Amazonia for April 8, 2019
April 8, 2019
The Bezos bulldozer was grinding along last week. The big celebrity news was the creation of a new world billionaire once married to the online bookstore’s founder. There were some less interesting developments the DarkCyber research team spotted. Here’s a selection of semi-interesting items.
Eero: A Deal?
If the information in “Amazon Bought Eero for $97 Million and Employees Still Got Screwed” is accurate, the easy networking outfit made some of its employees unhappy. Here’s the passage we noted:
According to confidential documents viewed by Mashable, Amazon acquired Eero for $97 million. Eero executives brought home multi-million dollar bonuses and eight-figure salary increases. Everyone else, however, didn’t fare quite so well. Investors took major hits, and the Amazon acquisition rendered Eero stock worthless: $0.03 per share, down from a common stock high of $3.54 in July 2017. It typically would have cost around $3 for employees to exercise their stock, meaning they would actually lose money if they tried to cash out.
Didn’t venture capitalists pump more money into the company? Maybe employees and investors got a lesson in how to be a billionaire?
Amazon in Space
Google does Loon balloons. Facebook likes gliders. Amazon wants to put 3,000 satellites in space to deliver Internet connectivity to those who want to buy a Kindle ebook. We learned:
The effort, code-named Project Kuiper, follows up on last September’s mysterious reports that Amazon was planning a “big, audacious space project” involving satellites and space-based systems. The Seattle-based company is likely to spend billions of dollars on the project, and could conceivably reap billions of dollars in revenue once the satellites go into commercial service.
DarkCyber wants to know, “Will Amazon use the Bezos space rocket to put these devices into orbit?” Source: Geekwire. As a prank a clever person created a mock up of an Amazon blimp or Loon balloon deploying drones.
Rekognition Facial Recognition May Face a “Rekoning”
DarkCyber does not know much about shareholder meetings. Apparently the subject of Amazon’s licensing of its facial recognition technology to law enforcement and government agencies is an issue for some. We learned that shareholders will have an opportunity to vote on where Amazon can sell its FAR systems. Who decided? Mr. Bezos? Nope, the Securities & Exchange Commission. Google has sparked some fierce discussion with its refusal to work on a government project. What will happen if Amazon disables its FAR systems? DarkCyber believes that some entities will be unhappy. Source: Verge
Hello, Air Pods the Amazon Basics Way
Poor Apple. It cannot make butterfly keyboards. The Cupertino giant cannot craft a wireless charging mat. The spirit of Jobs seems to have departed with version two of its wireless ear phones. Never fear. Amazon is going to release its own version, which will interact with Amazon’s services. DarkCyber is more interested in possible LE and intel applications of this particular chunk of Amazon’s technology. Source: Bloomberg
Amazon and Health Care
Google and Microsoft have bailed out of their health care initiatives. Not Amazon. DarkCyber learned that Alexa will be gussied up with medical expertise. Interested in what Amazon allegedly will do? DarkCyber is too. Information about certain medical conditions could be useful in some investigations. Source: Venture Beat
Amazon and Fairness Research
DarkCyber did not spot too many tweets about Amazon’s sponsoring research about fairness. A newspaper reported:
Amazon has partnered with the taxpayer-funded National Science Foundation on a three-year, $20 million program to fund basic research into fairness in artificial intelligence systems, which are under increasing scrutiny as they spread in society and sometimes amplify existing biases.
“Fair” is a word like “quality.” Tough to define. So far the company has not abandoned the project. Google jettisoned its public ethics group. But Amazon may be paid for this effort to tackle a very fuzzy concept. DarkCyber asks, “What’s “fair” when it comes to lavatory breaks in an Amazon warehouse? Source: Seattle Times
Amazon Reduces Some Prices at Whole Foods
We don’t have a Whole Paycheck (sorry, I meant Whole Foods) here in Harrod’s Creek. We do have a saloon, a bar, a restaurant and bar, a filling station with a wood stove and old times. No Whole Feeds. The new reported in “Amazon Slashes Prices on Hundreds of Whole Foods Items” was greeted with silence. The local Kroger manager asked one of the DarkCyber research team, “What’s a Whole Foods?”
