Amazon Tactics: Entanglement at a Distance or the New Physics of Ecommerce?
April 15, 2021
Just a thought: Are two distant, seemingly unrelated events entangled? It depends on which physicist one believes and what one knows about the forces exerted by the Bezos bulldozer. I will talk about one facet of this strange influence in my Amazon lecture at the National Cyber Crime Conference. There are some attendance requirements, but I want to outline what I call the Bezos bulldozer’s strange force. This is hypothetical because like Dark Matter, no one knows exactly how to monetize it beyond snagging tenure. Nevertheless, it is an amusing notion to explore.
Here’s the first allegedly true factoid: The Wall Street Journal reports what to its intrepid “real” journalists is news. What is the nub of “How Amazon Strong-Arms Partners Using Its Power Across Multiple Businesses.” You will have to snag a dead tree version of the newspaper or pay Mr. Murdoch for some “real news.” The friendly mom and pop bookstore are allegedly using the collective presence of multiple Amazon businesses to alter the behavior of some vendors, partners, and other mostly unconnected pools of people bouncing off the blade of the Bezos bulldozer. As Mr. Murdoch’s stellar professionals have discerned:
A heavyweight in retail, cloud computing, digital advertising, streaming and smart speakers, the tech giant [Amazon] compels vendors in one market to engage with it in others.
Now shift to chilly Canada. This story is about a company touted by a media personality, NYU professor, and podcaster. “Senior Execs Forsyth, Frasca and Lemieux leaving Shopify” reports:
The departures will leave a significant gap in Shopify’s C-suite as the Ottawa firm ?– which surpassed RBC last year to become Canada’s most valuable publicly traded company ?– continues to stake its claim as a global e-commerce software leader.
What’s the connection between these two stories? One possibility is:
“Each one of them has their individual reasons but what was unanimous with all three was that this was the best for them and the best for Shopify,” Lütke said in the announcement obtained by OBJ.
Another possibility is that the vibrations or the Dark Force of the Bezos bulldozer has been sensed by those who recognize a power greater than themselves.
Connection or not? My thought is that one doesn’t need a yoda with French bulldog ears and nose to sense strange action at a distance.
As Yoda noted:
When you look at the dark side, careful you must be. For the dark side looks back.
Words to ponder?
Stephen E Arnold, April 15, 2021
Google Stop Words: Close Enough for the Mom and Pop Online Ad Vendor
April 15, 2021
I remember from a statistics lecture given by a fellow named Dr. Peplow maybe that fuzzy is one of the main characteristics of statistics. The idea is that a percentage is not a real entity; for example, the average number of lions in a litter is three, give or take a couple of the magnets for hunters and poachers. Depending upon the data set, the “real” number maybe 3.2 cubs in a litter. Who has ever seen a fractional lion? Certainly not me.
Why am I thinking fuzzy? Google is into data. The company collects, counts, and transform “real” data into actions. Whip in some smart software, and the company has processes which transform an advertiser’s need to reach eyeballs with some statistically validated interest in whatever the Mad Ave folks are trying to sell.
“Google Has a Secret Blocklist that Hides YouTube Hate Videos from Advertisers—But It’s Full of Holes” suggests that some of the Google procedures are fuzzy. The uncharitable might suggest that Google wants to get close enough to collect ad money. Horse shoe aficionados use the phrase “close enough for horse shoes” to indicate a toss which gets a point or blocks an opponent’s effort. That seems to be one possible message from the Mark Up article.
I noted this passage in the essay:
If you want to find YouTube videos related to “KKK” to advertise on, Google Ads will block you. But the company failed to block dozens of other hate and White nationalist terms and slogans, an investigation by The Markup has found. Using a list of 86 hate-related terms we compiled with the help of experts, we discovered that Google uses a blocklist to try to stop advertisers from building YouTube ad campaigns around hate terms. But less than a third of the terms on our list were blocked when we conducted our investigation.
What seems to be happening is that Google’s methods for taking a term and then “broadening” it so that related terms are identified is not working. The idea is that related terms with a higher “score” are more directly linked to the original term. Words and phrases with lower “scores” are not closely related. The article uses the example of the term KKK.
I learned:
Google Ads suggested millions upon millions of YouTube videos to advertisers purchasing ads related to the terms “White power,” the fascist slogan “blood and soil,” and the far-right call to violence “racial holy war.” The company even suggested videos for campaigns with terms that it clearly finds problematic, such as “great replacement.” YouTube slaps Wikipedia boxes on videos about the “the great replacement,” noting that it’s “a white nationalist far-right conspiracy theory.” Some of the hundreds of millions of videos that the company suggested for ad placements related to these hate terms contained overt racism and bigotry, including multiple videos featuring re-posted content from the neo-Nazi podcast The Daily Shoah, whose official channel was suspended by YouTube in 2019 for hate speech.
