A group of small advertisers suing the Menlo Park social media titan alleged in the filing that Facebook “induced” advertisers to buy video ads on its platform because advertisers believed Facebook users were watching video ads for longer than they actually were. That “unethical, unscrupulous” behavior by Facebook constituted fraud because it was “likely to deceive” advertisers, the filing alleged.
IBM: Watson, What Happened?
October 18, 2018
I read “IBM Surprises Investors with Quarterly Revenue Decline.” The write up states:
The company broke its three-quarter string of revenue growth with a 2 percent drop in total revenue to $18.76 billion, down from $19.15 billion a year ago.
The article pointed out:
Most notably, Cognitive Solutions revenues fell 5 percent, to $4.15 billion, against analyst estimates of $4.3 billion. That division, which includes IBM’s analytics business as well as the Watson cognitive computing platform, was pulled down by weakness in some horizontal categories such as collaboration, commerce and talent management.
Watson, what happened?
But IBM pointed out that it is starting to see “green shoots.” I think this means that growth is evident in some sectors.
IBM is a consulting company which still sells mainframes. Enough said.
Stephen E Arnold, October 18, 2018
Google: Is Technical Erosion Taking Place?
October 17, 2018
Two interesting reports caught my attention.
The first concerns the access problems experienced on October 16, 2018, with YouTube and YouTube Music. The details appear in “Back online. It’s Not Just You, YouTube and Other Google Services Are Down.” The write up states:
According to downtime tracker DownDetector, most people who are seeing the YouTube outage are in eastern and western United States and the UK. The site is seeing a very notable spike in reports of the web’s most popular video hosting site being down. Readers as far spread as Canada, India, Australia and Brazil are also reporting being affected.
Google’s infrastructure is large, complex, and subject to anomalies. Google was on top of the problem. The write up reports that Google dispatched “a team of highly trained monkeys” to rectify the glitch. Understandable, but YouTube is an ad revenue machine. The outage may have had an impact on Google Play, the pay-to-use-it service which will be available in the European Union soon. A YouTube outage is difficult to ignore even for monkeys. Did a monkey cause the problem or was it an annoying human user or a bad actor?
The second issue is related to Google’s self driving automobiles. “Google Engineer Triggered Self-Driving Car Accident That Went Unreported” asserts:
Google never publicly reported multiple autonomous vehicle crashes.
Let’s assume that the statement is accurate. The notion of a “failure to report” echoes the information in “Alphabet in the Soup for Keeping Quiet about Google Plus Data Leak Bug.” The article says:
Alphabet also failed to make investors aware that the company’s security measures “had failed recently and massively”; that they had been breached “due to employee error, malfeasance, system errors or vulnerabilities”; and that security protections had not shielded personal user data.
Google’s technology is quite good. Maybe there is no deterioration. What seems to be surfacing are examples of management decisions which are situational. I will pass these articles to the Beyond Search team compiling data about high school science club management methods.
Glitches and judgment could become the metaphorical equivalent of peanut butter and jelly, ham and eggs, or pressure and cracking in Inconel tubes.
Stephen E Arnold, October 17, 2018
Facebook Follies: Consistency, Completeness, and Credibility
October 17, 2018
Years ago, we set up Beyond Search so that posts were distributed to Facebook. The Beyond Search goose assumes that Facebook tracks what it can from our office in rural Kentucky. But Facebook is clogging our Overflight system with factoids and “real” news about a proud company anchored in a Harvard dorm.
For example, I learned today that Facebook said that it would not collect data via its Portal video calling service. Recode, a podcast company, that Facebook will collect data from this service and use it to target ads. One day, no use of data; a few days later, use of data. A misunderstanding or an alternative definition of consistency? The Beyond Search goose is deeply skeptical about the information flowing from Facebook. But the humans on the team love Facebook and can easily see that yes and no are exactly the same.
