Another Swiftian Moment? Who Is Working for Whom?
September 21, 2020
I spotted “It’s Ridiculous. Underfunded FTC and DOJ Can’t Keep Fighting the Tech Giants Like This.” The information in the write up may be one of those spontaneous search engine optimization ploys or the work of super-intelligent smart software. To my inexperienced eyes, the write up seems to be semi accurate.
The idea is that “US regulators don’t have enough money to properly check the tech giants.” I would suggest that the revolving door, free logo bedecked mouse pads, and nifty briefings with edible food are also among the reasons.
The write up asserts:
The Federal Trade Commission and Department of Justice’s antitrust division have a combined annual budget below what Facebook makes in three days. The FTC runs on less than $350 million per year, the DOJ’s antitrust division on less than $200 million. Facebook made $18 billion last quarter alone. The funding disparity between the tech giants and their regulators leads to an unbalanced fight, current and ex-staffers said: The agencies can’t investigate the tech giants to the extent they’d like.
The write up did not mention taxes, but is that significant? Of course not.
The write up also does not point out that the demographics of staff in some Federal agencies may suggest that the contest between enforcers and the enforced is a bit like the Barcelona soccer team taking on a group of under 12s in a match.
The write up may be getting close to the resource disparity. The larger question may be, “Who is working for whom?”
Stephen E Arnold, September 21, 2020
The JEDI Questioned: Windows 10 Updates and Value
September 21, 2020
“Windows 10 Updates Are Pretty Much Useless” suggests that the JEDI outfit and inventor of two mobile phones held together with a hinge is hand waving. Who knew? The article asserts: “IT professionals claim Windows 10 updates rarely deliver value.” The sample on which these shocking conclusions are based contained 500 people. No, we don’t know how these folks were selected or if they were wearing Steve Jobs-style jeans and shirts.
We noted these items from the write up:
- Of the 500 respondents, 20 percent said they think Windows 10 updates deliver at least some value.
- 22 percent said the updates left them “indifferent.”
- In 2018, a similar survey revealed nearly 70% of IT personnel were dismissive of the bi-annual feature updates at the time.
Is Microsoft Windows winning over the hearts and minds of the JEDI minions? Not much progress it seems. How excited can one get when an operating system is a utility function. Fiddling with an operating system appears to put speed bumps on the information highway.
What about bum updates? Not even a bold online information services dares to enter that digital swamp.
Stephen E Arnold, September 21, 2020
9 21
September 20, 2020
One of the DarkCyber research team came across this chart on the Datawrapper Web site. Datawrapper provides millennial-ready analysis tools. With some data and the firm’s software, anyone can produce a chart like this one with green bars for negative numbers.
What is the chart displaying. The odd green bar shows the decline in job postings. Why green? No idea. What is the source of the data? Glassdoor, a job listings site. The data apply only to Chicago, Illinois. The time period is August 2020 versus August 2019. The idea is that the longer the bar, the greater the decline. Why is the bar green? Isn’t red a more suitable color for negative numbers?
Shown in this image are the top 12 sectors for job loss. To be clear, the longer the bar, the fewer job postings. Fewer job postings, one assumes, translates to reduced opportunities for employment.
What’s interesting is that accounting, consulting, information technology, telecommunications, and computer software and hardware are big losers. Those expensive MBAs, the lost hours studying for the CPA examination, and thumb typing through man pages are gone for now.
Observations:
- The colors? Red maybe.
- The decline in high technology work and knowledge work is interesting.
- The “open jobs” numbers are puzzling. Despite declines, Chicago – the city of big shoulders and big challenges – has thousands of jobs in declining sectors.
Net net: IT and computer software and hardware look promising. The chart doesn’t do the opportunities justice. And the color?
Stephen E Arnold, September 20, 2020
TikTok: Maybe Some Useful Information?