It seems to me that Google is filtering specific words and phrases on a stop word list. Then the company is not identifying related terms, particularly words which are synonyms for the word on the stop list.
Is it possible that Google is controlling how it does fuzzification. In order to get clicks and advertising, Google blocks specifics and omits the term expansion and synonym identification settings to eliminate the words and phrases identified by the Mark Up’s investigative team?
These references to synonym expansion and reference to query expansion are likely to be unfamiliar to some people. Nevertheless, fuzzy is in the hands of those who set statistical thresholds.
Fuzzy is not real, but the search results are. Ad money is a powerful force in some situations. The article seems to have uncovered a couple of enlightening examples. String matching coupled with synonym expansion seem to be out of step. Some fuzzification may be helpful in the hate speech methods.
Stephen E Arnold, April 12, 2021
Justice Thomas, Social Media, and Big Tech
April 15, 2021
Are social-media platforms more akin to telephone carriers or to conference halls? SCOTUS Justice Clarence Thomas likens them to the former, we learn from “Justice Thomas Argues for Making Facebook, Twitter and Google Utilities” at Protocol. On the other hand, TechDirt makes a solid, though snarky, argument that social-media companies are more like venues that rent out conference space in, “Justice Thomas Goes Weird Again; Suggests Twitter Can’t Moderate & Section 230 Violates 1st Amendment.”
On April 5th, the Supreme Court vacated a lower court decision which had ruled President Trump could not block Twitter followers, saying the issue is moot now that 45 is out of office. The lower court’s decision rests on the idea that a government official’s post and any discission around it constitute a public forum. As such, the official may not block comments with which they disagree. Justice Thomas took the occasion to muse upon the nature of social media platforms. Protocol reporter Issie Lapowsky writes:
“Thomas argues that some digital platforms are ‘sufficiently akin’ to common carriers like telephone companies. … Thomas argues that while private companies aren’t subject to the First Amendment, common carriers are unique to other private businesses in that they do not have the ‘right to exclude.’ Thomas suggests that large tech platforms with substantial market power should be bound by the same restrictions.”
Such restrictions would make it very hard for platforms to do anything about fake news, hate speech, and other objectionable content. TechDirt’s Mike Masnick, however, describes why Justice Thomas’s perspective is flawed. He writes:
“A bunch of very confused and clueless people have (incorrectly) taken to arguing that this somehow means that Twitter itself is a ‘public forum’ and cannot moderate content. That has always been very, very wrong. The courts were clear that they were only talking about the space beneath a public official’s statements. The simplest way to think of it is this: If the government rents out an event hall to let the President give a speech, it cannot engage in viewpoint discrimination in blocking people from coming into the hall to hear the speech. That does not mean the event hall itself is now permanently a public forum, or that the event hall owners cannot block people they have banned from their property from attending the speech, or any other events.”
Justice Thomas also hinted that Section 230 may be unconstitutional, a viewpoint Masnick insists demonstrates a misunderstanding of the law. See the TechDirt piece for more of Masnick’s strong opinions and reasoning on the subject.
Will Big Tech be able to influence Justice Thomas’ view? Maybe.
Cynthia Murrell, April 15, 2021
Clearview AI Faces Lawsuit on Web Photo Scraping Practices
April 15, 2021
We knew that facial-recognition firm Clearview AI, which sells its software to law enforcement agencies throughout the US, scrapes the Web for our photos and any data connected to them. Several civil liberties groups are trying to put a stop to the practice. The Los Angeles Times reports, “Clearview AI Uses Your Online Photos to Instantly ID You. That’s a Problem, Lawsuit Says.” Writer Johana Bhuiyan tells us the firm has collected more than 3 billion photos from Facebook, Twitter, Google, Venmo, and other sites. We learn:
“It also has caught the attention of civil liberties advocates and activists, who allege in a lawsuit filed Tuesday that the company’s automatic scraping of their images and its extraction of their unique biometric information violate privacy and chill protected political speech and activity. The plaintiffs — four individual civil liberties activists and the groups Mijente and NorCal Resist — allege Clearview AI ‘engages in the widespread collection of California residents’ images and biometric information without notice or consent.’ This is especially consequential, the plaintiffs argue, for proponents of immigration or police reform, whose political speech may be critical of law enforcement and who may be members of communities that have been historically over-policed and targeted by surveillance tactics. Clearview AI enhances law enforcement agencies’ efforts to monitor these activists, as well as immigrants, people of color and those perceived as ‘dissidents,’ such as Black Lives Matter activists, and can potentially discourage their engagement in protected political speech as a result, the plaintiffs say.”
