Common Sense: Unlikely When It Comes to Software for Thumbtypers
April 28, 2021
Here is some intriguing research we should all probably consider. Sometimes, the best solution to a design problem is to remove something instead of piling more features on. However, Scientific American reports, “Our Brain Typically Overlooks this Brilliant Problem-Solving Strategy.” Perhaps the Microsoft Teams’ professionals might find value in a reduced-features approach to software. Just a suggestion.
Balance bikes that eliminate pedals instead of sporting training wheels for kids learning to ride. The elimination of traffic lights and road signs for safer streets. Solutions like these can be startling because they involve deletions instead of additions. Who would’ve thought? A pair of researchers at the University of Virginia tested their suspicion that humans tend to add elements instead of to removing them and that there is a psychological explanation. They conducted a series of observational studies that seem to confirm their hypothesis; see the write-up for those interesting details. Reporter Diana Kwon writes:
“These findings, which were published today in Nature, suggest that ‘additive solutions have sort of a privileged status—they tend to come to mind quickly and easily,’ says Benjamin Converse, a social psychologist at the University of Virginia and a co-author of the study. ‘Subtractive solutions are not necessarily harder to consider, but they take more effort to find.’ The authors ‘convincingly demonstrate that we tend to not consider subtractive solutions as much as additive ones,’ says Tom Meyvis, a consumer psychologist at New York University, who was not directly involved in the study but reviewed it and co-authored a commentary about it in Nature. While the propensity for businesses and organizations to opt for complexity rather than simplification was previously known, the novelty of this paper is that it shows that people tend toward adding new features, ‘even when subtracting would clearly be better,’ he adds. Meyvis also notes that other reasons for this effect may be a greater likelihood that additive solutions will be appreciated or the so-called sunk-cost bias, in which people continue investing in things for which time, money or effort has already been spent.”
Does this bias against subtraction cross cultures? Is it present in childhood or do we grow into it? Several questions remain to be investigated. Meanwhile, the researchers hope their findings will encourage all of us, whatever our field, to consider subtraction as well as addition when we go to make improvements or solve design problems. We might just find brilliant solutions we would otherwise have overlooked.
Cynthia Murrell, April 28, 2021
Cyber Security Quote to Note: Seeing Is Important
April 28, 2021
I read a Washington Post article with a somewhat misleading title. The main point of the write up is that the US Department of Defense began using a large block of IP addresses in January 2021. These reason for the shift from dormant holding to active use of the Internet addresses related to cyber security. That’s the explanation in the write up. In the news story there was an important statement attributed to an anonymous source (a very popular way to report “real” news). Here’s the quote:
If you can’t see it, you can’t defend it.
In my opinion this is accurate. The statement underscores what I have commented upon in this blog and in my DarkCyber bimonthly video program DarkCyber. The SolarWinds and more recent security missteps have been missed by the commercial and governmental systems designed to spot cyber attacks and malware.
Having more traffic to monitor is a good thing. The problem is what I call the 21st century horse and barn situation. Here it is again:
Barn burned. Horses gone. Globus (Russia) retail space constructed where the hay used to be stored.
Better late than never? Yeah, sure.
Stephen E Arnold, April 28, 2021
Microsoft Teams: An Interesting Message
April 27, 2021
Today my lecture will be via Zoom. The reason? Because Teams. The tweets greeted me with interesting content; for example:
We’ve confirmed that this issue [Teams spitting error messages] affects users globally.
Gobally. Okay. Now that’s a pretty fascinating statement from Microsoft, the outfit which has the ability to make it impossible for some people to play games at normal frame rates or print documents.
Very pro Microsoft online information services are explaining the oh-so-minor glitch; for example, “Microsoft Teams Down to Start the Day on the East Coast.” Without the usual rah rah, the objective news service states:
Many people struggling to use Teams see a message stating, “Operation failed with unexpected error.” As of 6:55 AM EST, reports spiked for outages from zero to 355, but they are rising quickly. Teams has millions of users, so 355 reports isn’t a dramatically high number, but the rate of change indicates an issue.
One can assume that “the rate of change indicates an issue” a pretty strong statement about the feature rich Teams’ service. Will some of the technical professionals working on the SolarWinds’ misstep be shifted to shore up the Teams mishap?
The technical issues with security, consumer updates, and Teams seem to be intractable to me. Instead of too big to fail, has Microsoft become too big to create stuff which works?
