The Future of Open Source Software: Who Knows? Maybe VCs and Data Aggregators?
July 5, 2021
I read some of the write up about Audacity, an audio editor, maybe a wannabe digital audio workstation. One group of write ups foretell the future of this particular open source software as spyware. A good example is “Audacity 3.0 Called Spyware over Data Collection Changes by New Owner.” This is an interesting premise. In some countries, companies even those wearing open source penguins and waving FOSS flags must comply. I suppose the issue is intentional data collection. From a business perspective, there’s money in them thar data elements. And money, not free, is the name of the game in some circles; for example, developers who cut corners in code and construction.
There’s another side to the argument. A reasonable example is “Audacity Is a Poster Child for What Can Be Achieved with Open-Source Software.” The main idea is that if one does not like Audacity, a skilled person can whip up an Audacity variant. (Is the process as simple as creating a Covid variant?) The write up points out:
the first version of Audacity was released in 1999 (at the time the name was different)…Still, while it might look outdated, Audacity doesn’t lack when it comes to features. If you can find them.
High praise?
The author of “Poster Child” opines:
From what I’ve seen over the last two months, Muse Group seems to have its heart in the right place. And if the opposite comes true, there’s always GitHub’s fork button. For now, though, it seems that not only is Audacity in good hands, but that it might be finally getting that design refresh it desperately needs.
The point I carried away from these two write ups is that open source is at an inflection point.
Making money from software is more difficult than it seems. Services, subscribing, consulting, for-fee extras, training, customizing, and platforming are quite different from picking up a box with a disc inside.
Observations:
- Open source software is supposed to give users a way to free themselves from the handcuffs of license agreements. Aren’t the new monetization methods a form of handcuffing?
- The value of sucked up data, packaged, and licensed to an aggregator an interesting path forward. Hey, Intuit licensed its small business user data to a quite interesting ConAgra of data collection. What’s good for the proprietary goose, may be very, very good for an open source gander.
- Monopolization of software functionality hooked into the ever-secure ever-so-reliable cloud sets the stage for no-code alternatives. Will these be free and open? My hunch: Unlikely.
Net net: Open source, she be changin’.
Stephen E Arnold, July 5, 2021
Brave Privacy-Centric Search Arrives
July 5, 2021
Several online services that emphasize privacy have emerged in recent years, including the Brave browser. The San Francisco-based company is not stopping there. We learn from TechCrunch that “Brave’s Nontracking Search Engine is Now in Beta.” Earlier this year, Brave acquired Cliqz, a company which had developed an anti-tracking browser with its own search platform. That system’s Tailcat technology will underpin Brave Search. The company also offers Brave Ads, a way to make money while preserving users’ privacy. Brave is different from other non-tracking Google alternatives like DuckDuckGo because it is using its own, independent index. Reporter Natasha Lomas writes:
“Brave touts its eponymous search offering as having a number of differentiating features versus rivals (including smaller rivals) — such as its own index, which it also says gives it independence from other search providers. Why is having an independent index important? We put that question to Josep M. Pujol, chief of search at Brave, who told us: ‘… More choices will entail more freedom and also get back to real competition, with checks and balances. Choice can only be achieved by being independent, as if we do not have our own index, then we are just a layer of paint on top of Google and Bing, unable to change much or anything` in the results for users’ queries. Not having your own index, as with certain search engines, gives the impression of choice, but in reality such engine “skins’” are the same players as the big-two. Only by building our own index, which is a costly proposition, will we be in a position to offer true choice to the users for the benefit of all, whether they are Brave Search users or not.’”
It should be noted that for certain functions, like image searches, Brave currently relies on other search providers to ensure relevant results. For now. Otherwise it turns to anonymized community contributions to refine its index’s results and will soon provide “community-curated open ranking models” in an effort to combat censorship and AI bias. The company plans to offer both a free option supported by ads and a paid, ad-free version we are told will be “affordable.”
We are running test queries, and the results are promising. There are other services becoming available too. I like Swisscows.ch. But I like cows.
Let us hope Brave’s efforts result in an index that is better than what has gone before. The increasing number of search options is a signal that Google search has failed in its basic mission. The problem is that millions don’t know what they are missing. Undisclosed omissions and obfuscated distortions are worse than guessing or asking friends.