The suit, filed in Alameda County Superior Court, seeks an injunction forcing Clearview to not only cease collecting photos and other biometric information in California, but to also delete all biometric data and personal information from their databases. Meanwhile in Illinois, the American Civil Liberties Union is suing the company, charging it has violated that state’s biometric privacy law. Officials in the European Union and Canada have also expressed concerns. We are unsure how much traction these suits and objections will get, however. Clearview insists it is in full compliance with the law, and cites the First Amendment in defending its databases. Besides, as Bhuiyan notes, citizens are getting used to a low expectation of privacy.
Amazon’s policeware efforts have avoided this type of publicity. Why?
Cynthia Murrell, April 15, 2021
MIT Deconstructs Language
April 14, 2021
I got a chuckle from the MIT Technology Review write up “Big Tech’s Guide to Talking about AI Ethics.” The core of the write up is a list of token words like “framework”, “transparency”, by design”, “progress”, and “trustworthy.” The idea is that instead of explaining the craziness of smart software with phrases like “yeah, the intern who set up the thresholds is now studying Zen in Denver” or “the lady in charge of that project left in weird circumstances but I don’t follow that human stuff.” The big tech outfits which have a generous dollop of grads from outfits like MIT string together token words to explain what 85 percent confidence means. Yeah, think about it when you ask your pediatrician if the antidote given your child will work. Here’s the answer most parents want to hear: “Ashton will be just fine.” Parents don’t want to hear, “probably 15 out of every 100 kids getting this drug will die. Close enough for horse shoes.”
The hoot is that I took a look at MIT’s statements about Jeffrey Epstein and the hoo-hah about the money this estimable person contributed to the MIT outfit. Here are some phrases I selected plus their source.
- a thorough review of MIT’s engagements with Jeffrey Epstein (Link to source)
- no role in approving MIT’s acceptance of the donations. (Link to source)
- gifts to the Institute were approved under an informal framework (Link to source)
- for all of us who love MIT and are dedicated to its mission (Link to source)
- this situation demands openness and transparency (Link to source).
Yep, “framework”, “openness,” and “transparency.” Reassuring words like “thorough” and passive voice. Excellent.
Word tokens are worth what exactly?
Stephen E Arnold, April 14, 2021
Microsoft Gets Some Help
April 14, 2021
I want to keep this item brief. Here’s the headline which caught my attention:
The DoJ statement says:
Throughout March, Microsoft and other industry partners released detection tools, patches and other information to assist victim entities in identifying and mitigating this cyber incident. Additionally, the FBI and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency released a Joint Advisory on Compromise of Microsoft Exchange Server on March 10. Despite these efforts, by the end of March, hundreds of web shells remained on certain United States-based computers running Microsoft Exchange Server software.
Here’s a partial fix as explained in the DoJ write up:
This court-authorized operation to copy and remove malicious web shells from hundreds of vulnerable computers shows our commitment to use any viable resource to fight cyber criminals. We will continue to do so in coordination with our partners and with the court to combat the threat until it is alleviated, and we can further protect our citizens from these malicious cyber
breaches.”
Interesting. To the reader of this blog who did not find my Microsoft Bob security T shirt amusing I would say, “What about a Microsoft Bob security baseball cap?” The Microsoft softball team appears to need some professional players to be competitive in this season’s games.
Stephen E Arnold, April 14, 2021
Facebook Skewing Job Hunters? Is Skew the Right Word?
April 14, 2021
I read “Study Reveals Gender Bias in How Facebook Directs Employment Ads.”
Here’s the quote I noted from the article:
“Facebook’s ad delivery can result in skew of job ad delivery by gender beyond what can be legally justified by possible differences in qualifications,” the study said. The finding strengthens the argument that Facebook’s algorithms may be in violation of U.S. anti-discrimination laws, it added.
The write up omits details about the study. The idea that Facebook does something that disadvantages users of its free service is ludicrous. The article continues to suggest that Facebook is not the knight riding to the rescue of those in economic distress; to wit:
Facebook spokesman Joe Osborne said the company accounts for “many signals to try and serve people ads they will be most interested in, but we understand the concerns raised in the report.”
Facebook cares about signals. Facebook understands.
That’s super. Do the job hunters and advertisers?
Stephen E Arnold, April 14, 2021
Federating Domains: Advancing a Tiny Google Agenda?