We also noted a report in the estimable Wall Street Journal. Apparently some advertisers misunderstood the completeness of Facebook’s reports about the number of people who watched the social media giant’s video ads. Some advertisers doubt that Facebook revealed necessary information about the efficacy of the system. With errors, the accuracy and completeness of the Facebook data are questioned. Log files can be baffling, and their data can be misinterpreted. Skeptics might suggest that click data are suggestive, not definitive. When it comes to delivering data about online traffic, complete is complete. Unless it is not. “Facebook Lured Advertisers by Inflating Ad Watch Times Up to 900 Percent: Lawsuit” asserts:
Finally, Axios reported that Facebook is delivering traffic from mobile phones to its publishing “partners.” That makes sense because online access is on its way to being the only way some people will get information, communicate with fellow humans, and output tracking data. Good news. But the Axios report suggests that “Facebook traffic to publishers is down.” Some traffic up, some down. Due to the credibility which clings to Facebook data like lint to black socks on a winter’s morn, it seems as if Facebook is chugging along. Chug, chug goes the credibility engine.
Net net: Facebook manifests itself as an outfit which behaves in a consistent manner, outputs complete information when asked, and maintains a posture which evokes credibility.
The Beyond Search goose believes this.
Stephen E Arnold, October 17, 2018
Facebook: A Rhetorical Punching Bag for Real Journalists
October 17, 2018
I got a kick out of “Facebook’s ‘Spam Purge’ Is Silencing Genuine Debate, Political Page Creators Say.” Years ago I had a teacher named George Harris, I believe. His favorite ploy was to craft “Have you stopped beating your wife?” questions. Nifty game. My response to him was to shift the assumption up a level and direct the question to his inner psychological processes; for example, “That’s interesting. Why do you ask?” He did not like my refusal to play his game. I think he longed for a car battery and, alligator clips, a bucket of water, and some rope. Fascinating idea, but he was a teacher and the methods of interrogators were beyond his reach.
The Guardian story reminded me of good old George. The psychological motivation is not difficult to discern. Facebook is an online information system which makes money by selling ads. Unlike the good old world of “real” journalism, Facebook apologizes and continues on its merry way.
The Facebook money machine had humble beginning in a dorm. The idea was to get information about individuals who might—a conditional idea—want to meet up in the student union and actually talk. From this noble idea has emerged a company which makes some ad starved newspapers green with envy.
The response is to point out that Facebook does not do a good job of balancing information for its users. Of course, when Facebook makes a decision, that decision is going to annoy some of the two billion Facebookers. Even better is that if Facebook does nothing, the company has abrogated its moral responsibility.
News flash: This is a company invented in a dorm and has not outgrown its original DNA.
I learned in the write up:
As a private entity, Facebook can enforce its terms however it sees fit, says the ACLU attorney Vera Eidelman. But this can have serious free speech consequences, especially if the social network is selectively enforcing its terms based on the content of the pages. “Drawing the line between ‘real’ and ‘inauthentic’ views is a difficult enterprise that could put everything from important political parody to genuine but outlandish views on the chopping block,” says Eidelman. “It could also chill individuals who only feel safe speaking out anonymously or pseudonymously.”
I can hear the snorts of laughter in my mind’s reconstruction of several real British newspaper professionals talking about the spike on which Facebook finds itself impaled.
Jolly good I say.
The write up invokes pathos, annoyance, and shock. These are useful rhetorical tricks, particularly when presented by individuals who have been injured in service to their country.
And the coup de grace:
Facebook did not respond to requests for comment.
Well done, old chap. Indeed. Now about throttling your children and that ad revenue, you yob?
Stephen E Arnold, October 17, 2018
Factualities for October 17, 2018
October 17, 2018
Hey, hey, believe ‘em or not.
- 33 percent of US adults hit with identity theft. Source: DarkReading
- 45 out of 50 companies illegally void warranties for electronics. Source: Reddit.com
- 000000. Kanye West’s iPhone pass code. Source: Graham Cluley
- $50,000 per hour. Cost of Flying the F 35 fighter aircraft for one hour. Source: New York Times page A 19 October 12, 2018
- 29 million people. Number of individuals probably affected by the September Facebook breach. Source: Facebook
- 30 000. Number of US Department of Defense personnel records which may have been breached by hackers. Source: Cyberscoop
Beyond Search loves round numbers. So satisfyingly accurate-like.