Cynthia Murrell, July 5, 2021
Google and Personnel: Progress or Regress?
July 5, 2021
I read a write up from Verdict, a UK information service. The story “Google: We’re Hiring Lots of Minorities! Sadly They Are Leaving Even Faster” provides some useful information about Google’s management practices. The story reports:
Big Tech has a diversity problem, a fact underlined by Google’s latest diversity report revealing how minorities are leaving Mountain View in droves.
And from whence does this factoid come? Heh, heh, the information comes from the Google, if the Verdict story is on the money. Google issued an annual diversity report. I think this was the first one since the diversity report for 2014. Hey, we are on Internet time, so those seven years are really many, many more. Logically, if Google operates on Internet time and that “time” is accelerated, the Google is not late. Google is on time and on target. Non Googlers need to process Google’s definition of annual and understand that the faster you go, stuff slows down to observers. Hence, 2021 is simply the next annual report in the quantum supremacy world. Google uses a variation of this logic when it misses European regulators’ requests for documents by invoking the “dog ate my homework” enhancement.
Onward. The article includes this interesting passage:
True to form, the latest report kicks off by highlighting all the efforts that it’s made to ensure diversity among its staff. Some highlights to that end include how 84% of Google’s people managers have completed unconscious bias training and that Mountain View has spent $55m since 2014 to boost economic empowerment for women. To put that last figure into perspective: that’s 0.4% of Google’s total revenue of $13.059bn from 2020…
And there’s more:
Hiring among black employees jumped from 5.5% to 8.8% between 2020 and 2021. Similarly, hiring of Latin employees jumped from 6.6% to 8.8%. However, hiring of Asian employees shrunk from 48.5% to 42.8% and Native American hiring slumped from 0.8% to 0.7%. The hiring of white employees rose from 43.1% to 44.5%.
The article includes a somewhat negative statement too:
However, the report also reveals that Google is bleeding staff from ethnic minorities.
And here are the data presented by Verdict:
The biggest change was seen among its black staff. The attrition index demonstrated a jump from 112 in 2020 to 121 in 2021 among black employees. It was particularly bad for black women, whose attrition rate grew from 110 to 146 over the last year. For black men, the number decreased from 114 to 106. A similar increase was seen among Latin employees, with the rate of attrition increasing from 97 to 105 over the period. For women in the group, attrition decreased from 93 to 81. For the Latin men, it jumped from 98 in 2020 to 117 in 2021. For women in the group, attrition decreased from 93 to 81. For the Latin men, it jumped from 98 in 2020 to 117 in 2021. The attrition of Native American Google employees grew from 131 to 136. The increase was led by by Native American women whose attrition rate increased from 123 in 2020 to 148 in 2021 while the men in the group saw attrition decrease from 143 to 127.
Hmmm. The next report will be due next year. Please, don’t forget to calculate what annual means in Google speak.
Stephen E Arnold, July 5, 2021
Audacity: Audacious or Not?
July 5, 2021
I found this notice interesting: “Audacity Desktop App.” Audacity is an audio software. One can record a podcast and remove unwanted background noise. It has many other tricks, not the least of which was that it was free and open source. There is an interesting back-and-forth on Reddit about who has rights to Audacity the application, the licenses under which the software has been provided, and nuances about music which elude me.
But there was an interesting passage in the Audacity Web page at this location about the type of data collected by the app and the organization with some ownership and development claims to the Audacity product; to wit:
Data necessary for law enforcement, litigation and authorities’ requests (if any).
My hunch is that music or audio banditos relying on Audacity may react to this explanation of data collected by the software. And for those living in California assuming that its Consumer Privacy Act offers a shield. Audacity says:
The California Consumer Privacy Act (“CCPA”) provides California residents, referred to in the law as “consumers,” with rights to receive certain disclosures regarding the collection, use, and sharing of personal information, as well as rights to access and control personal information. Certain information that we collect may be exempt from the CCPA because it is considered public information (because it is made available by a government entity) or covered by another federal privacy law, such as the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, or the Fair Credit Reporting Act.
