather information from multiple sources and spit out an information tidbit:
“‘Intel’s FPGA chips allows Bing to quickly read and analyze billions of documents across the entire web and provide the best answer to your question in less than a fraction of a second,’ wrote Microsoft representatives in a blog post. ‘Intel’s FPGA devices not only provide Bing the real-time performance needed to keep our search fast for our users, but also the agility to continuously and quickly innovate using more and more advanced technology to bring you additional intelligent answers and better search results.’”
Bing is also using the new FPGAs to translate jargon, working on a how-to answer feature, and upgrading image search with an object detection tool. eBay and Pinterest may be exploring similar functionality.
Whitney Grace, June 26, 2018
Video Filtering: You Can Do It and for Free
June 26, 2018
YouTube has long been perceived as the crown jewel of almost anything goes online video streaming. Sure, there have been some minor problems; for example, blocking MIT instructional videos. Google is not standing still.
We learned more from a recent Vice piece, “Are You Batman? How YouTube’s Volunteer Army Gets Channels Un-Deleted.”
According to the story:
“These super-users volunteer for YouTube through a company initiative that used to be called “YouTube Heroes” but is now known as two separate programs, Trusted Flaggers and YouTube Contributors. They patrol the official YouTube Help Forum and social media, where many of them use TweetDeck to sift for keywords that signal distressed YouTubers.”
This effort for helping others via crowdsourcing is really stretching its limits in interesting ways. Another example is how coders are helping crowdsource stem cell research. Whether it is helping the unjust get reinstated to YouTube or to save lives, crowdsourcing has become a massive way for do-gooders to do good.
A large company can make good use of work from its customers. Are these Googley programs working? Instagram’s new extended video service may help answer this question.
Patrick Roland, June 25, 2018
DarkCyber for June 26, 2018 Now Available
June 26, 2018
This week’s DarkCyber is now available at www.arnoldit.com/wordpress and on Vimeo at https://vimeo.com/?276722659? .
DarkCyber’s story line up for this week’s program includes four stories.
First, the FBI and other US enforcement agencies shut down a child pornography ring. After a three month sweep, officials from 61 different law enforcement organizations identified 195 offenders, primarily in the United States.
Second, investigators arrested OxyMonster (aka Gal Vallerius). The bearded drug kingpin inadvertently leaked information about his identify via a mismanaged Bitcoin wallet. When arrested at the Atlanta airport, Mr. Vallerius sported a bright red orange beard. He also had documents revealing that he was a citizen of France, Israel, and the United Kingdom.
The third story provides information about Warwire’s image identification and analysis software. An investigator can automatically review, identify, classify, and metatag images from popular sites such as Facebook and Twitter. Data can be displayed on a map so that images related to a particular event or incident can be reviewed in a fraction of the time required for manual review of visual imagery.
The fourth story provides updated cybercrime statistics. Among the data presented in this week’s DarkCyber program is a revised estimate of the dollar value of illegal drugs, services, and transactions. Arnold also provides information about the growing financial impact of ransomware and compromised personal financial information.
Kenny Toth, June 26, 2018
Applying Blockchain Technology to AI Systems
June 25, 2018
The founder of Ocean Protocol and BigchainDB, Trent McConaghy, has written a detailed piece for the BigchainDB’s Blog titled, “Blockchains for Artificial Intelligence: from Decentralized Model Exchanges to Model Audit Trails.” In it, the engineer explains what blockchain technology offers the AI field. See the article for his philosophy, an interesting history lesson on AI and data, and his assertion that the performance issues inherent in blockchain tech are no big deal. Not yet, anyway.
After this thorough introduction, the piece spells out six opportunities McConaghy foresees for this blessed union: Data sharing for better models; Data sharing for qualitatively new models, including “new planet-level data for new planet-level insights” (more on that in a moment); Audit trails on data and models for more trustworthy predictions; a Shared global registry of training data and models; Data and models as IP assets for data and model exchange; and AI DAOs (Decentralized Autonomous Organizations), or “code that owns itself.” See the piece for details on each of these ideas.
Back to the planet-level data concept, which I found interesting. McConaghy references the Interplanetary Database, or IPDB, in his explanation. We’re told:
“IPDB is structured data on a global scale, rather than piecemeal. Think of the World Wide Web as a file system on top of the internet; IPDB is its database counterpart. (I think the reason we didn’t see more work on this sooner is that semantic web work tried to go there, from the angle of upgrading a file system. But it’s pretty hard to build a database by ‘upgrading’ a file system! It’s more effective to say from the start that you’re building a database, and designing as such.) ‘Global variable’ gets interpreted a bit more literally. …
I also noted this statement:
“Overall, we get a whole new scale for diversity of datasets and data feeds. Therefore, we have qualitatively new data. Planetary level structured data. From that, we can build qualitatively new models, that make relations which among inputs & outputs which weren’t connected before. With the models and from the models, we will get qualitatively new insights. I wish I could be more specific here, but at this point it’s so new that I can’t think of any examples. But, they will emerge!”
We are curious to see what does emerge, and to what purposes the technology is applied. Stay tuned.
Cynthia Murrell, June 25, 2018
Amazon: A Corporate Monster?