Stephen E Arnold, October 17, 2018
Google and Its Smart Software: Stupid?
October 16, 2018
I received an email from the owner of a Web site focused on providing consumers with automobile information. The individual shared with me an email sent to his company by the Google smart entity “publisher-policy-noreply.com”.
The letter was an AdSense Publisher Policy Violation Report. In short, Google’s smart software spotted an offensive article. The Google document said:
- New violations were detected. As a result, ad serving has been restricted or disabled on pages where these violations of the AdSense Program Policies were found. To resolve the issues, you can either remove the violating content and request a review, or remove the ad code from the violating pages.
Translating the Google speak: “You are showing ads on a page which contains pornography, contraband, hate speech, etc. Make this right, or no AdSense money for you.”
Okay, I was intrigued. How can information about cars be about porn, contraband, hate speech, etc.
The offensive item, my colleagues and I determined, was a review of a 2004 Saab 9-3 Arc Convertible, published about 14 years ago. The offense was that the review contained words of a sexual nature.
Does this vehicle and the height of its truck or boot offend you? If it does, you are not Googley.
I read the review and noted that the author of the review does indeed focus on an automobile. The problem is that the review is a long tail news story. That means that old content rarely gets clicks. So what’s Google doing? Processing historical data in order to locate porn, contraband, and hate speech? Must be. This suggests that the company is playing catch up. I thought Google was on top of offensive content and had been for more than a decade. Google forbidden word lists have been kicking around for years.
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I find this extremely suggestive? Perhaps that is why the reviewer described the tiny rear seating area as needful of a way to “ease rear seat access.” I am not sure my French bulldog would fit in the back seat of this Saab nor could he engage in hanky panky.
I noted that the Saab convertible has a “high rear.” Looking at the picture, it looks as if the mechanical engineers did increase the height of the trunk or boot in order to accommodate the folding hard top for this model Saab. I am not sure if I would have thought the phrase “high rear” was sexual because I was reading about how the solid convertible top had been accommodated by the engineering team. Who reads about trunk lids or boots as a sexual reference.
But wait. There’s more lingo about the car described about 14 years ago. Check out this passage:
While the convertible’s interior is similar to the sedan’s, with a semi-wraparound cockpit- style instrument panel, it has unique and very comfortable front seats, with the shoulder straps anchored to the seat frame to ease rear-seat access.
Can you spot offensive language. Well, there’s the cockpit, which I assume could be interpreted in a way different from where the driver sits to drive the vehicle. Then there is “rear seat access.” My goodness. That is offensive. Imagine buying a convertible in which a person could sit in the back seat. Obviously “rear seat” is a trigger phrase. When combined with “cockpit,” the Google smart software becomes. What is the word. Oh, right. Stupid.
Let’s step back. Some observations:
- Google positions itself as having a whiz bang system for preventing offensive content from reaching its “customers.” I must say that the system seems to be doing a less than brilliant job. (See. I did not use the word stupid again.) In my DarkCyber video news program for October 23, 2018, I point out that YouTube offers videos which explain to teens how to buy drugs on the Dark Web. The smart filters, I assume, think these vids are A Okay.
- At the same time Google’s smart software is deciding that car reviews are filthy and offensive, the company is telling elected officials it does not know what it will do about its possible China search system. But today I noted “Sundar Pichai Spoke about Google’s China Plans for the First Time and It Doesn’t Look Like He’s Backing Down.” So Google is thinking more about assisting a government with its censorship effort when it cannot figure out that a car review is not pornographic? Stupid is not the word. Maybe mendacious?
- The company seems to be expending resources to reprocess content which it had already identified, copied, parsed, and indexed. This Saab story was indexed and available 14 years ago. I wonder if Google realized that its index and Web archives are digital time bombs. Could the content become evidence in the event Google was subjected to a thorough investigation by European or US regulators? House cleaning before visitors arrive? Interesting because the smart software may be tweaked to be overzealous, not stupid at all.
