Is Google Thinking about Turkeys?
November 27, 2019
Is Google actually fearful of an authoritarian government? Google is okay with firing people who do not go along. Google exerts considerable force. Is Google is a company driven by dollar signs? Is it possible that Google fears anything and anyone that threatens its net profit? The Register explains the cause of Google’s fear in “Google Takes Sole Stand on Privacy, Rejects New Rules For Fear Of ‘Authoritarian’ Review.”
Google, like any company from a capitalist society, is leery of any organization that wishes to restrain its power. Google recently blocked a new draft for he Privacy Interest Group (PING)’s charter. PING is a member of the W3C web standards body. Google blocked the new draft, because it creates an unchecked authoritarian review group and will create “significant unnecessary chaos in the development of the web platform.”
PING exists to enforce technical specifications that W3C issued to respect people’s Web privacy. W3C provides horizontal review, where members share suggestions with technical specifications authors to ensure they respect privacy. Ever since the middle of 2019, PING’s sixty-eight members have tried to rewrite its charter. The first draft was shared with 450 W3C members, one of which is Google, and only twenty-six members responded. Of the twenty-six members, Google was the only one that objected.
Google supports PING’s horizontal review, bit the search engine giant did not want to invest in the new charter without the group having more experience. There are not many differences between the charter drafts:
“‘The new charter is not dramatically different from the existing one, Doty said in an email. ‘It includes providing input and recommendations to other groups that set process, conduct reviews or approve the progression of standards and mentions looking at existing standards and not just new ones. I think those would all have been possible under the old charter (which I drafted originally); they’re just stated more explicitly in this draft. It includes a new co-chair from Brave, in addition to the existing co-chairs from the Internet Society and Google.’
Doty said he’s not surprised there would be discussion and disagreement about how to conduct horizontal spec reviews. ‘I am surprised that Google chose to formally object to the continued existence of this interest group as a way to communicate those differences,’ he said.”
Doty hopes that Google will invest in PING and Web privacy, but Google’s stance is more adversarial. Google and other tech companies are worried about their business models changing of cookies are blocked. Google does not want to lose the majority of its business, which comes from advertising through its search engine. Google might protect privacy, but only so far as it does not interfere with their bottom line.
Whitney Grace, November 27, 2019
HPE: Missed? Hybrid What?
November 27, 2019
I read “HPE Misses Q4 Revenue Targets, Sees Decline in Hybrid IT Group.”
I noted this statement:
the company continues to see declining revenue in several business lines.
But there is a bright spot, according to an objective money expert type:
Analyst Patrick Moorhead noted that HPE’s growth in strategic areas like Aruba Services and Apollo is indicative of a positive long term revenue strategy. “For HPE, I believe the future is all about its differentiation and execution in the hybrid cloud and ‘everything as a service’ about which I am optimistic,” said Moorhead.
The future? More cost cuts? Nope. The HPE future is Kubernetes.
Some observations:
- Misses, declines, yada yada. One point: progress is slow
- Excitement.Excitement HPE?
- Outlook? Sure, predict the future of HPE. No problem. Just guess.
Net net: A troublesome report from management making management decisions which appear to cause shares of HPE to drop. Yikes.
Stephen E Arnold, November 27, 2019
Open Source Software: A Digital Snail Darter
November 26, 2019
Years ago I worked on a project. The focus was the snail darter, a little fish. A commercial initiative intruded on the habitat of the creature. The bureaucratic process chugged forward. I lost track of the snail darter. Probably there are a few of the creatures around, but their future was impinged upon by the need and desire to covert streams and “undeveloped” land into a wonderland of EPA compliant effluent, asphalt, and industrial facilities.
Wikipedia’s image shows a paper clip next to a snail darter. This reminds me of my mobile phone next to an Amazon data center.
I thought about the snail darter when I read “Dining Preferences of the Cloud and Open Source: Who Eats Who?” Not surprisingly the write up does not mention the snail darter or its obstruction of “progress”. But the article describes how open source has found its digital manifestations threatened by large commercial firms.
There is a description of Amazon’s method which has disrupted to some degree the happiness of Elastic (developers and maintainers of Elasticsearch) and MongoDB (a DBaaS service). No, I don’t know what DBaaS is. It may be a way to make community supported software tough in a cloud eat cloud datasphere.
We noted this passage:
Most of the current debate focuses on Amazon and a few open source companies they have startled, like gazelles on the savannah, specifically Elastic and MongoDB. All while chronically prefacing their messaging with “customers tell us…”, AWS is offering its own services that are built on (Elastic) or are compatible with (MongoDB) popular open source projects, thereby competing with the relatively successful commercial open source companies associated with those projects. In the case of Elastic, AWS has generously created a new open source distribution of the features that Elastic had held back as proprietary software. The prey have responded with both pluckily defiant blog posts and a frenzy of license engineering to impede AWS’ ability to use their ostensibly open source software. Others, like Cockroach Labs and Redis Labs, have followed with their own new licenses. This has renewed an existential and philosophical debate about open source: is it about free speech or does it also include the right to a free moat for key project contributors? In the end, the high priests of open source do not seem to be endorsing the “open except for people who compete with us” approach.