Stephen E Arnold, April 27, 2021
AI: Committees Are Smarter Than Developers?
April 27, 2021
I read “EU Outlines Ambitious AI Regulations Focused on Risky Uses.” The main idea seems to be that European Union regulators are smart enough to write rules for risky uses of numerical recipes. First, what’s risk, or, more accurately, what’s acceptable risk? Second, are regulators able to understand specific implementations of smart software designed for “uses”?
In my opinion, the answer to the first question is that “acceptable risk” is an interesting idea. It’s like ethical behavior, beauty, and evil. The answer to the second question is, “Not a chance.”
The write up reports:
Under the AI proposals, unacceptable uses would also include manipulating behavior, exploiting children’s vulnerabilities or using subliminal techniques.
How pray tell will lawyers, bureaucrats, and successful clothing sales professionals recognize a subliminal technique? Whom will these professional deciders believe when data are gathered from academics, allegedly suppressed businesses, and activists?
AI is now, and the write up makes clear that progress will be slow and painful:
To be sure, the draft rules have a long way to go before they take effect. They need to be reviewed by the European Parliament and the European Council and could be amended in a process that could take several years, though officials declined to give a specific timeframe.
To sum up, hubris is wonderful when enshrined in bureaucracy. How fast does AI change? A little quicker than an EU deliberation for sure.
Stephen E Arnold, April 27, 2021
Huawei: Dutch Treat for 5G Security
April 27, 2021
A secret report from 2010 has surfaced in the Netherlands and has been reviewed by editors at news site de Volkskrant. The document reveals that “Huawei Was Able to Eavesdrop on Dutch Mobile Network KPN,” reports the NL Times. We learn that, in 2009, KPN used Huawei tech and that six employees of the Chinese tech giant worked at its head office. Warned by security firm AIVD that this was a dicey situation, KPN hired researchers at Capgemini analyze any risks involved. We learn:
“The conclusions turned out to be so alarming that the internal report was kept secret. ‘The continued existence of KPN Mobile is in serious danger because permits may be revoked or the government and businesses may give up their confidence in KPN if it becomes known that the Chinese government can eavesdrop on KPN mobile numbers and shut down the network’, de Volkskrant quotes the report. At the time, KPN’s mobile network had 6.5 million subscribers.”
These subscribers included then Prime Minister Jan Peter Balkenende and other ministers as well as, importantly, Chinese dissidents. The write-up continues:
“The Capgemini report stated that Huawei staff, both from within KPN buildings and from China, could eavesdrop on unauthorized, uncontrolled, and unlimited KPN mobile numbers. The company gained unauthorized access to the heart of the mobile network from China. How often that happened is not clear because it was not recorded anywhere.”
Huawei assures everyone it never took advantage of this access and there is no evidence (yet) that it did so. The revelation explains why KPN has since maintained its own mobile core network and relied upon Western suppliers. Lesson learned.
Cynthia Murrell, April 27, 2021
You Buy a Newspaper, and Then You Read This: Will the Bezos Bulldozer Change Direction?
April 27, 2021
Jeff Bezos (via assorted financial entities) gained control of the Washington Post. MBAs can quibble about “gained control”, the idea of buying a newspaper, and associating the publication with the mom-and-pop online store. That’s okay.
Navigate to “How Big Tech Got So Big: Hundreds of Acquisitions.” Now visualize yourself as the world’s richest man and an individual who may be the smartest person in any room into which he wanders. Then read this passage from your newspaper:
You may have recognized many of these acquired companies, like Zappos, IMDb, Twitch and Goodreads — all owned by Amazon.
Skip a few lines:
But the majority of acquisitions involved small start-ups with
valuable patents or talented engineers…
And this passage:
But now, as the tech giants grow more powerful, critics who accused these companies of using monopoly power to weaken competitors have also called for more scrutiny, saying the acquisitions are not rooted in innovation but total market control — part of a tactic known as “copy, acquire, kill” — to eliminate competition…
Continuing with:
To enter the grocery arena, the company acquired Whole Foods Market and its distribution channels and retail locations in one $13.7 billion-dollar gulp. Amazon wanted to be a bigger player in the “Internet of Things,” so it swallowed up several home security companies and the home router company Eero. And as the company dived into the autonomous vehicle industry, it chose start-ups in that space, too. [Want to borrow that e-book from the library? Sorry, Amazon won’t let you.] Amazon is everywhere: in your television with Prime Video, in your ears with its Echo smart speaker, and behind the websites and apps you use every day. In 2020, the company made $386 billion in revenue. The company shows no signs of slowing, with additional acquisitions that included robotics companies to assist workers and artificial intelligence to grow the capabilities of its Alexa virtual assistant service. Amazon executives have said the company is just a small part of the overall retail industry.