Our view from Harrod’s Creek is simple. We think Google is a smart company. These minor, trivial, inconsequential filter failures are anomalies. In fact, the offensive auto reviews must go. What else must go? Another interesting question.
Google is great. Very intelligent.
I suppose one could pop the boot in the high rear and go for some rear seat access. I think there is a vernacular bound phrase for this sentiment.
Stephen E Arnold, October 16, 2018
Guess Who Has Not Been in an MIT Dorm for Men?
October 16, 2018
I know that Wikileaks is an interesting source of information. I usually do not mention the organization, its founder, or its information in this blog. However, I read “Leaked Memo: No Internet Until You Clean Your Bathroom, Ecuador Told Julian Assange.” Good stuff. So, let me make an exception to my minimalist approach to Wikeleaks.
I noted this statement in the write up:
London’s Ecuadorian embassy has slapped WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange with a nine-page memo of house rules to follow if he wants to see the internet again under their roof.
The nine page memo contained this passage, which strikes me as a classic administrative response to a guest who has undesirable habits:
In order to safeguard the sanitary conditions of the Embassy facilities, Mr Julian Assange and his visitors will conserve the cleanliness and hygiene of the bathroom and other spaces that they use inside the embassy. For the same reasons, Mr Julian Assange will be responsible for the well-being, food, cleanliness and proper care of your pet. If the pet is not given due attention, the Head of Mission will ask Mr Assange to deliver the pet to another person or an animal shelter outside the Diplomatic Mission.
Yep, the cat is likely to be a pivot point.
However, what the memo reveals to me is that no one in the Ecuadorian embassy has had an opportunity to live in an MIT men’s dorm, spend time with some of the professionals participating in hackathons which require around the clock coding, or checked out the garbage left on Starbuck tables at 175 East El Camino Road.
Mr. Assange may be behaving in a manner which seems normal and—quite possibly—expected of a person with technical expertise.
Ecuador, however, does not seem to understand the cultural context of Mr. Assange’s approach to maintaining self, pet, and domicile.
What happens when an irresistible force meets and immovable object?
Trash and slovenly behavior escalate. Entropy takes numerous forms.
Stephen E Arnold, October 16, 2018
HSSCM: Organizing for Success in Google Plus
October 16, 2018
I continue to collect examples of high school science club management methods. My thought is to extract the “principles” of this approach. With MBA programs looking at a decline in student enrollments, perhaps these ideas will spark some new thinking at these august institutions.
The source of this example is the write up “Now That Google+ Has Been Shuttered, I Should Air My Dirty Laundry on How Awful the Project and Exec Team Was.” The author worked at Google for eight months, if LinkedIn contains accurte information. These observations date from the period in 2011 and 2012. I pegged the Golden Era of Google as ending in 2006, so these observations come as Google’s trajectory to the “new and improved era” indicate the direction of movement at the online ad company.
I highlighted a handful of items from the essay, which I have edited to remove the language which might be offensive to some of the more educated residents of Harrod’s Creek, Kentucky:
Statement 1: “I’m still #%*/! about the bait and switch they pulled by telling me I’d be working on Chrome, then putting me on this god forsaken piece of #%*/! on day one.
Beyond Search goose observation: Ah, has. Get hired. Get assigned. Then condemned to prowling the Google internal comms system for teams you might want to join. In short, bait and switch or—more likely—disorganization within the Google personnel hobby shop.
Statement 2: The [Google interview] process felt very haphazard.
Beyond Search goose observation: Ah, disorganization. The implementation of “we’re so smart, whatever we do will work out”. High school science club members are quite confident their ideas are better than those generated by the doobies on the student council.
Statement 3: The CEO didn’t just have an office. The entire floor was his [the person with the four corner office is Larry Page, the flying car entrepreneur].
