China Smart, US Dumb: Some AI Readings in English
January 28, 2025
A blog post from an authentic dinobaby. He’s old; he’s in the sticks; and he is deeply skeptical.
I read a short post in YCombinator’s Hacker News this morning (January 23, 2025). The original article is titled “Deepseek and the Effects of GPU Export Controls.” If you are interested in the poli sci approach to smart software, dive in. However, in the couple of dozen comments on Hacker News to the post, a contributor allegedly named LHL posted some useful links. I have pulled these from the comments and displayed them for your competitive intelligence large language model. On the other hand, you can read them because you are interested in what’s shaking in the Lin-gang Free Trade Zone in the Middle Kingdom:
Deepseek-R1: Incentivizing Reasoning Capability in LLMs via Reinforcement Learning
Deepseek Coder V2: Breaking the Barrier of Closed Source Models in Code Intelligence
Deepseek-V2: A Strong, Economical, and Efficient Mixture-of-Experts Language Model
Deepseek LLM Scaling Open-Source Language Models with Longtermism
First, a thanks to the poster LHL. The search string links timed out, so you may already be part of the HN herd who is looking at the generated bibliography.
Second, several observations:
- China has lots of people. There are numerous highly skilled mathematicians, Monte Carlo and gradient descent wonks, and darned good engineers. One should not assume that wizardry ends with big valuations and tie ups among Oracle, Open AI and the savvy funder of Banjo, an intelware outfit of some repute.
- Computing resource constraints translate into one outcome. Example: Howard Flank, one of my team members, received the Information Industry Association Award decades ago for cramming a searchable index of the Library of Congress’ holdings. Remember those wonderful machines in the early 1980s. Yeah, Howard did wonders with limited resources. The Chinese professionals can too and have. (Note to US government committee members: Keep Howard and similar engineering whiz kids in mind when thinking about how curtailing computer resources will stop innovation.)
- Deepseek’s methods are likely to find there way into some US wrapper products presented as groundbreaking AI. Nope. These innovations are enabled by an open source technology. Now what happens if an outfit like Telegram or one of the many cyber gangs which Microsoft’s Brad Smith references? Yeah. Innovation of a type that is not salubrious.
- The authors of the papers are important. Should these folks be cross correlated with other information about grants, academic affiliations with US institutions, and conference attendance?
In case anyone is curious, from my dinobaby point of view, the most important paper in the bunch is the one about a “mixture of experts.”
Stephen E Arnold, January 28, 2025
Why Ghost Jobs? Answer: Intelligence
January 21, 2025
Prepared by a still-alive dinobaby.
A couple of years ago, an intelware outfit’s US “president” contacted me. He was curious about the law enforcement and intelligence markets appetite for repackaged Maltego, some analytics, and an interface with some Palantir-type bells and whistles. I explained that I charged money to talk because as a former blue-chip consultant, billing is in my blood. I don’t have platelets. I have Shrinky-dink invoices. Add some work, and these Shrinky-dinks blow up to big juicy invoices. He disconnected.
A few weeks later, he sent me an email. He wanted to pick up our conversation because his calls to other people whom he thought knew something about selling software to the US government did not understand that his company emerged from a spy shop. I was familiar with the issues: Non-US company, ties to a high-power intelligence operation, an inability to explain whether the code was secure, and the charming attitude of many intelligence professionals who go from A to B without much thought about some social conventions.
The fellow wanted to know how one could obtain information about a competitor; specifically, what was the pricing spectrum. It is too bad the owner of the company dumped the start up and headed to the golf course. If that call came to me today, I would point him at this article: “1 in 5 Online Job Postings Are Either Fake or Never Filled, Study Finds.” Gizmodo has explained one reason why there are so many bogus jobs offering big bogus salaries and promising big bogus benefits.
The answer is obvious when viewed from my vantage point in rural Kentucky? The objective is to get a pile or résumés, filter through them looking for people who might have some experience (current or past) at a company of interest to the job advertiser. What? Isn’t that illegal? I don’t know, but the trick has been used for a long, long time. Headhunting is a tricky business, and it is easy for someone to post a job opening and gather information from individuals who want to earn money.
What’s the write up say?
The Wall Street Journal cites internal data from the hiring platform Greenhouse that shows one in five online job postings—or between 18% and 22% of jobs advertised—are either fake or never filled. That data was culled from Greenhouse’s proprietary information, which the company can access because it sells automated software that helps employers fill out job postings. The “ghost job” phenomenon has been growing for some time—much to the vexation of job-seekers.