What other open source software products, systems, and components will capture interesting information to be able to comply with rules and regulations in the jurisdictions in which the products are “used”?
Stephen E Arnold, July 5, 2021
More Peer Review Excitement
July 2, 2021
Academics, researchers, and “experts” love the glory of ink in a peer reviewed publication. Hey, if you want tenure or a juicy grant, those “prestigious” journals and the peer review process is an Olympic medal of sorts.
“Scientists Quit Journal Board, Protesting Grossly Irresponsible Study Claiming COVID-19 Vaccines Kill” summarizes allegedly uncomfortable information about Covid related research report appearing in Vaccines, an open source journal. Another sci-tech outfit, Science Magazine (published by the American Association for the Advancement of Science) revealed what could be slick propaganda or search engine optimization of the peer review process itself.
In short, the original article made some experts uncomfortable. How uncomfortable? AAAS Science Magazine says:
- Six “experts” quit because a peer reviewed article appearing in Vaccine was incorrect.
- The Vaccine article appeared to have misused of data. (Yeah, I know that rarely happens.)
- The researchers who wrote the Vaccine article made flawed assumptions. (Another black swan for sure.)
- “Experts” writing a peer reviewed article Vaccine were experts, just not in the Covid disciplines. (Is anyone listed in LinkedIn culpable of claiming expertise in a technical field whilst knowing little about that discipline? Of course not.)
If the AAAS Science Magazine write up about the Vaccine article is accurate, more than 300,000 Internet users (either human or bot) clicked on the Covid story. Eyeballs. Fame. Controversy.
I mention peer review dust up because if the Vaccine Covid centric research article is indexed, placed in a commercial online database, and sold at $30 a download, we may have identified one of the reasons Sci-Hub has become popular.
Observations/Hypotheses:
- Peer reviewed articles can be darned exciting, wrong, and/or guided by non scientific forces.
- Professional associations like the AAAS are mounting up like Don Quixote and charging at already constructed, reinforced, and operating windmills. Ineffectual? I think so.
- Individual “experts” are “into” some interesting types of information management activities.
- Online vendors who want to sell documents as super valuable even though the information is fabricated from recycled plastic Mountain Dew bottles.
This professional publishing and peer reviewing are more exciting than I thought possible.
Stephen E Arnold, July 2, 2021
Microsoft and LinkedIn: How about That Security?
July 2, 2021
I spotted an interesting and probably made up post titled “New LinkedIn Data Leak Leaves 700 Million Users Exposed.” Isn’t this old news? I must be thinking about the 500 million names scraped earlier this year. (See “Reported LinkedIn Data Breach: What You Need to Know,” please.)
The write up states:
Since LinkedIn has 756 million users, according to its website, this would mean that almost 93% of all LinkedIn users can be found through these records.
I am eagerly awaiting Microsoft’s explanation. Will it be 1,000 programmers? Russia? China? A flawed update?
Excuses: Microsoft has offered a few. Is ineptitude in the quiver of rhetorical arrows? Perhaps it was an illusion?
Stephen E Arnold, July 2, 2021
Facebook and Milestones for the Zuck
July 2, 2021
I read “Facebook Reaches $1 Trillion Valuation Faster Than Any Other Company.” The write up reports that the highly esteemed Facebook (WhatsApp and Instagram) have out performed Apple, the Google, the spaceship outfits, and Microsoft. The article reports:
No stranger to breaking records, Facebook has just achieved another: the social media giant’s market cap has exceeded $1 trillion for the first time, reaching the milestone faster than any other company in history.
What has caused this surge in “valuation”? The answer is revealed in “Judge Dismisses Gov’t Antitrust Lawsuits against Facebook.” This separate write up in a news service oh, so close to Microsoft’s headquarters, states:
A federal judge on Monday dismissed antitrust lawsuits brought against Facebook by the Federal Trade Commission and a coalition of state attorneys general, dealing a significant blow to attempts by regulators to rein in tech giants. U.S. District Judge James Boasberg ruled Monday that the lawsuits were “legally insufficient” and didn’t provide enough evidence to prove that Facebook was a monopoly.