Beyond Search goose observation: One needs room in which to operate, to fly new ideas like Loon balloons and cars which take wing. HSSCM principle: Get the biggest: Company, money, online ad system, etc. The wrestling team can occupy a squalid corner of the locker room. That’s the area with splintered benches, bent lockers, and slime on the green and yellow tile.
Statement 4: During the 8 months I was there, culminating in me leading the redesign of his product, Vic [Gundotra, the former head of Google Plus and once a Microsoft wizard] didn’t say a word to me.
Beyond Search goose observation: Communication is for goofs. If you are Googley, you know what’s what. Don’t get it? Become a Xoogler or work on scripts for updating indexes in the building near the lawyers. HSSCC principle: Telepathy is a functional way to coordinate work.
Statement 5: If your team, say on Gmail or Android, was to integrate Google Plus’s features then your team would be awarded a 1.5-3x multiplier on top of your yearly bonus. Your bonus was already something like 15% of your salary. You read that correctly. A #%*/! ton of money to ruin the product you were building with bloated garbage that no one wanted.
Beyond Search goose observation: In the handbook of HSSCM, it is not necessary to obtain information from potential user and actual users of an online service. The idea is to make decisions motivated by compensation. Combine this with the Microsoft method of soliciting feedback and then ignoring, and the HSSCC approach ensures a certain distance between what’s created and what users actually want. I don’t want to go “William James” on you, gentle reader, but this type of disconnection is important to effective HSSCC methodology.
Statement 6:
Everything being produced felt disjointed or siloed. Not part of the whole. The M.O.[modus operandi, a Latin phrase in case you did not recognized the acronym] was build and copy as much #%*/! as possible.
Beyond Search goose observation: HSSCM principle: If an employee does not understand the objective, the employee is not Googley. Obviously the failure to tune into the correct wavelength proves the inferiority of the humanoid.
Statement 7: None of this stuff was tightly integrated. More of a layer on top of everything. I wanted to change that. This was Plus when I joined. Lots of sections. Lots of junk. Bad navigation.
Beyond Search goose observation: Notice the duplication. In the HSSCC approach, everyone can do his or her own thing. (Yep, even my science club in 1958 had a female member. She changed schools, probably because of the general behavior of the advanced class toward those in “regular” classes. Welcoming is not a word associated with HSSCM methods. Operative concept: Wrappers, fixes, and good enough plus telepathy. Excellent guidelines.
Statement 8: They [fellow Googlers] didn’t care about what was better.
Beyond Search goose observation: HSSCC management does not require excellence. Membership means recognition. Stomp on others in the club so you get the recognition. Cue the theme music from Fame. Excellence? When one is a Googler, that’s like water to a fish. Ergo: Kill the other fish. Get the water.
Onward to management effectiveness.
Stephen E Arnold, October 16, 2018
DarkCyber for October 16, 2018 Is Now Available
October 16, 2018
DarkCyber for October 16, 2018, is now available at www.arnoldit.com/wordpress and on Vimeo at https://vimeo.com/295026034
Stephen E Arnold’s DarkCyber is a weekly video news and analysis program about the Dark Web and lesser known Internet services. This week’s program covers three stories related to the Dark Web and specialized Internet services.
The first story explores what appears to be a public relations spat between two Dark Web indexing vendors. Terbium Labs offers it Matchlight service to government and commercial companies. Digital Shadows sells its SearchLight service to the same markets. Terbium Labs issued a new report. The document asserts that data collection about the Dark Web and related services has to be more stringent and consistent. Digital Shadows response was a report that for $150 Dark Web bad actors would hack the email account of any employee. The data used to back the claim were general, and they lacked the specificity that Terbium Labs desires. DarkCyber’s view is that Terbium Lab is advocating a “high road”; that is, more diligent data collection and more comprehensive indexing. Digital Shadows, on the other hand, seems to be embrace the IBM approach to marketing by emphasizing uncertainty and doubt.
The second story reports that PureTech Systems has announced it fully autonomous drone platform. When a sensor is activate, the PureTech drone can launch itself, navigate to the specific location identified by the sensor, and began collecting information in real time. The data are then fed in real time into the PureTech analytics subsystem. Tasks which once required specialists and intelligence analysts can now be shifted to the PureTech platform.