September 19, 2020
US President Donald Trump banned Americans from using TikTok, because of potential information leaks to China. In an ironic twist, The Intercept explains “Leaked Documents Reveal What TikTok Shares With Authorities—In The U.S.” It is not a secret in the United States that social media platforms from TikTok to Facebook collect user data as ways to spy and sell products.
While the US monitors its citizens, it does not take the same censorship measures as China does with its people. It is alarming the amount of data TikTok gathers for the Chinese, but leaked documents show that the US also accesses that data. Data privacy has been a controversial topic for years within the United States and experts argue that TikTok collects the same type of information as Google, Amazon, and Facebook. The documents reveal that ByteDance, TikTok’s parent company, the FBI, and Department of Homeland Security monitored the platform.
Law enforcement officials use TikTok as a means to monitor social unrest related to the death of George Floyd. Floyd suffocated when a police officer cut off his oxygen attempting to restrain him during arrest. TikTok users post videos about Black Lives Matter, police protests, tips for disarming law enforcement, and even jokes about the US’s current upheaval. TikTok’s user agreement says it collects information and will share it with third parties. The third parties include law enforcement if TikTok feels there is an imminent danger.
TikTok, however, also censors videos, particularly those the Chinese government dislikes. These videos include political views, the Hong Kong protests, Uyghur internment camps, and people considered poor, disabled, or ugly.
Trump might try to make the US appear as the better country, but:
““The common concern, whether we’re talking about TikTok or Huawei, isn’t the intentions of that company necessarily but the framework within which it operates,” said Elsa Kania, an expert on Chinese technology at the Center for a New American Security. “You could criticize American companies for having an opaque relationship to the U.S. government, but there definitely is a different character to the ecosystem.” At the same time, she added, the Trump administration’s actions, including a handling of Portland protests that brought to mind the police crackdown in Hong Kong, have undercut official critiques of Chinese practices: “At a moment when we’re seeing attempts by the administration to draw a contrast in terms of values and ideology with China, these eerie parallels that keep recurring do really undermine that.”
The issue is contentious. Information does not have to be used at the time of collection. The actions of youth can be used to exert pressure at a future time. That may be the larger risk.
Whitney Grace, September 19, 2020
Waze: Suffering from the Rona?
September 18, 2020
Less driving and carpooling during the pandemic means less ad revenue for a certain navigation and mapping service. The Verge reports, “Google’s Waze Lays Off 5 Percent of its Workforce, Closes Offices in Asia and Latin America.” For Waze, that five percent represents about 30 folks out of its 555 workers. Those jobs mostly come from the sales, marketing, and partnerships departments. The company hopes to strike a balance by adding a similar number of jobs in technology and engineering in upcoming months. We wish them luck with that. The offices to be shuttered in Malaysia, Singapore, Colombia, Chile, and Argentina also represent a trade-off. Waze plans to focus more on markets in which it had been growing—the US, the UK, France, Brazil, Canada, Italy, and Mexico.
Reporter Andrew J. Hawkins writes:
“As shelter-in-place and working from home become the new norm, fewer people are using Waze for their daily navigation needs. Fewer eyeballs on the app means less advertising revenue for the company. Waze, which was acquired by Google in 2013 for a reported $1.1 billion, has seen a dip in both monthly active users, or the number of customers using the app each month, and driven kilometers, the metric by which the company measures how far its customers drive while using Waze.”
Though Waze’s numbers have been gradually recovering since lockdown restrictions were lifted in some countries, the global weekly driven kilometers dipped by a striking 70 percent in June. As one might imagine, usage the company’s ride-sharing service, Waze Carpool, has also dwindled. We’re told:
“With more people working from home, fewer people are using Waze Carpool to share rides with co-workers or other neighbors who work along a similar route. As a result, Waze is shrinking the number of people who work on its standalone carpooling service. Earlier this year, Waze was on track to cross 1 million monthly carpool trips globally, and now the company is nowhere near that, a spokesperson said.”
