Amazon Management Principles: Conceal and Coerce?
July 12, 2021
I read “Amazon Tells Bosses to Conceal When Employees Are on a Performance Management Plan.” Let’s assume the report is accurate and not the outputs from disgruntled individuals familiar with the online bookstore which sells a few other things to a couple of people on the Kitsap Peninsula.
The write up states:
Amazon instructs managers not to tell office employees that they are on a formal performance-management plan that puts their job in jeopardy unless the employee explicitly asks, according to guidance from an Amazon intranet page for managers.
I assume the intranet page is company confidential. If it is, what does access to the page by a “real news” professional say about Amazon security? The question is important because Amazon has floated above the cyber breach storms which are burning some organizations.
Next, the write up explains:
The policy, a copy of which was viewed by The Seattle Times, helps explain why some Amazon employees have described the experience of being on the performance-management plan, called Focus, as baffling and demoralizing. Some managers, too, question why they are asked to conceal that their employees are on a pathway that often leads out of the company. The secrecy surrounding performance management is one more reason why some Amazon office employees say the company is not living up to its April pledge to become “Earth’s Best Employer.”
What this passage suggests is that there is a disconnect between the marketing spin of a technopoly and the reality of the business processes in use at the organization.
This is a surprise? The Bezos bulldozer is a delicate machine. Unlike other largely unregulated, corporate entities, the bulldozer does not run over flowers, small creatures, and competitors. It’s a sensitive beast.
The most interesting factoid in the allegedly accurate write up may be this passage:
Some managers flout the rules and reveal to their subordinates that they are on Focus, according to two managers and documentation of one employee’s Focus plan seen by The Seattle Times. “I always broke the rule,” said one senior Amazon manager. “If I cannot share that an employee is on a coaching plan, how can I give him a fair evaluation?”
A similar management policy appears to apply at Google, the mom and pop online ad agency. “Senior Google Executive Who Opposed Work-from-Home to Move to New Zealand to Work Remotely” asserts:
CNET reported that Urs Holzle, Senior Vice President for technical infrastructure is moving to New Zealand to work remotely. Holzle told staff on June 29 that he will be moving to New Zealand. As per the report in CNET, Holzle had initially opposed WFH for staff who did not have a certain level of seniority in the organization.
Does this mean that those with seniority and maybe an elected office in the high school science club have a different rule book? Sure seems like it to me. But maybe Mr. Holzle is moving to Detroit or another Rust Belt location and New Zealand was a red herring.
If accurate, these two reports suggest that Amazon and Google may operate with three levels of high school management magic.
First, official procedures are not disclosed. Anyone remember the cockroach guy Kafka?
Second, employees are uncertain. Keeping people on edge is a clever way to exert control. There’s nothing like control, just ask a prison guard.
Third, the rules are differential; that is, those with power have a different set of guidelines.
Stephen E Arnold, July 12, 2021
Commercial Accidental Censorship: Legal Blogs
July 12, 2021
Printed law journals are going the way of the printed newspaper, and legal blogs are taking their place. Kevin O’Keefe, LexBlog founder and host of Real Lawyers Have Blogs, is concerned that the ephemeral nature of blog posts poses a real problem for the law field. In his succinct post, “Where Will All the Legal Blogs Go?” he notes when a lawyer leaves a firm their posts are usually either deleted or recredited to the firm itself. We learn:
“Courts are more apt to cite blogs than a law review or law journal. As the New York Times has written on a couple occasions, law reviews are becoming largely irrelevant. Citations will lead to broken links. Legal blogs play a significant role in legal research. Lawyers looking for information on a subject turn to Google and find helpful blog posts. Law is for the long term. Lawyers use law from years ago. Law is advanced by dialogue and writing on the law. You eliminate the long term and a useable dialogue and writing on the law, and you have a problem.”
Yes, citations to nowhere are of no use to anyone, and posts credited to a firm rather than an individual become cannot be referenced, cited, or footnoted. The remedy, O’Keefe insists, is that legal blogs be aggregated, archived, and made accessible. Will his fellow legal bloggers listen?
Are Reed Elsevier and Thomson Reuters failing its legal users?
Cynthia Murrell, July 12, 2021
Microsoft LinkedIn: A TikTok Target?