The final story for the October 16, 2018, is the failure of a California film professional to arrange for a Dark Web murder. After police received a tip, the person of interest was arrested. His missteps included using his California driver’s license to purchase Bitcoin to pay the Dark Web hit man. The interest in murder for hire seems to be high; however, most of those visiting these sites do not realize that they are scams. The California man paid $5 down on the hit, but his payoff was a stay in jail, not the termination of his step mother.
DarkCyber appears each Tuesday on the blog Beyond Search and on Vimeo. A four part series about Amazon’s policeware capabilities begins on October 30, 2018. Watch for these programs at www.arnoldit.com/wordpress.
Kenny Toth, October 16, 2018
Google and IBM: Me Too Marketing or a Coincidence?
October 15, 2018
I noted this article: “Google AI Researchers Find Strange New Reason to Play Jeopardy.” What caught my attention was the introduction of the TV game show which featured IBM Watson stomping mere humans in a competition. I dismissed the human versus machine as a Madison Avenue ad confection. IBM wanted to convince the folks in West Virginia and rural Kentucky that Watson smart software was bigger than college basketball.
I think it worked. It allowed me to crank out write ups poking fun at the cognitive computing assertion, the IBM billion dollar revenue target, and the assorted craziness of IBM’s ever escalating assertions about the efficacy of Watson. I even pointed out that humans had to figure out the content used to “train” Watson and then fiddle with digital knobs and levers to get the accuracy up to snuff. The behind the scenes work was hidden from the Madison Avenue creatives; the focus was on the sizzle, not the preparatory work in the knowledge abattoir.
The Googlers have apparently discovered Jeopardy. I learned that Google uses Jeopardy to inform its smart software about reformulating questions. Here’s a passage I highlighted:
Active Question Answering,” or Active QA, as the TensorFlow package is called, will reformulate a given English-language question into multiple different re-wordings, and find the variant that does best at retrieving an answer from a database.
I am not going to slog through the history of query parsing. The task is an important one, and in my opinion, without providing precise indexing such as “company type” and other quite precise terms, queries go off base. The elimination of explicit Boolean has put the burden on query processors figuring out what humans mea when they type a query using the word “terminal” for instance. Is it a computer terminal or is it a bus terminal. No indexing? Well, smart software which looks up data in a dynamic table will do the job in a fine, fine way. What if one wants to locate a white house? Is it the DC residence of the president or is it the term for Benjamin Moore house paint when one does not know 2126-70?
Well, Google has embraced Jeopardy to make its smart software smarter and ignore the cost, time, and knowledge work of creating controlled term lists, assigning and verifying index accuracy, and fine grained indexing to deal with the vagaries of language.
So, Google seems to have hit upon the idea of channeling IBM Watson.
But I recalled seeing this article: “Google AI Can Spot Advanced Breast Cancer More Effectively Than Humans.” That reminded me of IBM Watson’s message carpet bombing about the efficacy of Big Blue cancer fighting. The only problem was that articles like “IBM Pitched Its Watson Supercomputer As a Revolution in Cancer Care. It’s Nowhere Close” Continue to Appear.”
Is Google channeling IBM’s marketing?
My hypothesis is that Google is either consciously or unconsciously tilling an already prepped field for marketing touch points. IBM did Jeopardy; Google does Jeopardy with the question understanding twist. IBM did cancer; Google does a specific type of cancer better than humans and, obviously, better than IBM Watson.
So what? My thought is that Google is shifting its marketing gears. In the process, the Google-dozer is dragging its sheep’s’ foot roller across the landscape slowly recovering from IBM’s marketing blitzes.
Will this work?
Hey, Google, like Amazon, wants to be the 21st century IBM. Who knows? I thank both companies for giving me some new fodder for my real live goats which can walk away from behemoth smart machines reworking the information landscape.
Here’s a thought? Google is more like IBM than it realizes.
Stephen E Arnold, October 15, 2018
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