Okay, snappy. Ghost jobs. But the number seems low to me.
The article fails to note the intelligence angle, however. It concludes:
The plague of such phantom positions has led some platforms to treat job postings in very much the same way that other online content gets treated: as either A) verified or B) potential misinformation. Both Greenhouse and LinkedIn now supply a job verification service, the Journal writes, which allows users to know whether a position is legit or not. “It’s kind of a horror show,” Jon Stross, Greenhouse’s president and co-founder, told the Journal. “The job market has become more soul-crushing than ever.”
I think a handful of observations may be warranted:
- Some how the education of a job seeker has ignored the importance of making sure that the résumé is sanitized so no information is provided to an unknown entity from whom there is likely to be zero response. Folks, this is data collection. Volume is good.
- Interviews are easier than ever. Fire up Zoom and hit the record button. The content of the interview can be reviewed and analyzed for tasty little info-nuggets.
- The process is cheap, easy, and safe. Getting some information can be quite tricky. Post an advertisement on a service and wait. Some podcasts brag about how many responses their help wanted ads generate in as little as a few hours. As I said, cheap, easy, and safe.
What can a person do to avoid this type of intelligence gathering activity? Sorry. I have some useful operational information, but those little platelet sized invoices are just so eager to escape this dinobaby’s body. What’s amazing is that this ploy is news just as it was to the intelware person who was struggling to figure out some basics about selling to the government. Recycling open source software and pretending that it was an “innovation” was more important than trying to hire a former US government procurement officer, based in the DC area with a minimum of 10 years in software procurement. We have a situation where professional intelligence officers, job seekers, and big time journalists have the same level of understanding about how to obtain high-value information quickly and easily. Amazing what a dinobaby knows, isn’t it?
Stephen E Arnold, January 21, 2025
Can the UN Control the Intelligence Units of Countries? Yeah, Sure. No Problem
January 16, 2025
This blog post is the work of an authentic dinobaby. Sorry. No smart software can help this reptilian thinker.
I assume that the information in “Governments Call for Spyware Regulations in UN Security Council Meeting” is spot on or very close to the bull’s eye. The write up reports:
On Tuesday [January 14, 2025] , the United Nations Security Council held a meeting to discuss the dangers of commercial spyware, which marks the first time this type of software — also known as government or mercenary spyware — has been discussed at the Security Council. The goal of the meeting, according to the U.S. Mission to the UN, was to “address the implications of the proliferation and misuse of commercial spyware for the maintenance of international peace and security.” The United States and 15 other countries called for the meeting.
Not surprisingly, different countries had different points of view. These ranged from “we have local regulations” to giant nation state assertions about bad actions by governments being more important to it is the USA’s fault.
The write up from the ubiquitous intelligence commentator did not include any history, context, or practical commentary about the diffusion of awareness of intelware or what the article, the UN, and my 90 year old neighbor calls spyware.
The public awareness of intelware coincided with hacks of some highly regarded technology. I am not going to name this product, but if one pokes about one might find documentation, code snippets, and even some conference material. Ah, ha. The conference material was obviously designed for marketing. Yes, that is correct. Conferences are routinely held in which the participants are vetted and certain measures put in place to prevent leakage of these materials. However, once someone passes out a brochure, the information is on the loose and can be snagged by a curious reporter who wants to do good. Also, some conference organizers themselves make disastrous decisions about what to post on their conference web site; for example, the presentations. I give some presentations at these closed to the public events, and I have found my slide deck on the organizer’s Web site. I won’t mention this outfit, but I don’t participate in any events associated with this outfit. Also, some conference attendees dress up as sheep and register with possibly bogus information. These folks happily snap pictures of exhibits of hardware not available to the public, record audio, and at one event held in the Hague sat in front of me and did a recording of my lecture about some odd ball research project in which I was involved. I reported the incident to the people at the conference desk. I learned that the individual left the conference and that his office telephone number was bogus. That’s enough. Leaks do occur. People are careless. Others just clever and duplicitous.
Thanks, You.com. You are barely able to manage a “good enough” these days. Money problems? Yeah, too bad. My heart bleeds for you.