July 12, 2021
Microsoft LinkedIn had an opportunity to dominate the video résumé market. Now the allegedly Chinese influenced TikTok appears to be chasing this sector. More importantly, LinkedIn users are “old school.” Rah rah text and video snippets explaining how a life coach can jumpstart a career. Are those wrinkles I see on most of the LinkedIn video performers’ programs. Yep, they are wrinkles.
Now TikTok is creating a video résumé service in a “official” way. The idea is that even TikTok creators may need a real job. The write up “TikTok Lets Users Apply for Jobs in the US with Video Resumes” says:
Short-video sharing app TikTok on Wednesday, July 7, launched a pilot program that lets users upload video resumes for US-based jobs ranging from a WWE Superstar to a senior data engineer at Shopify or a creative producer at TikTok itself.
The idea is that unhip “real” companies need workers. LinkedIn profiles don’t signal “I will flip burgers” or “I will watch your super over achieving high performing really wonderful children”. Thus, a gap exists and TikTok aims to fill it. Or will this service just provide a flow of data into TikTok’s servers and then maybe to other interesting data centers in lovely Wuhan.
Microsoft and LinkedIn is dealing with the hashtag #securitybreach. TikTok is moving forward with the #CareerTok and related metadata.
Stephen E Arnold, July 12, 2021
Tor Compromised?
July 9, 2021
I read “Tor Encryption Can Allegedly Be Accessed by the NSA, Says Security Expert.” I was stunned. I thought that the layers of encryption, the triple hop through relays, and the hope that everything worked as planned was bulletproof. And who funded Tor in the first place? What’s the status of the not-for-profit foundation today? Why were some European entities excited about cross correlating date and time stamps, IP addresses, and other bits of metadata? I don’t have answers to these questions, nor does the write up.
The article presents this information:
A security expert by the name of Robert Graham, however, has outlined his reasons for actually believing that the NSA might not even need tricks and paltry exploits in order for them to gain access to Tor, according to a blog post on Erratasec. Why? The security expert notes that this is because they might already have the keys to the kingdom. If they don’t, then they might be able to, according to arsTechnica.
Let me see if I can follow the source of this interesting assertion. TechTimes (the outfit publishing the “Tor Encryption Can” story cited above) quotes a security expert. There was a source called Erratasec. Then there was a story on ars Technica.
Now I think that Tor software and the onion method have security upsides and downsides. I also know that what humans create, other humans can figure out. I think the point of the write up is that anyone who uses Tor should embrace the current version.
Can NSA or any other intelligence entity figure out who is doing what, when, and why? My view is that deobfuscation methods are advancing. The fact that bad actors are shifting from old-school Dark Web sites to other channels speaks volumes. Bad actors have been shifting to messaging services which feature end-to-end encryption (E2EE) and do not require a particularly hard-to-complete registration process. But this shift from the “old” Dark Web to the “new” Dark Web began several years ago. Bad actors have been aware that other secure communications options were Job One for years. My thought is that this story in interesting, just not focused on what is actually further consumerizing criminal behavior. The action has shifted, and the US may not be the leader in making sense of the new types of communications traffic.
Stephen E Arnold, July 9, 2021
Is a New Wave of Disintermediation Gaining Momentum
July 9, 2021
Hacker News pointed to “We Replaced Rental Brokers with Software and Filled 200+ Vacant Apartments.” That real estate write up provides a good case example for using software to chop out the useless humanoids. Sound like an Amazon thing? I think so. Corporate special librarians were among the first to be allowed to find their future elsewhere. Other professions are finding ways to de-humanoid their business processes. How does that Ford Bronco get painted? Not by people with spray guns. Those made-for-TV car shows use humans. Real car makers don’t unless there is some compelling reason.
Now a start up is going to try and de-people Amazon AWS development and programming. Amazon is trying to train people to think Amazon for new t shirts and super duper online cloud services. But the company’s efforts are mostly free education plays and zippy presentations at Amazon-sponsored events.
The disintermediation of the Amazon developer is now a start up’s goal. Digger.dev says:
Digger automatically generates infrastructure for your code in your cloud account. So you can build on AWS without having to learn it.
Disenchanted with the Lyft and Uber thing? Tired of collecting unemployment? Bored with your lawyering gig? Now you can become an entrepreneur:
Deploy anything. Containers, Serverless Lambda functions, webapps, databases, queues, load balancers, autoscaling – Digger supports it all.
If Digger.dev is successful, the certified Amazon professional may be looking for a new career. COBOL programmer maybe?