April 14, 2021
Years ago I documented some of Google’s aspirations in my monograph Google Version 2.0: The Calculating Predator. The research was funded by commercial enterprises, but I was given the green light to publish some of the data my team and I gathered. One of the findings was that Google’s founders had an image of Google as the Internet. The idea was that a user would come to Google, and Google would serve “answers” without having to send the user to the source Web site. No one paid much attention to my diagram of how this would work (included in my first Google monograph) the Google Legacy and then in word form in Google Version 2.
A harmonic response occurred when I read “W3C Technical Architecture Group Slaps Down Google’s Proposal to Treat Multiple Domains as Same Origin.” The write up explains the Googley approach. I noted this statement in the source article:
The proposal suggests that where multiple domains owned by the same entity – such as google.com, google.co.uk, and youtube.com – they could be grouped into sets which “allow related domain names to declare themselves as the same first-party.” The idea allows for sites to declare their own sets by means of a manifest in a known location. It also states that “the browser vendor could maintain a list of domains which meet its UA [User Agent] policy, and ship it in the browser.”
Why?
I have no great intuition for the 2021 Google. It seems to me that this notion of using a “”virtual domain” for multiple domains is a useful functionality. User tracking, advertising applications, and making the Google infrastructure the central authority for named virtual hosts, and other operations is a good one. By that I mean “good” for Google.
The notion of efficiency is central to Google business model. Due to the scale of the company, consolidating, federating, and controlling deliver both business and technical payoffs. Speeding up Web site response or reducing the time required for DNS operations translates to money savings for the Google. When coupled with tasks such as streamlined monitoring, there are probably additional benefits.
Will the rejection of the Google idea cause the idea to go away? In my view, this type of virtualization which is semi-possible within WordPress (a Google fave at the moment) is in operation in some Googley test set ups. Cross domain tracking is more efficient when the federated targets pipe data into the monitoring subsystem.
Rejection is irrelevant in my experience. Google does what Google does with or without permission or the blessings of committees. Azure and IBM are poking around the same functionality. Amazon AWS may be ahead by two years, an estimate offered by a senior AWS manager a couple of years ago.
Each of these outfits have one thing in mind: Control, revenue, and data collection.
Will anyone care? Sure, the Google competitors, but to users and advertisers my hunch is that the play is irrelevant until it is not.
Stephen E Arnold, April 14, 2021
virtual parking
domain mapping (Cloud Run)
named virtual hosts
Fables of Googzilla: The Theoretical Information Tsar and the Search Duck
April 14, 2021
The mom and pop online ad vendor (hereinafter “The Google”) will appear in a thrilling new video series tentatively titled “Tales of Googzilla.”
Public sources (aka open source intelligence or OSINT) reveals two magnetic programs.
The first is summarized in “YouTube Pulls Florida Governor’s Video, Says His Panel Spread Covid-19 Misinformation.” The plot involves an emerging star named Gov Ron. In the midst of Covid, spring break dust ups, and NASCAR races — the Alphabet Google YouTube mom and pop online ad vendor hit the delete button. The write up reports:
Video of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and a panel of scientists apparently trading in Covid-19 misinformation has been pulled from YouTube.
To add some back alley darkness, the report noted:
It had been embedded in a Tampa-area TV station’s news story and it’s removal was flagged by the American Institute for Economic Research, a “free market” think tank based in Great Barrington, Massachusetts.
Ah, ha. Misinformation “embedded.”
What will Gov Ron do? Will Googzilla continue to squash certain info bugs? What if Googzilla, like a drunken elephant, get frisky amidst the shanties erected by other alleged miscreants? How does one corral an elephant under the influence?
The second is reported in “DuckDuckGo Promises to Block Google’s Latest Ad-Tracking Tech — If Google Allows It.” The semi mighty metasearch engine Duck is honking in an intimidating manner at Googzilla. Can the Duck thing cause the mom and pop giant to discard its new approach to ensuring the privacy of Google services’ users?
The DuckDuck write up asserts that the Duck:
announced that the latest version of its Chrome extension would prevent websites from tracking users via their FLoC identification. Of course, the company notes that the extension update will have to be approved by Google before it becomes available to its users.
This seems like a fair fight. Issue a news release, honk angrily, and then point out that unless Googzilla grunts, “Okay,” the “new” user privacy methods will be implemented. Quack, quack, quack.
What’s the point of these two programs?
Advertising. Power. Control. Power. Did I already mention power? And PR/marketing. Yes.
Googzilla is the creation of the mom and pop finding system which has a large appetite for revenue.
Programs will air exclusively on streaming services supported by a company which lives in fear of Qwant, a fact revealed by Googzilla’s former keeper, Eric Schmidt.