However, the big reveal of intelware and its cousin policeware coincided with the push by one nation state. I won’t mention the country, but here’s how I perceived what kicked into high gear in 2005 or so. A number of start ups offered data analytics. The basic pitch was that these outfits had developed a suite of procedures to make sense of data. If the client had data, these companies could import the information and display important points identified by algorithms about the numbers, entities, and times. Marketers were interested in these systems because, like the sale pitches for AI today, the Madison Avenue crowd could dispense with the humans doing the tedious hand work required to make sense of pharmaceutical information. Buy, recycle, or create a data set. Then import it into these systems. Business intelligence spills forth. Leaders in this field did not disclose their “roots” in the intelligence community of the nation encouraging its entrepreneurs to commercialize what they learned when fulfilling their government military service.
Where did the funding come from? The nation state referenced provided some seed funds. However, in order to keep these systems in line with customer requirements for analyzing the sales of shampoo and blockbuster movies. Venture firms with personnel familiar with the nation state’s government software innovations were invited to participate in funding some of these outfits. One of them is a very large publicly traded company. This firm has a commercial sales side and a government sales side. Some readers of this post will have the stock in their mutual fund stock baskets. Once a couple of these outfits hit the financial jackpot for the venture firms, the race was on.
Companies once focused squarely on serving classified entities in a government in a number of countries wanted to sanitize the software and sell to a much larger, more diverse corporate market. Today, if one wants to kick the tires of commercially available once-classified systems and methods, one can:
- Attend conferences about data brokering
- Travel to Barcelona or Singapore and contact interesting start ups and small businesses in the marketing data analysis business
- Sign up for free open source intelligence online events and note the names and organizations speaking. (Some of these events allow a registered attendee to conduct an off line for others but real time chat with a speaker who represents an interesting company.
There are more techniques as well to identify outfits which are in the business of providing or developing intelware and policeware tools for anyone with money. How do you find these folks? That’s easy. Dark Web searches, Telegram Group surfing, and running an advertisement for a job requiring a person with specialized experience in a region like southeast Asia.
Now let me return to the topic of the cited article: The UN’s efforts to get governments to create rules, controls, or policies for intelware and policeware. Several observations:
- The effort is effectively decades too late
- The trajectory of high powered technology is outward from its original intended purpose
- Greed because the software works and can generate useful results: Money or genuinely valuable information.
Agree or disagree with me? That’s okay. I did a few small jobs for a couple of these outfits and have just enough insight to point out that the article “Governments Call for Spyware Regulations in UN Security Council Meeting” presents a somewhat thin report and lacks color.
Stephen E Arnold, January 18, 2025
Guess What? Most Conferences Leak High Value Information
September 24, 2024
This essay is the work of a dumb dinobaby. No smart software required.
I read the Wired “real news” article titled “Did a Chinese University Hacking Competition Target a Real Victim?” The main idea of the article is that a conference attracted security professionals. To spice up the person talking approach to conferences, “games” were organized. The article makes clear that the conference and the activities could have and maybe were a way for some people involved with and at the conference to obtain high-value information.
News flash! A typical conference setting. Everyone is listening for hot info. Thanks, MSFT Copilot. Good enough.
I have a “real news” flash for the folks at Wired. Any conference — including those with restricted attendance or special security checks — can be vectors for exfiltration of high-value information. After one lecture I delivered at a flashy public conference, a person who identified himself as a business professional wanted to invite me to give lectures in a country not in the EU. I listened. I asked questions. I received only fuzzy wuzzy answers. I did hear all expenses paid and an honorarium. I explained that I was a dinobaby. I wanted more details before I could say yes or no. I told the gentleman I had a meeting and had to get to that commitment. How often has that happened to me? At one conference I attended for six or seven years, a similar conversation took place with me and a business professional every time I gave a lecture.
Within the last 12 months, one of my talks was converted into an email from someone in the audience and a “real” journalist. Some of my team’s findings appeared without attribution in one of few remaining big name online publications. Based on my experience alone, I think attending conferences related to any “hot” technical subject is going to be like a freshly grilled Trader Joe’s veggie burger to a young-at-heart member of the Diptera clan (that’s a house fly, but you probably know that).
Let me offer several observations which may be use to people speaking at public, semi-public, or restricted events:
- Make darned sure you are not providing high-value actionable information. If one is not self aware, speakers get excited and do a core dump. The people seeking information for a purpose the speaker has not intended just writes it down and snaps mobile phone pix of the visuals. If a speakers says something of utility, that information is gone and can make its way into the hands of competitors, bad actors, or enemies of one nation state or another. The burden is on the attendee. Period.