Stephen E Arnold, July 9, 2021
Microgoof of the Day: The Print Thing
July 9, 2021
I read “Microsoft’s Emergency PrintNightmare Pat Doesn’t actually Fix the Issue.” If this article is correct, it warrants a honk from the Beyond Search goose. The story was the inspiration for an irregular series of posts to be called “Microgoof of the Day.” The write up says without any stand up comedy joke writer:
…there are reports of new proof-of-exploit code that circumvents the fix altogether.
Well, well, well.
The write up nods to another publication with this passage:
Reporting on the findings of Benjamin Delpy, creator of popular post exploitation tool Mimikatz, The Register says that it’s how Microsoft checks for remote libraries in the PrintNightmare patch that offers an opportunity to work around the patch. “They did not test it for real,” Delpy bluntly told The Register, reportedly describing the issue as “weird from Microsoft.”
Weird from Microsoft? Hmmm.
Regardless of who’s right or wrong, PrintNightmare is a hoot in some circles. In others, maybe not so much. That’s the microgoof for you.
Stephen E Arnold, July 9, 2021
The New Dark Web: Innovation in the Middle Kingdom
July 9, 2021
Chinese actors have created an interesting spin when obfuscation is important. “China’s Dark Web Spawns a Hard-to-Crack Hacker Community” reports:
Dark websites in China are unique in two ways, according to SouthPlume, the Japanese agency for CNsecurity. First, Chinese hackers communicate with one another through local social media. This creates what amounts to a members-only organization that differs from the general darknet, where websites are accessed only through anonymizing browsers such as Tor. Chinese dark websites also lack the typical underground listings of drugs, weapons or child pornography. Instead, they mostly traffic in personal information and tips on hacking corporate sites, according to SouthPlume.
Is Tor the go-to system? i2p? Neither. The trick is to use social media. Worth watching.
Stephen E Arnold, July 9, 2021
Recursive Weirdness: How Technology Is Gnawing on Its Fingernails
July 8, 2021
I was scanning headlines this morning after a peculiar venture innovator meeting after work on July 7, 2021. Quick summary: I talked to 11 attendees at the Louisville, Kentucky, even and each person worked for a big firm and was prospecting for recruits, trying to sell accounting services, or offering their non venture expertise as a consultant. Wow. No wonder Louisville has been outpaced by Nashville, Tennessee, in the venture space.
Now to the childish habit of chewing on fingernails:
I assumed the adults of the technology industry were enjoying the good old summer time. As I zipped through the content in my Overflight system, I noticed a few sleeping policeman in the highway to the vacation resorts in Monopoly Land; for example:
- A trivial 36 states in America are now demonstrating their inability to be Googley.
- Top dogs at Facebook allegedly find the firm’s social kennel too confining, too small, and too uncomfortable.
- A former president is not happy with the Twitter thing.
- The government of China makes clear why old-fashioned capitalism may be a risky life choice in the Middle Kingdom.
But none of these stories is as intriguing as this one: “YouTube’s Recommender AI Still a Horror Show, Finds Major Crowdsourced Study.” The main idea is that YouTube recommends content which it then bans for violating its terms of service. The write up states:
New research published today by Mozilla backs that notion up, suggesting YouTube’s AI continues to puff up piles of “bottom-feeding”/low-grade/divisive/disinforming content — stuff that tries to grab eyeballs by triggering people’s sense of outrage, sewing division/polarization or spreading baseless/harmful disinformation — which in turn implies that YouTube’s problem with recommending terrible stuff is indeed systemic; a side effect of the platform’s rapacious appetite to harvest views to serve ads. That YouTube’s AI is still — per Mozilla’s study — behaving so badly also suggests Google has been pretty successful at fuzzing criticism with superficial claims of reform.
The write up and the study must be read in their entirety to appreciate the delicious business processes at work. Business processes, what are those? Here’s an example:
Mozilla’s report also underlines instances where YouTube’s algorithms are clearly driven by a logic that’s unrelated to the content itself — with a finding that in 43.6% of the cases where the researchers had data about the videos a participant had watched before a reported regret the recommendation was completely unrelated to the previous video.
This story is interesting to me because it illustrates how relatively simple methods can be used to generate revenue and keep users clicking. The notion of making informed decisions about content using artificial intelligence may be little more than magician tricks. It seems that audiences want to be mesmerized. Advertisers want to believe that online advertising works. Google wants to be the quantumly most supreme high-technology giant no matter what.