DarkCyber finds that completely unsurprising. Hawkins gets much of his information from an email Waze’s CEO Noam Bardin sent to employees, which is reproduced in full at the end of the article. He notes the company is sympathetic to its workers who must say goodbye, and Bardin pledges to help them into the beginning of next year with severances, bonuses, and health insurance.
Cynthia Murrell, September 18, 2020
An Infographic about Amazon with One Tiny Omission
September 18, 2020
Until the Visual Capitalist diagrammed “The Jeff Bezos Empire In One Giant Chart,” South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone had the best portrayal of Bezos. Stone and Parker depicted Bezos as a psychic human with a giant brain akin to something out of a science fiction B movie. The 2018 season of South Park also compared Amazon Fulfillment Centers to indentured servitude complete with renditions of “I Sold My Soul To The Company Store.”
The Visual Capitalist takes a more professional representation of Bezos by breaking down his fortune and depicting it with handy dandy charts. Bezos’s assets total $137 billion, surpassing philanthropist and Microsoft founder Bill Gates. That fortune will decrease in the future, because Bezos and his wife of twenty-five years MacKenzie Bezos are divorcing. It is currently unknown how the couple will divide the fortune.
Most of Bezos’ empire is Amazon and acquisitions he made through his main company. He purchased Whole Foods, PillPack, twitch.tv, Zappos, and Kiva Systems. Not all of Bezos’s purchases were wise as seen in failed dot-com kozmo.com and Twilio. He has also invested money as a venture capitalist through his Bezos Expeditions.
If that was not enough, his personal investments are also shared:
“Jeff Bezos also invests money on a personal level. He was an angel investor in Google in 1998, and has also put money in Uber and Airbnb. (Note: these last two companies are listed on the Bezos Expeditions website, but on Crunchbase they are listed as personal investments.
Nash Holdings LLC
Nash Holdings is the private company owned by Bezos that bought The Washington Post for $250 million.
Bezos Family Foundation
The BFF is run by Jeff Bezos’ parents, and is funded through Amazon stock. It focuses on early education, and has also made an investment in LightSail Education’s $11 million Series B round.
Blue Origin
Finally, it’s also worth noting that Jeff Bezos is the founder of Blue Origin, an aerospace company that is competing with SpaceX in mankind’s final frontier.”
Does Bezos have enough to purchase his own island yet? Why stop at an island, when he could buy an entire archipelago.
And the omission?
Amazon’s policeware and intelware businesses.
Whitney Grace, September 18, 2020
Facebook and Digital Partitioning
September 18, 2020
I am no expert on managing the Gen X, Y, and millennials creating must have services for thumbtypers. The services, like the young wizards, puzzle me. I don’t worry about it, but for Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, he worries and tries to remediate what seems to be a management Sudoku.
“Facebook Issues New Rules on Internal Employee Communication” explains new principles “to guide debates and conversations within Workplace. This is Facebook’s social network for employees. The article points out that Google moderates its internal message boards.
I live in rural Kentucky, but it seems to me that “principles” and humans who are digital content guards are an interesting development. The approach is even more interesting because Facebook has expressed a keen desire to facilitate social interactions.
I noted this passage in the CNBC write up:
The company will also be more specific about which parts of Workplace can be used to discuss social and political issues. This change will be so that employees do not have to confront social issues during their day-to-day work. Facebook’s new principles also ask that employees communicate with professionalism and continue to debate about the company’s work but do so in a respectful manner.
How does partitioning work in day-to-day communication? In computer speak, a partition is a chunk of a storage device. That data space is a separate logical volume. In a house, a partition divides one space into smaller spaces; for example, a big house in San Jose may have a “safe room.” The idea is that a person can enter the separate area and prevent an intruder from harming the individual. In the case of the storage device, a person or software system operates as the decision maker. the partition is created. The “user” gains access to the storage under certain conditions, but the user does not decide. The user just gets rights and lives with those rights.
The safe house is a different kettle of intentions. The safe room is entered by an individual who feels threatened or who wants to escape a Zoom call. The user locks the door and prevents others from getting into the safe room.