June 25, 2018
I am not sure about companies becoming republics or democracies. When I went to work at Halliburton Nuclear, I knew the business and understood that I would get paid to do what my boss told me to do.
I am oriented the same way today in 2018 as I was in 1973. Call me old fashioned.
I read “Amazon Staffers Protest Giant’s ‘Support of the Surveillance State‘”. Okay, employees do not want Amazon to work on certain government projects. Why not quit?
I assume that’s not an option.
I did notice some interesting word choices in the write up; for example:
- “cops and spies”
- “moral objections”
- “separating children”
- “asylum seeking parents”
- “chain link cages”
- “shudder Amazonians”
- “refuse to build the platform”
- “ethically concerned Amazonians”
- “demand a choice”
- “data slurping outfit Palantir”
- “linked to the Cambridge Aanlytica data harvesting saga?
- “immoral US policy”
- “inhumane treatment:
- “enable ICE and DHS”
- “Privacy International”
- “disgraced US agency”
- “condemn the policy”
Quite a series of phrases.
Yep, real “news”. Perfect for a Facebook, Google Plus, or Twitter post or two. Wait, wait. That’s how exploiting algorithmic functions gain their momentum. Words work wonders.
Stephen E Arnold, June 25, 2018
Unlocking iPhones: Cat and Mouse Continues
June 25, 2018
In a recent DarkCyber, referenced companies that specialize in unlocking iPhones for law enforcement. Apple responded by suggesting that it would alter the functionality of its lightning USB connector to provide greater user privacy.
At the security conference in Winston Salem, North Carolina, last week, I heard some talk about the issues that the Apple versus law enforcement cat and mouse game would create. (I gave two talks available to the 160 conference attendees. No boos and not thrown tomatoes.)
My impression of these comments is that the games will continue.
I was not surprised to read “A Hacker Figured Out How to Brute Force iPhone Passcodes.” Has the hacker kicked off a new round of game playing? Who knows?
The write up states:
A security researcher has figured out how to brute force a passcode on any up-to-date iPhone or iPad, bypassing the software’s security mechanisms… But Matthew Hickey, a security researcher and co-founder of cybersecurity firm Hacker House, found a way to bypass the 10-time limit and enter as many codes as he wants — even on iOS 11.3.
The method revealed in the write up is clever, like many hacks.
The write up quotes the hacker as saying, “I suspect others will find it [the hack] or have already found it.
Worth monitoring the score line.
Stephen E Arnold, June 25, 2018
Psychic Software: Yeah, We Know
June 23, 2018
Coming soon to a search system near you? Science Alert declares, “Scientists Have Invented a Software That Can ‘See’ Several Minutes Into the Future.”
Writer Mike McRae reports on the predictive-analysis progress of researchers at Germany’s University of Bonn. The goal—to predict a sequence of activities five minutes into the future. McRae explains their two approaches:
“The team tested two approaches using different types of artificial neural network: one that anticipated future actions and reflected before anticipating again, and another that built a matrix in one hit before crunching the probabilities. As you’d expect, the deeper they looked into the future, the more mistakes they made. ‘Accuracy was over 40 percent for short forecasting periods, but then declined the more the algorithm needed to look into the future,’ says Gall. The reflective approach did a little better than the matrix method when looking at the next 20 seconds, but the two different neural networks were equally matched when looking beyond 40 seconds. At the extreme end, the scientists discovered their trained program could correctly predict an action and its duration 3 minutes in the future roughly 15 percent of the time. That might not sound impressive, but it does establish solid ground for future artificial intelligence that could potentially develop super-human foresight.”
The researchers plan to present their results at the IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition in Salt Lake City, which McRae hopes will generate more interest in predictive software. Though we already have cautionary tales about the limits of this technology, there remain many positive possibilities, he notes.
We wonder when Recorded Future will adopt this approach.
Cynthia Murrell, June 23, 2018
Ink Stained Wretches: You Are Redundant, Says Smart Software
June 23, 2018
Artificial intelligence is revolutionizing skilled and unskilled tasks with wicked efficiency, from juggling the wait times on a customer service line to sentencing hardened criminals. One skilled task that looks like it will be the next on the chopping block is journalism. We found out more from a recent Big Think story, “AI’s Newest Target for Worker Displacement: Journalism.”
The story followed a Bloomberg News employee who recently lost his job:
“AI, he believes, had a part in ending his 12-year employment. He estimates that one-quarter of his tasks were taken by software that crawled filings and press releases for news and flashed headlines automatically. Another recently unemployed journalist, who requested anonymity to speak on the record, said that as much as 60% of her tasks had become automated over the past few years.”
However, not everyone is ready to doom journalism because of AI. Some actually think AI will save the writerly vocation. “It can do the background research, call contacts to get their statements, report on the daily news cycle and so forth,” says one commentator. This seems to make sense and only muddies the water of AI and it’s general impact on our lives. It is either the end of humanity or the start of a new, wonderful era. It all depends on your perspective.
AI may not write like a crafty NYT or WSJ wizard, but no vacations, no breaks, and no health care. What’s not to like?
Patrick Roland, June 23, 2018
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