Sure seems like it. Each of the examples remind me of a confused sun bear chewing on its claws.
Stephen E Arnold, July 8, 2021
How Do You Spell Control? Maybe Google?
July 8, 2021
The lack of a standardized format has made it difficult to manage vulnerabilities in open source software. Now, SiliconAngle reports, “Google Announces Unified Schema to Make Sharing Vulnerabilities Easier.” Writer Duncan Riley explains:
“Google LLC today announced a unified schema for describing vulnerabilities precisely to make it easier to share vulnerabilities between databases. The idea behind the unified schema is to address an issue with existing vulnerability databases where various ecosystems and organizations create their own data. As each uses its own format to describe vulnerabilities, a client tracking vulnerabilities across multiple databases must handle each separately. Because of the lack of a common standard, sharing vulnerabilities among databases is challenging. The new unified schema for describing vulnerabilities has been designed by the Google Open Source Security Team, Go Team and the broader open-source community and has been designed from the beginning for open-source ecosystems. The unified format will allow vulnerability databases, open-source users and security researchers to share tooling and consume vulnerabilities more easily across open source, providing a complete view of vulnerabilities in open source.”
Google also launched its Open Source Vulnerabilities database in February, describing it as the “first step toward improving vulnerability triage for developers and consumers of open-source software.” Originally populated with a few thousand vulnerabilities from the OSS-Fuzz project, the database is being expanded to open-source ecosystems Go, Rust, Python and DWF. These seems like moves in the right direction, but can we trust Google deliver objective, unfiltered reports? Or will it operate as it has with YouTube filtering and AI ethics staff management?
Cynthia Murrell, July 8, 2021
Experts in Information Experience Real Life Entropy: Not Much Fun, Right?
July 8, 2021
“The Internet Is Rotting” is 6,000 words which suggest that the end of “knowledge” is nigh. I am not sure “rotting” is the word I would have used. The subtitle for the write up is quite dramatic:
Too much has been lost already. The glue that holds humanity’s knowledge together is coming undone.
Online has been blasting bits since the late 1960s. A half century later “rot” is evident to the experts who recognize a problem and can provide mostly interesting examples. Here’s one:
This absence of central control, or even easy central monitoring, has long been celebrated as an instrument of grassroots democracy and freedom. It’s not trivial to censor a network as organic and decentralized as the internet. But more recently, these features have been understood to facilitate vectors for individual harassment and societal destabilization, with no easy gating points through which to remove or label malicious work not under the umbrellas of the major social-media platforms, or to quickly identify their sources.
Yep, the example is pretty much everything.
Several observations:
- Say “Hi” to what happens when “glue” fails in its basic job
- The elimination of gatekeepers is like pulling rods from a nuclear core. Stuff heats quickly, melts, burns, and eventually decides to take a trip to Entropy World
- The Internet is a manisfestation of online and is, therefore, one smaller component of the datasphere
- You can’t go home again.
One of the most visible aspects of digitalization is disintermediation. The gatekeepers are sent packing. Everyone’s an expert in online search, including those who think that Google delivers high value, accurate, unbiased information to faculty and students 24×7.
Paper outputs leave “trails.” These trails can be followed, whether by Dr. Gene Garfield’s link analysis method or by forensic investigators looking at cancelled checks. Now try to find a hard copy of a technical journal in a public library or an institution of higher education. Now try to locate the backfiles. With the shift to digital there are some challenges in the Pathfinder approach:
- Gatekeepers cannot be trusted
- Digital content providers can filter content, delete it, or not include items
- Users cannot determine what information is on point what is baloney
- Institutional structures which once assumed responsibility for accuracy have become less stable than the basements of Florida high rises
- Government entities struggle to perform basic functions. Hey, the IRS with its whizzy computer systems is years behind in processing tax returns.
- Kick back has become the optimal mode for learning. Forget that “hot” approach: Note taking, old fashioned lectures, reading books printed on paper, and writing in longhand.
There is a cultural shift which has occurred. This is not a gerund like rotting. Entropy can be calculated. The math I have done on the back of a 4×6 index card produces one of those cute equations which articular an infinitesimal approach to the construction of linear models. The outputs of these models will be evidence of racing toward zero.
It won’t take 50 years to get a lot closer to the x axis.
Stephen E Arnold, July 8, 2021
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