What’s the Facebook partition? Who decides? These will be interesting questions to answer as Facebook pushes forward with what I call “imposed adulting.” The partitioning of Workplace is an interesting step by a company which has been less than proactive in making certain types of decisions about social behavior within the Facebook datasphere.
A related question is, “How does partitioning work out in a social setting?” I napped through lectures about historical partitioning efforts. I vaguely recall one of my history professors (Dr. Philip Crane) expounding about the partitioning of Berlin after the second world war. My recollection is very fuzzy, but the impression I can dredge up from the murky depths of my memory is that it was not party time and pink balloons.
Net net: Partitioning a storage device is a god mode function. Partitioning in a social space is a less tidy logical operation. And when the computer partitioning meets the social partition? Excitement for sure.
Stephen E Arnold, September 18, 2020
TikTok Ticks Along
September 18, 2020
US President Donald Trump allegedly banned Americans from using TikTok, because of potential information leaks to China. In an ironic twist, The Intercept explains “Leaked Documents Reveal What TikTok Shares With Authorities—In The U.S.” It is not a secret in the United States that social media platforms from TikTok to Facebook collect user data as ways to spy and sell products.
While the US monitors its citizens, it does not take the same censorship measures as China does with its people. It is alarming the amount of data TikTok gathers for the Chinese, but leaked documents show that the US also accesses that data. Data privacy has been a controversial topic for years within the United States and experts argue that TikTok collects the same type of information as Google, Amazon, and Facebook. The documents reveal that ByteDance, TikTok’s parent company, the FBI, and Department of Homeland Security monitored the platform.
Law enforcement officials use TikTok as a means to monitor social unrest related to the death of George Floyd. Floyd suffocated when a police officer cut off his oxygen attempting to restrain him during arrest. TikTok users post videos about Black Lives Matter, police protests, tips for disarming law enforcement, and even jokes about the US’s current upheaval. TikTok’s user agreement says it collects information and will share it with third parties. The third parties include law enforcement if TikTok feels there is an imminent danger.
TikTok, however, also censors videos, particularly those the Chinese government dislikes. These videos include political views, the Hong Kong protests, Uyghur internment camps, and people considered poor, disabled, or ugly.
Trump might try to make the US appear as the better country, but:
““The common concern, whether we’re talking about TikTok or Huawei, isn’t the intentions of that company necessarily but the framework within which it operates,” said Elsa Kania, an expert on Chinese technology at the Center for a New American Security. “You could criticize American companies for having an opaque relationship to the U.S. government, but there definitely is a different character to the ecosystem.” At the same time, she added, the Trump administration’s actions, including a handling of Portland protests that brought to mind the police crackdown in Hong Kong, have undercut official critiques of Chinese practices: “At a moment when we’re seeing attempts by the administration to draw a contrast in terms of values and ideology with China, these eerie parallels that keep recurring do really undermine that.”
Where is the matter now? We will have to ask an oracle.
Whitney Grace, September 18, 2020
Tireless Readers Those Bots
September 18, 2020
AI bots do marvelous things such as facial recognition, document analysis, and creating false videos of world leaders singing pop songs. AI bots, however, are only as smart as they are programmed. The MIT Technology Review shares how smart AI bots are in the article, “This Know-It-All AI Learns By Reading The Entire Web Nonstop.”
Most AI bots are good at consuming and regurgitating information, but lack the knowledge to interpret the content. If AI is going to be more integral in society, algorithms need to be smarter and also trustworthy. Diffbot is supposed to be different from its brethren, because it is designed to be factual. Diffbot reads everything on the public Internet in multiple languages and extracts as many facts as possible. It sounds like Diffbot know how to double and triple check facts.
Diffbot takes the facts and transforms them into a three part factoid that relates the information together: subject, verb, object. Each factoid interconnects and forms an interconnected knowledge graph of facts. Knowledge graphs have been used for years and are the basis for the semantic web. Google implemented knowledge graphs a few years ago, but only uses them for popular search terms. Diffbot wants to make knowledge graphs for everything on the Internet. How does Diffbot read everything?