Good Bye, Oracle
Amazon once was a good Oracle customer. Oracle license fees. Oracle add ons. Oracle data base administrators. Oracle World speaking opportunities. If an Amazonia were lucky, a nifty Oracle hat. No more. Amazon uses its “own” database technology now, thank you, very much Larry Ellison. According to one British computer publication, Amazon’s database team held a “thank heavens, it is outta here” party. Don’t let the PL/SQL documentation fall on your head. Source: Computing
Hi, Microsofties. We’re Neighbors
Some Amazon employees will be relocating their offices to Bellevue, Washington. We learned from Geekwire:
Amazon plans to relocate its entire Seattle-based worldwide operations team to Bellevue, Wash., by 2023, adding thousands of employees to its new campus just across Lake Washington, according to an internal email obtained by GeekWire.
Yeah, about that security for corporate email? If true, Seattle’s city fathers may want to ask themselves, “What did we do wrong?” On the other hand, Microsoft may have its own questions. One big winner will be the Bellevue real estate specialists. Let’s not overlook this Amazon initiative: “Amazon Web Services Sharpens Its Focus on Cloud Security.” Internal email included or not?
An Amazon Alexa Robot May Be Developed
DarkCyber noted that a walking Alexa may be developed by Amazon’s engineers. We noted this passage in “Alexa’s Chief Scientist Wants to Give the Voice Assistant a Robot Body”:
Speaking at The EmTech Digital A.I .Conference held by MIT Technology Review in San Francisco, Prasad raised the idea of letting Alexa learn about the world by experiencing it like a human might. “The only way to make [a]smart assistant really smart is to give it eyes and let it explore the world,” he said. That would include giving Alexa a physical form. While the idea might seem a little out there, we’re already closer to the possibility than one might imagine. In some cases, Alexa already has access to “eyes” of sorts, as some devices with Alexa installed include cameras that the A.I. can access. A body would be a considerable jump in progression, of course, but it is a possibility. That said, Prasad didn’t confirm whether Amazon is already working on building a body for its voice assistant.
Source: Digital Trends
Jim Henson Shows on Amazon, Just Not in the US
We learned in “Jim Henson Shows Come to Amazon Prime Video, but Not in the US” that licensing spoils the fun:
Amazon has added a lot more Jim Henson Company programs to Prime Video after rolling out all four season of sci-fi series Farscape for the platform. Starting today, you’ll be able to access 2,500 hours of child-friendly shows with Muppets and other Henson puppets if you have a Prime or a standalone Prime Video subscription. That is, depending on where you’re located — unfortunately, most of those programs won’t be available in the US due to licensing issues.
Source: Engadget
Audio Watermarking
Was that secret recording subsequently modified? Amazon may have technology which could answer this question. An Amazon ebook lover wrote a journal article with the alluring title “Audio Watermarking over the Air with Modulated Self Correlation.” You can find a copy of the free article at this link.
Amazon Gets More Twitchy
“AWS Introduces API Specification for Securing On-Demand and Live Video” reveals that its the Secure Packager and Encoder Exchange (SPEKE) for video are available. DarkCyber noted:
The SPEKE specification aims to eliminate this one-off, customization requirement and replace the old with a standardized method. SPEKE-enabled servers and encryptors should greatly improve time to market for services regardless of consumption method (on-premises, cloud, hybrid, etc.). SPEKE is built on the DASH Industry Forum’s Content Protection Information Exchange Format (CPIX) standard. The API specification supports HLS, MSS and DASH packaging. Many DRM platforms (e.g. Apple FairPlay Streaming, Microsoft PlayRead, Google Widevine, AES-128 and more) are already supported.
Could the best of YouTube find its way to an Amazon Twitch-like service. Some disenchanted Vimeo customers might find this information interesting as well.