In your hypothetical guise of the world’s richest person, what do you do?
[a] Ignore
[b] Make a call to someone who can talk to someone about the story
[c] Pull a lever on the bulldozer and change direction
[d] Other? Explain: _______________________________
Business strategies with examples from one’s employer can be interesting.
Stephen E Arnold, April 27, 2021
Apple and Facebook: Maybe Regular Governmental Regulations Do Not Work for These Outfits?
April 26, 2021
I read “How Mark Zuckerberg and Tim Cook Became Foes.” The dust up is about user tracking. It is not explicitly about making money, acting in a manner which helps customers, or conforms to the expectations of some people. The NYT article is interesting, but it ignored a point I think is important. I will get to what is in my opinion an important omission in a moment.
First, the write up states:
At the center of the fight are the two C.E.O.s. Their differences have long been evident. Mr. Cook, 60, is a polished executive who rose through Apple’s ranks by constructing efficient supply chains. Mr. Zuckerberg, 36, is a Harvard dropout who built a social-media empire with an anything-goes stance toward free speech.
Then some history:
Mr. Cook decided to distance Apple from Facebook, the people said. While Mr. Cook had raised privacy as an issue as early as 2015, he ramped that up in 2018. Apple also unveiled a new corporate motto: “Privacy is a fundamental human right.”
And allegedly Mr. Zuckerberg’s current position:
But Mr. Zuckerberg has also been blunt about Facebook’s feelings on Apple. “We increasingly see Apple as one of our biggest competitors,” he said in an earnings call this year.
No problem but the omission is that the antics of two monopolies are no longer amusing. The US government as well as organizations like the EU have been unable to constrain either firm. This is a failure for three reasons:
- These are monopolies and the jousting is simply an effort to allow one company to win.
- Neither company cares about customers. Facebook sucks data and enables a Cambridge Analytica thought process and Apple makes it impossible for “customers” to have confidence that their purchases are theirs or that their devices can be fixed. Both approaches are anti-consumer.
- Both companies manipulate to thrive. Both use Orwellian type lingo to further the illusion that these firms are more than money generating constructs operating with personal antipathies, biases, and as supra-governments.
Quite an omission if my hypotheses are on the money.
Stephen E Arnold, April 26, 2021
Easy AI: Big Tech Options Are Too Complicated
April 26, 2021
One my researchers spotted https://pretrained.ai/. This is a service which allows a customer to “integrate pretrained machine learning models in minutes.” The Web site explains:
Configure and deploy your own private, hosted API endpoints to process text, images, and other data using state-of-the-art machine learning.
Simple, right? The service offers these numerical recipes:
- Face detection
- Crowd counting
- Language detection
- Sentiment analysis
- Entity extraction
- OCR
- Keyword extraction
- Question answering.
At this time there are some questions to which I could not locate answers; for example:
- What the biases embedded in the API endpoints
- What’s the performance penalty when multiple API endpoints are chained together
- What does “scalable” mean?
- What’s the facial recognition “accuracy” rate on a crowd of 30 people of mixed ethnicity in early evening light?
Here’s the pricing:
Get started for free. Worth a look.
Stephen E Arnold, April 26, 2021
Microsoft and LinkedIn: Ultimate Phishing Pool, er, Tool
April 26, 2021
Microsoft is buckling like an old building in Reykjavik. There was SolarWinds, then Microsoft Exchange Server, and then… The list goes on. Another issue has shaken the enterprise software company: LinkedIn phishing. (You thought I was going to comment about Windows Updates killing some gamers’ “experience”, didn’t you? Wrong.)
“Hackers Are Using LinkedIn As the Ultimate Phishing Tool” asserts:
According to MI5, the UK’s security agency, at least 10,000 citizens have been approached by state-sponsored threat actors using fake profiles on a popular social media platform. While MI5 did not specifically name the platform, the BBC claims to have learned that the platform in question is LinkedIn.
Interesting. MI5 is the UK’s domestic intelligence agency. The Box usually does not publicity and tries to sidestep the type of information disseminated in some countries; for example, in the US, intelligence agencies proactively accessed computers and took steps to reduce the risk of malware issues. By the way, those servers were running Microsoft software. Microsoft owns LinkedIn too.