“To collect its facts, Diffbot’s AI reads the web as a human would—but much faster. Using a super-charged version of the Chrome browser, the AI views the raw pixels of a web page and uses image-recognition algorithms to categorize the page as one of 20 different types, including video, image, article, event, and discussion thread. It then identifies key elements on the page, such as headline, author, product description, or price, and uses NLP to extract facts from any text.
Every three-part factoid gets added to the knowledge graph. Diffbot extracts facts from pages written in any language, which means that it can answer queries about Katy Perry, say, using facts taken from articles in Chinese or Arabic even if they do not contain the term ‘Katy Perry.’”
Diffbot rebuilds its knowledge graph every four to five days by adding 100 million to 150 million entities each month. Machine learning allows Diffbot to merge old information with new. Diffbot must also add new hardware as the knowledge graph grows.
Diffbot is currently used by DuckDuckGo to make Google-like boxes, Snapchat uses it to feeds its news pages, Adidas and Nike use it to track counterfeit shoes, and Zola uses it to assist people making wedding lists. For the moment, Diffbot only interacts with people in code, but the plan is to make it a universal factoid question answering system.
That sounds familiar, doesn’t it?
Whitney Grace, September 18, 2020
Google: WFH Engineers with Zero Hands On Real World Knowledge Are an Amusing Group
September 17, 2020
The Google thing is a meh to me. The dumpster fires at YouTube are a source of amazement. Odd ball behaviors in Gmail allow email to appear and disappear with merrie abandon. So be it. We noted “Google, Nobody Asked for a New Blogger Interface”, an interesting essay which tackles a facet of Google we have not paid attention to for years — Blogger.
The write up explains interface changes and behaviors of the editor. Most Blogger users may not care. The author of the TenFourFox Development essay does. As a result, there is a believability and emotion in the write up. Here’s an example:
By switching into HTML view, you lose ($#@%!, stop indenting that line when I type emphasis tags!) the ability to insert hyperlinks, images or other media by any other means other than manually typing them out. You can’t even upload an image, let alone automatically insert the HTML boilerplate and edit it. So switch into Compose view to actually do any of those things, and what happens? Like before, Blogger rewrites your document, but now this happens all the time because of what you can’t do in HTML view. Certain arbitrarily-determined naughtytags(tm) like <em> become <i> (my screen-reader friends will be disappointed).
There’s more, including the clunky workaround the TenFourFox Development author has figured out.
Welcome to the new and improved Google?
Several observations:
- Changes at Google often emerge before someone with actual hands on experience is aware of the changes. Don’t you love those rippling changes across time zones from Google search professionals? Same deal. Make a change. Go forth. Catch up later? Maybe. Maybe not.
- With less human-to-human Foosball interaction, advice is not shared casually. Consequently young entitled wizards do things and without rules or effective management, stuff happens. Case in point: The introduction of changes without considering 360 degree impacts. What 21 year old thinks beyond a single point of focus: Hey, this works. Not many.
- When managers are involved, those individuals often have their sights set on the next big thing; that is, a lateral arabesque to a task that will deliver fame, glory, and a bonus or a promotion. The utility of a change from a user’s perspective is not part of the job description.
For that reason, YouTube throttling, ad injection, and irrelevant search results seem to be the new normal. Don’t you love entering a query with a phrase in quotes. Google happily displays results with a required word excluded from the results list. Hey, those are really unhelpful fixes in my opinion. The policies burn through the ad inventory and annoy “customers”, don’t they? No. I think I understand.
Net net: DarkCyber has concluded that work from home engineers with zero hands on, real world knowledge are an amusing group. Just another task for the affable Google senior management to tackle. Unfortunately disconnects in Blogger are examples of an interior deterioration of bits and basics. That’s not amusing.
Stephen E Arnold, September 17, 2020
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