Roar. Stomp. Quack. Quack. Delayed programs in the series may be released on Amazon Twitch. Programs air at random and in response to real life, just like YouTube influencer videos containing wholesome family entertainment like Valentine’s Day Inspired Try On Haul Fashion Nova Lingerie, Sleepwear & Dresses. Hey, four million views of Disney-grade excellence at this link.
Stephen E Arnold, April 14, 2021
Search and the Bezos Bulldozer
April 13, 2021
For the last three years, I have been giving lectures about the lock in methods implemented by Amazon. I refer to the company as the online bookstore in order to remind those in my audiences that Amazon has a friendly facet. That’s exemplified by the smile logo. Amazon also has a Wall Street persona which is built upon the precepts of MBAism.
I will be talking about Amazon and its policeware strategy at the 2021 National Cyber Crime Conference. If you want a similar presentation tailored to commercial interests, let me know. I can be reached via benkent2020 at yahoo dot com. My LE and intel work are pro bono; commercial works incurs a fee.
I want to mention a subject I won’t be addressing directly in my upcoming lecture later this month. The subject is an Amazon blog post titled “Introducing OpenSearch.” I would also direct your attention to the comments submitted to the Ycombinator discussion of the announcement. You can find those interesting and varied remarks from hundreds of people at this link.
The news is that Amazon is taking quite predictable steps to recast search and retrieval so that it becomes another of the hundreds of functions, services, and features of Amazon Web Services. AWS hired people from Lucid Imagination (now LucidWorks) years ago. Many have forgotten that Amazon operated A9, a Web search system with a street view function, as well. There are other findability functions embedded in Amazon as well; for example, the “search” function in Amazon’s blockchain inventions. (Yes, I have a for fee lecture about that technology as well. Because money laundering is a growing problem, the Amazon methods are likely to become increasingly important to certain government agencies in the future.)
The little secret about open source software, which many overlook, is that the strongest supporters of FOSS and community supported code are large companies. I did a series of reports for the IDC outfit, and I am not sure what that now dismantled organization did with the data. A couple of chapters were sold on Amazon for $3,000, but the topic was not a magnet when we assembled the information six or seven years ago.
Since Amazon is engaged in a battle for one part of the “enterprise” with Microsoft, the online bookstore is actively seeking ways to attract large organizations as customers, lock them in, and then implement the tactics which benefit from Amazon’s knowledge of its customers’ behavior. The use of the “retail” tactic watch, duplicate, and leverage house brands is documented in the reports from vendors who have had their toes nipped by the bulldozer’s steel caterpillar traction system.
Why’s this germane to “search”? Here are the reasons:
- Search and retrieval is an essential utility for modern work. Amazon wants to generate revenue and other business benefits by having a “better” and (if possible) community supported software base. Search will become part of the lubricant for other Amazon enterprise services; for example, locating tax avoiders.
- Search becomes the glue and the circulatory system for information analysis and use. No search; no high value outputs. Machine learning is little more than a supporting technology to finding needed information. Many disagree with me, but marketing clouds many experts’ thinking. Search is a core function and requires many subsystems and technical methods.
- Once users become habituated to search, change is difficult. Amazon is one of the few outfits to have undermined Google search. Product searches are increasingly under Amazon’s control. The ElasticSearch “play” is going to become the vehicle for a broader utility attack.
I have quipped that Amazon has targeted Elastic and the ElasticSearch “system” because it has the same name as some of Amazon’s services. If Amazon is successful in its search maneuver, Shay Banon’s findability play will be marginalized.
There are larger implications quite beyond a comment made to elicit a laugh at a reception at an enterprise search conference. These include:
- Seamless integration with SageMaker and other advanced functionalities available from Amazon
- A lever for technical and financial leverage for innovators who use Amazon as the plumbing for their start ups, not Microsoft technology
- A model for Amazon and maybe other companies to use for shifting open source software into a variation on the FUD (fear, uncertainty, and doubt) approach to closing deals. The mantra could become “Nobody ever got fired for buying AWS.”
For the companies generating scorecards for enterprise search vendors, significant change is likely. The numerous vendors of proprietary enterprise search will have to make some changes in their approach to Amazon. Many of these Elastic alternatives use AWS for certain functions. What happens if the pricing structure, the legalese, or the access to certain AWS services “evolve”? What will start ups and Amazon partners do if access to search functions becomes free or requires contributions to the AWS version of open source?
Worth watching, right? The answer is, “Nah, you are way off base.” Yep, just as I was in my analysis of Google for BearStearns many years ago. I have a track record of getting thrown out as I head for second base.
Stephen E Arnold, April 13, 2021
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