Hmmm.
The article points out:
According to MI5, the LinkedIn attacks are wider in scope and directed at staff in government departments and major businesses. Once connected, the scammers try to bait the individuals by offering speaking or business opportunities, before attempting to recruit them to pass on confidential information.
Just another crack in the Microsoft LinkedIn edifice or a signal that the company can no longer manage its software, protect its “customers”, or update a consumer PC without creating problems?
Stephen E Arnold, April 26, 2021
Do Tech Monopolies Have to Create Enforcement Units?
April 26, 2021
Two online enforcement articles struck me as thought provoking.
The first was the Amazon announcement that it would kick creators (people who stream on the Twitch service) off the service for missteps off the platform. This is an interesting statement, and you can get some color in “Twitch to Boot Users for Transgressions Elsewhere.” In my discussion with my research team about final changes to my Amazon policeware lecture, I asked the group about Twitch banning individuals who create video streams and push them to the Twitch platform.
There were several points of view. Here’s a summary of the comments:
- Yep, definitely
- No, free country
- This has been an informal policy for a long time. (Example: SweetSaltyPeach, a streamer from South Africa who garnered attention by assembling toys whilst wearing interesting clothing. Note: She morphed into the more tractable persona RachelKay.
There’s may be a problem for Twitch, and I am not certain Amazon can solve it. Possibly Amazon – even with its robust policeware technology – cannot control certain activities off the platform. A good example is the persona on Twitch presented as iBabyRainbow. Here’s a snap of the Twitch personality providing baseball batting instructions to legions of fans by hitting eggs with her fans’ names on them:
There is an interesting persona on the site NewRecs. It too features a persona which seems very similar to that of the Amazon persona. The colors are similar; the makeup conventions are similar; and the unicorn representation appears in both images. Even the swimming pool featured on Twitch appears in the NewRecs’ representation of the personal BabyRainbow.
What is different is that on NewRecs, the content creator is named “BabyRainbow.” Exploration of the BabyRainbow persona reveals some online lines which might raise some eyebrows in Okoboji, Iowa. One example is the link between BabyRainbow and the site Chaturbate.
My research team spotted the similarity quickly. Amazon, if it does know about the coincidence, has not taken action for the persona’s Twitch versus NewRecs versus Chaturbate and some other “interesting” services which exist.
So either Twitch enforcement is ignoring certain behavior whilst punishing other types of behavior. Neither Amazon or Twitch is talking much about iBabyRainbow or other parental or law enforcement-type of actions.
The second development is the article “Will YouTube Ever Properly Deal with Its Abusive Stars?” The write up states:
YouTube has long had a problem with acknowledging and dealing with the behavior of the celebrities it helped to create… YouTube is but one of many major platforms eager to distance themselves from the responsibility of their position by claiming that their hands-off approach and frequent ignorance over what they host is a free speech issue. Even though sites like YouTube, Twitter, Substack, and so on have rules of conduct and claim to be tough on harassment, the evidence speaks to the contrary.
The essay points out that YouTube has taken action against certain individuals whose off YouTube behavior was interesting, possibly inappropriate, and maybe in violation of certain government laws. But, the essay, asserts about a YouTuber who pranked people and allegedly bullied people:
Dobrik’s channel was eventually demonetized by YouTube, but actions like this feel too little too late given how much wealth he’s accumulated over the years. Jake Paul is still pulling in big bucks from his channel. Charles was recently demonetized, but his follower count remains pretty unscathed. And that doesn’t even include all the right-wing creeps pulling in big bucks from YouTube. Like with any good teary apology video, the notion of true accountability seems unreachable.
To what do these two example sum? The Big Tech companies may have to add law enforcement duties to their checklist of nation state behavior. When a government takes an action, there are individuals with whom one can speak. What rights does talent on an ad-based platform have. Generate money and get a free pass. Behave in a manner which might lead to a death penalty in some countries? Keep on truckin’? The online ad outfit struggles to make clear exactly what it is doing with censorship and other activities like changing the rules for APIs. It will be interesting to see what the GOOG tries to do.
Consider this: What if Mr. Dobrik and iBabyRainbow team up and do a podcast? Would Apple and Spotify bid for rights? How would the tech giants Amazon and Google respond? These are questions unthinkable prior to the unregulated, ethics free online world of 2021.
Stephen E Arnold, April 26, 2021
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