Amazon May Gun for Roku
Medium (an outfit which wants email addresses in exchange for articles) published “Amazon Asks Advertisers to Pledge Millions for Roku Rival.” Makes sense. Amazon wants to gobble revenue, and advertising seems to be an obvious money spout. Read the write up in Medium. Nothing like trading a story told in a headline for an email.
Amazon Complexity
Skimfeed published an interesting statement. Here it is:
@jeffbigham: The 2nd day of the month is my favorite day because it’s when I get a $9.95 bill from AWS for something I can’t figure out how to shut down.
If you want a free run down of “everything” Amazon, you may find “Amazon AWS: Complete Business Guide to the World’s Largest Provider of Cloud Services” helpful. Or not. The write up is short, incomplete, and generally without the information @jeffbigham requires.
Amazon Goes to Bogota
Bogota has an excellent climate. It will also have an Amazon infrastructure facility. According to “Amazon Web Services to Open Infrastructure Location in Colombia”:
Amazon Web Services (AWS), a unit of Amazon.com Inc, said … it will open a Latin America infrastructure location in Colombia and help train 2,000 students in cloud technology. The company will team up with Colombia’s public technical education institute to train students in cloud computing, Jeffrey Kratz, AWS’ general public sector manager for Latin America, the Caribbean and Canada, said in a government statement.
Fleets of EC2 Instances. Fleets!
If you are a government agency and have a great deal of data to crunch, EC2 fleets may be of interest. The idea is that one can automate the creation of multiple instances. The method is to fill in a form. We learned:
hen you create a fleet, the virtual machine (VM) instances within the fleet will be based on a launch template. Launch templates are used to create VM instances in a standardized way. A launch template might, for instance, define the network interfaces, storage volumes and tags that are to be used by EC2 instances created from the template.
More information is available in Virtualization Review’s explanation “Use Amazon EC2 Fleets to Create Collections of EC2 Instances”, which is handier than Amazon’s documentation.
More Partners and Integrators
We jotted down the names of partners and integrators of things AWS not appearing in our files; to wit:
Stephen E Arnold, April 8, 2019
Singapore Enters the War Against US Social Media
April 7, 2019
Wow, the high school science club companies may have to duke it out with the student council. That’s a metaphor. The Facebooks, Googles, and other social media ad giants may have to deal with politicians. Horror of horrors.
I read “Singapore’s Fake News Laws Upset Tech Giants.” The main point is that a city state which takes a hard line on chewing gum is “adopting tough measures” related to fake news. (I assume the write up in Phys.org is accurate, of course.)
The article noted:
Singapore is among several countries pushing legislation to fight fake news, and the government stressed ordering “corrections” to be placed alongside falsehoods would be the primary response, rather than jail or fines.
The trick is that some person or some algorithms has to spot fake news. If that person is an individual who perceives a misstatement, that may be contentious. If a smart algorithm from the science club crowd misses fake news, that’s probably a thorny path as well.
Facebook and Google are on the scene. I noted this statement in the write up:
Google, Facebook and Twitter have their Asia headquarters in Singapore, a city of 5.6 million which is popular with expats as it is developed, safe and efficient. But there were already signs of tensions with tech companies as the government prepared to unveil the laws. During parliamentary hearings last year about tackling online falsehoods, Google and Facebook urged the government not to introduce new laws.
I interpreted this to mean, “Yikes, lobbying does not work in Singapore as it does in the USA.”
Another tiny step from non US regulators to get certain firms to abandon some of their more interesting and possibly cavalier and entitled practices. Can the mere government of Singapore deal with the corporate countries US laws have enabled?
Stephen E Arnold, April 7, 2019
Expert System: Interesting Financials
April 6, 2019
Expert System SpA is a firm providing semantic software that extracts knowledge from text by replicating human processes. I noticed information on the company’s Web site which informed me:
- The company had sales revenues of 28.7 million euros for 2018
- The company’s growth was 343 percent compared to 2017
- The net financial position was 12.4 million euros up from 8.8 million euros in March 2017.
Remarkable financial performance.
Out of curiosity I navigated to Google Finance and plugged in Expert System Spa to see what data the GOOG could offer.