The main point is that the business model is in place, working, and becoming more important to many developers and organizations.
But Amazon is not unique. Google and Microsoft are following the lead of AWS. Sheep do not appear to be at risk when they tag along, content to generate revenue by playing the me-too game.
The write up concludes on an upbeat; specifically:
Open source is here to stay as a development model. It is hard to imagine any kind of infrastructure or developer software that isn’t open source. But there is work to do on the accompanying business strategy. The next great open source endeavor may be to make multi-cloud a reality, at least for key workloads. But the new associated business models will have to embrace services as the primary delivery model and make a serious commitment to a level of integration that is the hallmark of cloud services.
Net net: There are still some snail darters.
Stephen E Arnold, November 26, 2019
Amazon Alexa: What Happened? Who Knew?
November 26, 2019
I read a somewhat disingenuous tale of Amazon’s Alexa. Navigate to “We Never Anticipated Alexa to Have Such a Profound Impact on Society” and make your own determination. Note: You will need to disable your ad blocker to view this article from Hindu Business Line. Lucky you! Extra work. Surprises abound.
The main idea in the story is that Amazon created Alexa. Everything that took place was a bit of a shock. That includes, I suppose, the surveillance potential, the data stream value, and the willingness of people to put Jeff Bezos’ ear in their homes and offices. Yep, a surprise. Wow.
The write up includes a statement or two from an Amazonian, who remains surprised; for instance:
We have onboarded a lot of such training data. Hindi seemed like the next logical step. We’ll keep pushing the envelope. What has really caught our attention in India is the fact that Alexa and Echo devices are used by a lot of schools to teach kids English, general knowledge and other subjects. This is really inspiring and we will try bringing services and skills to enhance this process. We never anticipated this device which started off as a fancy geeky Star Trek-inspired tool to have such a profound impact on the society. Today, we are trying to make it more useful to students, teachers, people with vision challenges and so on.
Ah, surprise.
Stephen E Arnold, November 26, 2019
Google Ads: Some Data
November 26, 2019
DarkCyber noted some information about the cost of Google ads for a pet-related business. Navigate to “How Much Does it Cost to Run Google Ads? : Tech : Nature World News”.
Here’s the passage we found interesting:
Google Ad Spend costs an average of $9,000 to $10,000 per month. Depending on your budget, you decide the maximum amount that you will spend on cost-per-click (CPC). The average CPC on the Google Search Network is $1 to $2 per click. The average CPC on the Google Display Network is $1 or less per click. The cost for professional Google Ads management per month is 12 percent to 30 percent of the cost of Ad Spend per month. PPC (pay-per-click) costs an average of $15 to $800 per month.
Stephen E Arnold, November 26, 2019
Microsoft and China: Doing Business with Huawei
November 26, 2019
DarkCyber noted “Microsoft Granted License to Export Mass Market Software to Huawei.” The write up reports:
On November 20, the U.S. Department of Commerce granted Microsoft’s request for a license to export mass-market software to Huawei.
Interesting. Apple, Microsoft: Is there a message here.
Stephen E Arnold, November 26, 2019
Google Cloud: Identification of an AWS Weakness
November 25, 2019
Who knows if this report is public relations or data gold? Today one can struggle to wriggle the truth in technical reports. If you are up to a challenge, navigate to “Just Eat Orders Google Cloud Platform for Its Data Needs – Ditches AWS.”
JustEat says on its Web site:
More than 12 million hungry people come to Just Eat every month. And they keep coming back because we continue to invest in marketing and improved products and services for customers and restaurants.
The write up points out that JustEat has 27 million customers. Each is “wanting food and you’ve got 112,000 restaurants. How do you start to map the two together?”
The article explains that the Google Cloud Platform is the solution. The company’s AWS system:
and every Monday morning, analysts and data scientists would cause a massive traffic jam and demand to get data, and the average query time would be 800 seconds, so people would start a query, go and get a coffee and then come back and get their results set and then may even have to query again if there’s something wrong.
How much faster is the Google solution? The answer is:
the average query time is down to 30 seconds, so not only are people getting data quicker than before, but all of that 90% of data that we weren’t ingesting is also being ingested – so the data estate is a magnitude bigger, and yet we’re still getting lower query times.
Just Eat was impressed with Google Contact Centre AI product. The write up quotes a JustEat executive as saying:
The post-order space is just as important [as ordering food], and I think there is a lot of work we can do there to improve the experience and remove anxiety. So, looking for services like Customer Contact Centre AI is a big piece.
A few observations:
- Amazon has invented a streaming data service. This article takes direct aim at AWS and its failures
- Query time improvement is interesting, but there is scant data about what’s happening within the GCP set up
- Amazon offers a range of smart software. The write up makes it clear that Google is just better at implementing.