Concentration is good, it seems. For social media start ups, have you thought about issuing T shirts with the Zuck’s smiling face printed on them? You can update your Facebook page and do some Instagram posts. Don’t overlook WhatsApp as a way to spread the good news. About the T shirts I mean.
Stephen E Arnold, July 2, 2021
Smart Software, Humans, and Personnel: The Ingredients for Management Success
July 2, 2021
I thought this paragraph was thought provoking:
A Deloitte survey found that while 71 percent of companies see people analytics as a high priority in their organizations (31 percent rate it very important), progress has been slow. After years of discussing this issue, only 8 percent report they have usable data; only 9 percent believe they have a good understanding of which talent dimensions drive performance in their organizations; and only 15 percent have broadly deployed HR and talent scorecards for line managers. One of the reasons for the low adoption of people analytics is that companies have a closed approach to analytics in HR, and readiness remains a serious issue.
This passage appears in “How People Analytics Can Create a Culture of Care and Success.” Let’s consider two organizations with smart software, oodles of data, and a pristine track record for making big bucks. The two outfits are Amazon and Google. Both of these exemplary institutions have done an outstanding job with their people management. As I recall, there were some distasteful blog posts about warehouse workers and plastic bottles, comments about smart cameras and GPS systems monitoring delivery truck drivers, and the phone booth in which an employee can lock away the world. Peace, calm, and care.
And the Google? Staff flips at DeepMind, the outfit which has some type of smart software supremacy. Then there is the trivial ethics thing and the textbook handling of the Timnit Gebru situation. And, lest I forget, the yacht death, the diploid cell assembly in the legal department, and the fumbled suicide attempt by a big wheel’s marketing associate. Protests? I could name a few. Petitions? Well, that Maven thing. Sigh.
It seems to me that the article, including the “hire us because we are HR experts” in the Deloitte PR set up are describing a future which sells consulting. It seems that employees are forcing change upon employers. Others are quitting. Another group is happy to collect government “pay for being alive” checks. Smart software to the rescue? Give me a break.
When two outfits equipped to create cultures of care and success cannot do basic personnel, reality is different from the silliness of surveys chock full of buzzwords. Don’t believe me? Ask an Amazon truck driver. Better yet, pose a question to Dr. Gebru.
Stephen E Arnold, July 2, 2021
Sci-Hub: Is It Evil Personified in Alexandra Elbakyan, a modern Abaddon?
July 1, 2021
If you are not familiar with professional publishing, you may find “Is the Pirate Queen Scientific Publishing in Real Trouble This Time?” particularly fascinating. Founded by Alexandra Elbakyan in 2011, Sci-Hub has become the go to source of academic or professional publishing materials. One key point: Unlike commercial services, Sci-Hub is a freebie. In the world of Disney infused copyright ideas, Mickey Mouse and research about children’s heart disease are not available without paying. Parking at DisneyLand is a bargain compared to the fees assessed for a single two-page document. The kid’s life? Not part of the copyright approach to government funded research.
If you have some experience with the business models of the big outfits running peer-reviewed publications, you will get a kick out of passages like this one:
According to the publishers who brought the case in India, quite a bit. Pirate sites like Sci-Hub “threaten the integrity of the scientific record, and the safety of university and personal data,” a joint statement reads. It goes on to say that sites like Sci-Hub “have no incentive to ensure the accuracy of scientific articles, no incentive to ensure published papers meet ethical standards, and no incentive to retract or correct articles if issues arise.”
My hunch is that most people who explain that “I am an online expert” cannot differentiate between a blog post, a paper on ArXiv, an IEEE pdf, and a full text document from Lexis. In my experience, few online wizards can answer these questions:
- Once a research paper is complete, does the author have to pay the publisher of the journal to which the write up is submitted?
- Are the “peer reviewers” paid to do the often very, very difficult work of checking that the information in the document is correct, the statistics accurate as far as the reviewers can determine, and the “value” of the document will result in learning, not in harm?
- Are the companies running professional publishing operations monopolies or oligopolies?
- Are documents in professional publishers’ span of control updated, are errors corrected, are cabals of friendly experts disabused from promoting a graduate student’s, friend’s, or colleague’s write up? Are exchanges of favors among reviewers ignored or denied?