- If handouts are provided, make certain these do not contain the complete information payload. If I prepare what I call a feuilles détachées, these are sanitized by omitting specific details. The general idea is expressed, but the good stuff is omitted. In short, neuter what is publicly available.
- Research the conference. Know before you go. If the conference is “secure,” you will have to chase down one of the disorganized and harried organizers and ask them to read you the names of the companies or agencies which sent representatives.
- Find out who the exhibitors are. Often some names appear on the conference Web site, but others — often some interesting outfits — don’t want any publicity. The conference is a way to learn what competitors are doing, identify prospects, pick up high value information, and recruit people to do work that can get them in some interesting conversations. Who knows? Maybe that consulting job dangled in front of a clueless attendee is a way to penetrate an organization?
- Leveraging conferences for intelligence is standard operating procedure.
Net net: Answer the question, “What’s the difference between high-value information and marketing baloney?” Here’s my response: “A failure to know or anticipate what the other person knows and needs. This is not news. It is common sense.
Stephen E Arnold, September 24, 2024
Anarchist Content Links: Zines Live
July 19, 2024
![dinosaur30a_thumb_thumb_thumb_thumb_[1]_thumb](https://arnoldit.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/dinosaur30a_thumb_thumb_thumb_thumb_1_thumb-1.gif "dinosaur30a_thumb_thumb_thumb_thumb_[1]_thumb")
This essay is the work of a dinobaby. Unlike some folks, no smart software improved my native ineptness.
One of my team called my attention to “Library. It’s Going Down Reading Library.” I know I am not clued into the lingo of anarchists. As a result, the Library … Library rhetoric just put me on a slow blinking yellow alert or emulating the linguistic style of Its Going Down, Alert. It’s Slow Blinking Alert.”
Syntactical musings behind me, the list includes links to publications focused on fostering even more chaos than one encounters at a Costco or a Southwest Airlines boarding gate. The content of these publications is thought provoking to some and others may be reassured that tearing down may be more interesting than building up.
The publications are grouped in categories. Let me list a handful:
- Antifascism
- Anti-Politics
- Anti-Prison, Anti-Police, and Counter-Insurgency.
Personally I would have presented antifascism as anti-fascism to be consistent with the other antis, but that’s what anarchy suggests, doesn’t it?
When one clicks on a category, the viewer is presented with a curated list of “going down” related content. Here’s a listing of what’s on offer for the topic AI has made great again, Automation:
Livewire: Against Automation, Against UBI, Against Capital
If one wants more “controversial” content, one can visit these links:
Each of these has the “zine” vibe and provides useful information. I noted the lingo and the names of the authors. It is often helpful to have an entity with which one can associate certain interesting topics.
My take on these modest collections: Some folks are quite agitated and want to make live more challenging that an 80-year-old dinobaby finds it. (But zines remind me of weird newsprint or photocopied booklets in the 1970s or so.) If the content of these publications is accurate, we have not “zine” anything yet.
Stephen E Arnold, July 19, 2024
McKinsey Black Heart: Smart Software Flat Lines!
December 7, 2022
The McKinsey online marketing content machine is chugging along. The service is called McKinsey Black, but I like to think of it as the McKinsey Black Heart. (There are many logo and branding opportunities with my version of the online publication’s name in my opinion.)
The Black Heart made available “The State of AI in 2022 and a Half Decade in Review.” I am not sure who the two or three sled dogs were who assembled the report. I know for sure that one or more managing partners are pulling their their harnesses like the horses bedecking the Brandenburg Gate.
I urge you to read this pontifical document yourself. I want to highlight one possibly irrelevant finding tucked into the mass of content marketing data; to wit:
While AI adoption globally is 2.5x higher today than in 2017, it has leveled off over the past few years.
Is this statement accurate? Come on now. That’s not a fair question due to the sampling methodology, the question formation, and the super analytic procedures used to generate the finding. Pretty boring like most Statistics 101 questions; for instance:
The online survey was in the field from May 3 to May 27, 2022, and from August 15 to August 17, 2022, and garnered responses from 1,492 participants representing the full range of regions, industries, company sizes, functional specialties, and tenures. Of those respondents, 744 said their organizations had adopted AI in at least one function and were asked questions about their organizations’ AI use. To adjust for differences in response rates, the data are weighted by the contribution of each respondent’s nation to global GDP.