Here’s the chart displayed on April 6, 2019:
The firm’s stock does not seem to be responding as we enter the second quarter of 2019.
Netwrix Buys Concept Searching
April 5, 2019
Late last year we learned that Concept Searching was selling itself to Netwrix. I don’t pay much attention to “finding” solutions. I thought of Concept Searching in the context of the delay in awarding the JEDI contract. Concept Searching might be a nifty add on if Microsoft gets the $10 billion deal.
Concept Searching had positioned itself as an indexing outfit and taxonomy management tool. The company struck me as having a Microsoft-centric focus and dabbled in enterprise search and jousted with Smartlogic.
According to the company’s founder Martin Garland:
Concept Searching is excited about becoming a part of Netwrix. Merging our unique technology with its exceptional Netwrix Auditor product delivers a new level of protection to organizations concerned about data security, with the ability to identify and remediate personal or organizationally defined sensitive information, regardless of where it is stored or how it was ingested. The expanded team will enable us to be even more agile, increasingly responsive to our clients’ needs, and to deliver a platform for growth to both client bases and ensure we maintain our leadership position in delivering world-class metadata-driven solutions.
Netwrix is a software company focused exclusively on providing IT security and operations teams with pervasive visibility into user behavior, system configurations and data sensitivity across hybrid IT infrastructures to protect data regardless of its location. The company has 10,000 customers.
DarkCyber believes that like Exalead’s acquisition by Dassault or OpenText’s purchase of assorted search and retrieval systems, it will be interesting to watch how this acquisition works out.
Stephen E Arnold, April 5, 2019
Comfort with Big Data or You May Not Be Hired
April 5, 2019
I read an interesting essay in Analytics India Magazine, a source I find useful in explaining how managers from that country think about certain issues.
Case in point: What makes a good employee, presumably of a company operating in Analytics India’s home territory or managed by a person who devours each issue in search of data nuggets.
The article which caught my attention? “Why Everyone In The Organization Has To Be Comfortable Dealing With Data.”
I noted this passage:
For a successful functioning of an organization, it is necessary that everyone in an organization is comfortable dealing with data.
I like the categorical affirmative: Everyone.
I like the notion of not being informed, good, or competent. Comfortable only.
Now the questions?
- Does the argument require the HR (personnel) to define “comfort” and then measure that quality?
- What happens to those who perform certain services like greeting visitors, providing administrative support, or chauffeuring the owner to his or her private jet? Outsourcing perhaps? A special class of workers removed from the Big Data folks?
- What happens to employees in countries which graduate individuals from a university lacking desired numerical skills? No jobs?
I enjoyed the recommendations for addressing this requirement. Educate and upskill (presented as two action items but to innumerate me these are one thing. Then “every department has to realize the power of data.” I love the “every” and the sort of adulty phrase “has to realize.”
But the keeper is this statement: “Adopt methods for data cleaning.”
Yeah, clean data for Big Data. Who does that work? Obviously employees who are comfortable. Yep, comfort will deal with data issues like validity, consistency, etc. etc.
Stephen E Arnold, April 5, 2019
Alphabet Google Ethics Board: Planning R Us
April 5, 2019
I found this item amusing: “Google Cancels AI Ethics Board in Response to Outcry.” Google’s attempt to get — in the words of a PR expert I once knew — in front of the building tsunami of government push back against the online ad company is no more. That which made me laugh was that Facebook’s call for regulation did not seem to stimulate such robust activity. I assume that someone younger and brighter than I might make a case that public opinion is discriminating against Facebook.
The write up states:
Google told Vox [my real news source] on Thursday that it’s pulling the plug on the ethics board. The board survived for barely more than one week.
Each time Amazon launches a new service, there’s an expectation that the oddly named and almost monikers will continue to chug along no matter what the online bookstore does. Sure, Amazon killed its mobile phone and a bunch of third party sellers. That’s not quite the pace of ideas-killed-off for the GOOG.
Let’s set aside the notion of people who wanted to help Google figure out AI ethics for a moment. The key fact for me is that high school science club management methods are in use.