- Are errors in online documents corrected after those original documents are posted online?
- Are online documents known to be fraudulent or containing non reproducible results removed from repositories?
- Are libraries subject to ever increasing fees because those institutions might lose accreditation if research content were not provided to students, researchers, and other staff?
- What is the explicit link between tenure at a university and publishing in journals operated by commercial professional publishing companies? Hint: Sword of Damocles and a horse hair.
Struggling with some of the answers? No surprise. Like the pharmaceutical industry and those engaged in SMS spam services, certain information about business methods are not disclosed. And if revealed, the business processes are denied. If you want example, just watch reruns of the investigations of some of the high profile high technology companies testifying before the US Congress.
This “information wants to be free” baloney is not the way “real” online works. Here’s an example. I was asked to submit a version of my law enforcement centric report about Amazon’s policeware. Some person contacted me via LinkedIn and said a draft was due in December 2019. I said, “My report is not for academics. I don’t care if you publish it, just leave me out of the professional publishing razzle dazzle.” I pointed out that I was not an academic; I was not changing anything in the manuscript; and I was not sure if the information in my report would make any sense whatsoever to the handful of people who might read the collection of essays.
I forget about the write up: I never filled out any online forms; I never sent a bill of $1.00 (because I have a policy of getting paid for some of my research); and I routed email from the person who asked me to submit a chapter and the assorted youthful folks at the European publishing company to the Junk folder on my systems.
And what did I receive a couple of days ago? I got an email addressed to “Dear Professor Arnold.” The email wanted me to promote my chapter and the book. Okay, this blog posts is promoting the chapter. Helpful, right? Some of these outfits cannot differentiate between a PhD program drop out and a real live PhD driving for Uber. Keen powers of discrimination for sure.
Net net: Alexandrea Elbakyan, who is a student in everyone’s favorite country, is the enemy. Courts in several countries have determined that Ms. Elbakyan is a threat to learning, knowledge sharing, and “way” research content is to be made available. Yep, Elsevier is waiting for its $15 million check from Ms. Abaddon. Oh, sorry. I meant Ms. Elbakyan.
Stephen E Arnold, July 1, 2021
Cheap, Convenient, and Much Too Easy: Fabricated Twitter Trends
July 1, 2021
Here is some news out of Turkey that perked our ears. News EPFL reports, “Mass Scale Manipulation of Twitter Trends Discovered.” Is Turkey an outlier when it comes to digital baloney? Perhaps a little, for now, but this problem recently uncovered by researchers appears to occur the world over.
Twitter Trends supposedly uses an algorithm to calculate the most popular topics at any given moment then deliver this information to its users. However, these calculations can be manipulated. Writer Tanya Petersen explains:
“Now, new EPFL research focused on Turkey, from the Distributed Information Systems Laboratory, part of the School of Computer and Communication Sciences has found a vulnerability in the algorithm that decides Twitter Trending Topics: it does not take deletions into account. This allows attackers to push the trends they want to the top of Twitter Trends despite deleting their tweets which contain the candidate trend shortly afterwards. ‘We found that attackers employ both fake and compromised accounts, which are the accounts of regular people with stolen credentials, or who installed a malicious app on their phones. Generally, they are not aware that their account is being used as a bot to manipulate trending topics, sometimes they are but don’t know what to do about it and in both cases they keep using Twitter,’ said Tu?rulcan Elmas, one of the authors of the research, accepted by the IEEE European Symposium of Security and Privacy 2021, a top cybersecurity conference. ‘We found that 47% of local trends in Turkey and 20% of global trends are fake, created from scratch by bots. Between June 2015 and September 2019, we uncovered 108,000 bot accounts involved, the biggest bot dataset reported in a single paper.’”
Those bot-created trends cover topics from gambling promotions to disinformation campaigns to hate speech against vulnerable populations. Another of the paper’s co-authors, Rebekah Overdorf, points out fake Twitter trends are magnified by media outlets, which regularly seize on them as examples of what people are talking about. Well if they weren’t before, they are now. Effective. When contacted by researchers, Twitter acknowledged the vulnerability but showed no interest in doing anything about it. We are sensing a (real) trend here.
Cynthia Murrell, July 1, 2021
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