Whom does one believe? The information flowing from Amazon via its AWS Web site or information in an article which can find little fault with the Google.
DarkCyber’s take away is that the PR battle between Google and AWS may be ticking up a notch. Despite the assertions in the write up, Amazon is likely to find a way to point out its virtues.
And the facts? Have you ever heard of road kill on the information superhighway?
Stephen E Arnold, November 25, 2019
Google Trends Used to Reveal Misspelled Wirds or Is It Words?
November 25, 2019
We spotted a listing of the most misspelled words in each of the USA’s 50 states. Too bad Puerto Rico. Kentucky’s most misspelled word is “ninety.” Navigate to Considerable and learn what residents cannot spell. How often? Silly kweston.
The listing includes some bafflers and may reveal what can go wrong with data from an online ad sales data collection system; for example:
- Washington, DC (which is not a state in DarkCyber’s book) cannot spell “enough”; for example, “enuf already with these televised hearings and talking heads”
- Idaho residents cannot spell embarrassed, which as listeners to Kara Swisher know has two r’s and two s’s. Helpful that.
- Montana residents cannot spell “comma.” Do those in Montana use commas?
- And not surprisingly, those in Tennessee cannot spell “intelligent.” Imagine that!
What happens if one trains smart software on these data?
Sumthink mite go awf the railz.
Stephen E Arnold, November 25, 2019
Who Owns the Future? Leonardos That Is Who
November 25, 2019
I found “The Future Belongs to Polymaths” oddly disturbing. The message is that people who are really smart and have mastered many field will own the future. People like Leonardo Da Vinci were identified to me in grade school as really smart people. I think one of my teachers, maybe Miss Soapes introduced the concept of Renaissance man to me in the fourth grade. This was good because I had missed two or three years of regular grade school because my family lived in Brazil. My local school had no provisions for an English speaker beyond “Yankee, go home.” My Calvert Course teacher died from an insect bite with complication from some obscure disease. Renaissance anything I wasn’t.
But the write up states:
Still, it’s clear that whenever we have had giants like Aristotle, Galileo, and Da Vinci, the contributions they made even in specialized fields may not have been made in the same way if they hadn’t attacked a problem with a diverse inventory of mental knowledge and understanding. Polymaths see the world differently. They make connections that are otherwise ignored, and they have the advantage of a unique perspective.
I think Facebook, Google, and the other members of the FAANG hire polymaths.
What’s the result?
Perhaps the reality created by polymaths is not so good for the other 99.8 percent of the population?
Here are some reassuring thoughts:
Now, in a world where Artificial Narrow Intelligence systems are going to displace most routine, specialized work, it isn’t too much of stretch to assume that this skill of learning to learn across disciplines may just be the difference between those who reinvent themselves and those who don’t. In fact, chances are that our current distinctions between disciplines will start to fade away and new ones will arise. Many of them will likely reside between areas that aren’t currently covered by specialization.
And the point of the write up is?
Stephen E Arnold, November 25, 2019
Potpourr-AI
November 24, 2019
Here is a useful roundup of information for those interested in machine learning. Forbes presents a thorough collection of observations, citing several different sources, about the impact of deep learning on the AI field in, “Amazon Saw 15-Fold Jump in Forecast Accuracy with Deep Learning and Other AI Stats.” As the title indicates, under the heading AI Business Impact, writer Gil Press reports:
“When Amazon switched from traditional machine learning techniques to deep learning in 2015, it saw a 15-fold increase in the accuracy of its forecasts, a leap that has enabled it to roll-out its one-day Prime delivery guarantee to more and more geographies; MasterCard has used AI to cut in half the number of times a customer has their credit card transaction erroneously declined, while at the same time reducing fraudulent transactions by about 40%; and using predictive analytics to spot cyber attacks and waves of fraudulent activity by organized crime groups helped Mastercard’s customers avoid some $7.5 billion worth of damage from cyberattacks in just the past 10 months [Fortune]”
A couple other examples under AI Business Impact include the Press Association’s RADAR news service, which generated 50,000 local news stories in three months with the help of but six human reporters; and the Rotterdam Roy Dutch Shell refinery’s sensor data analysis that helped them avoid spending about $2 million in maintenance trips.
Press arranges the rest of his AI information into several more headings: AI Business Adoption, where we learn nearly all respondents to an IFS survey of business leaders have plans to implement AI functionality; AI Consumer Attitudes, where he tells us a pessimistic 10% of Mozilla-surveyed consumers think AI will make our lives worse; AI Research Results, under which is reported that AI can now interpret head CT scans as well as a highly trained radiologist; AI Venture Capital Investments; AI Market Forecasts; and AI Quotable Quotes. The article concludes with this noteworthy quotation:
“‘To make deliberate progress towards more intelligent and more human-like artificial systems… we need to be able to define and evaluate intelligence in a way that enables comparisons between two systems, as well as comparisons with humans’—Francois Chollet”
We recommend interested readers check out the article for its many more details.
Cynthia Murrell, November 22, 2019
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