Planning? Check.
Efficiency? Check.
Staff management? Check.
Participant recruitment? Check
What could go wrong? Apparently quite a bit.
Stephen E Arnold, April 5, 2019
Deep Video Fakes: Getting Easier and Better, Much Better
April 4, 2019
You may have seen one of the news stories explaining that unwanted artifacts can be removed from video. The magic is one of the features of Adobe After Effects, an application which requires some effort to learn. “Adobe Creative Cloud Updates – New Features for Video Post Production” stated:
[A] new feature for Adobe After Effects is the Content-Aware Fill. It enables users to automatically remove unwanted objects from the footage. Content-Aware Fill for video is powered by Adobe Sensei and it was first introduced in Photoshop. It automates the process of removing visual elements like boom mics, signs, logos and even people from footage, which should save hours of manual work.
Zap. Reality or lousy video footage “fixed.”
You can get a rundown of other tools which can help out, improve, or alter reality in “Top 5 AI-Powered Video Editing Tools.”
Will non US propaganda agencies find these tools useful?
Yep.
Stephen E Arnold, April 4, 2019
The Function of Filters
April 4, 2019
Filters block access to words, sites, or other items identifiable via modern computation; for example, a pattern of relationships and addresses of certain businesses or people. An online publication Abacus reports an item of information which makes clear that it is important to be in charge of filters. “Chinese Browsers Block Protest against China’s 996 Overtime Work Culture” asserts:
A number of Chinese browsers, including Tencent’s QQ Browser, Qihoo’s 360 Browser and the native browser on Xiaomi smartphones, have restricted user access to the 996.icu repository on GitHub.
Maybe the only way to get unfiltered information is to work in the agency examining content to figure out what one should not see? What if Bing, Google, and Yandex were blocking access to content and no one except those working in the censorship department knew? Interesting to consider.
Stephen E Arnold, April 4, 2019
Intelligence Community Braces for AI-Generated Fake People
April 4, 2019
AI trouble comes in all shapes and sizes. Chatbots have been around so long, they seem to have become a generic term. More recently, the news that fake videos can be produced of famous people saying, well, anything have surfaced. But a new, more subtle threat looms in the act of making realistic photos of non-existent people. We learned more about this odd threat in the Mashable article, “This Website Uses AI to Generate Faces of People Who Don’t Really Exist.”
According to the story:
“As for the societal impact of this technology, Wang said the more people are aware of it, the better they can be prepared for these images…A powerful enough GAN [the face making technology] could be used to create an image of a loved one, which could be used for manipulation, he said. Or a big enough dataset could be used to create all sorts of realistic images, from scratch.”
We assumed that Google’s external AI board might have provided some insight, ideas, and inspiration with regard to digital manipulations. It seems, however, that the AI board has become mired in in-fighting. Real, not fake.
That’s real, which throws a bit of water on the idea of figuring out what’s false.
Patrick Roland, April 4, 2019
The Surf Is Up for the Word Dark
April 4, 2019
Just a short note. I read this puffy wuffy write up about a new market research report. Its title?
What caught my attention is not the authors’ attempt to generate some dough via open source data collection and a touch of Excel fever.
Here’s what caught my attention:
Dark analytics is the analysis of dark data present in the enterprises. Dark data is generally is referred as raw data or information buried in text, tables, figures that organizations acquire in various business operations and store it but, is unused to derive insights and for decision making in business. Organizations nowadays are realizing that there is a huge risk associated with losing competitive edge in business and regulatory issues that comes with not analyzing and processing this data. Hence, dark analytics is a practice followed in enterprises that advances in analyzing computer network operations and pattern recognition.
Yes, buried data treasure. Now the cost of locating, accessing, validating, and normalizing these time encrusted nuggets?
Answer: A lot. A whole lot. That’s part of the reason old data are not particularly popular in some organizations. The idea of using a consulting firm or software from SAP is not particularly thrilling to my DarkCyber team. (Our use of “dark” is different too.)
Stephen E Arnold, April 4, 2019
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