Ah, ha. A finger on the scale perhaps? Let’s move on and think about this.
The obvious value of the finding is that if you aren’t doing AI, you may be left behind. You will be like a small child watching the TGV disappear with your parents and nanny toward Nimes as you stand alone on the empty platform at Gare Montparnasse. Bad. How bad? Very bad which means, “Hire McKinsey.”
For me the idea that one of the most hyped, wild and crazy techno jargon crazies has gone flat line. Now that’s not just very bad; it is downright truly bad.
Why is the Black Heart report presenting a graph which does not look like a hockey stick. McKinsey wants to move people along the hockey stick handle, not report that the growth looks like the surface of the ice rink in the Patinoire de Nimes.
And what are the killer applications? How about making customer service great again? The idea is that smart software can replace expensive, litigious, unreliable, and non-McKinsey grade humans with digital magic. Think about your most recent brush with “customer service.” Those big company chatbots are wonderful, super wonderful.
The write up has one additional feature designed to cement the Black Heart content into your work life. You can sign up for “new artificial intelligence articles.” Presumably these will not be written by smart software. Real live Black Heart experts will share their insights.
Remember. AI is not doing the hockey stick thing. My view is that some fancy dancing was required to find violets and daisies sprouting in the opioid waste refinement system.
Imagine. A flat line. After all the pension fund money, all the hype, and all the excitement for workers who can be replaced. Here’s a question? Can those text generators replace a small McKinsey team?
That’s a good question.
Stephen E Arnold, December 7, 2022
Will Decision Intelligence Lead to Better Decision Making?
November 24, 2022
After years of hype, it turns out big data is not paying off as promised. Not yet. Marc Warner, CEO of AI firm Faculty, asserts, “Data-Driven Decision Making Will Fail—and Here Is Why” at Computer Weekly. Simply pouring through an abundance of data does not result in accurate conclusions. Warner turns philosophical as he elaborates:
“About 400 years ago, philosophers realized that collecting data to create understanding was a good thing. However, they also thought data alone was sufficient to establish how the world was and predict what would happen next – a process called induction. They thought a wider understanding of what was going on didn’t matter. Notice this is the same claim made for data-driven decision making – but we know a wider understanding does matter. Will stars appear in the sky because they did yesterday? Well, yes – for a while. But at some point, they will burn out. What was an obvious extrapolation is, suddenly, no longer true. This view changed with the philosopher Karl Popper, who said we don’t extrapolate inductively from data, because that’s impossible. In fact, we guess what’s going on, then find data to falsify that theory. This is a crucial change. Suddenly, the focus is the theory – not the data. This means the theory can be very different from an extrapolation from data.”
Not surprisingly, the AI entrepreneur believes the way to develop such theories lies in machine learning, specifically decision intelligence. Warner describes how his company used this approach to help the UK’s National Health Service wrangle an overwhelming amount of data to manage resources during the pandemic. The resulting decisions, he states, are credited with saving thousands of lives. It makes sense, of course, that accurate understanding leads to better decisions. Perhaps decision intelligence can get us there. But can this budding approach do anything to combat the stubborn problem of bias in machine learning? Nothing stops better, faster, and cheaper. More time to watch TikTok.
Cynthia Murrell, November 24, 2022
Google: Business Intelligence, Its Next Ad Business
October 11, 2022
Google has been a busy beaver. One example popped out of a ho hum write up about Google management’s approach to freebies. The write up “Google’s CEO Faced Intense Pushback from Employees at a Town Hall. His 2-Sentence Response was Smart Leadership” contains a rather startling point, if the article is accurate. Here’s the passage which is presumably a direct quote from Sundar Pichai, the top Googler:
Look, I hope all of you are reading the news, externally. The fact that you know, we are being a bit more responsible through one of the toughest macroeconomic conditions underway in the past decade, I think it’s important that as a company, we pull together to get through moments like this.
Did you see the crazy admission: “being a bit more responsible”. Doesn’t this mean that the company has been irresponsible prior to this announcement. I find that amusing: More responsible. Does responsibility extend beyond Foosball and into transparency about alleged online ad fraud or the handling of personnel matters such as the Dr. Timnit Gebru example?
But to the business at hand: Business intelligence. Like enterprise search and artificial intelligence, I am not exactly sure what business intelligence means. To the people who use spreadsheets like Microsoft Excel, rows and columns of data are “business intelligence.” But there must be more than redos of Lotus 1-2-3?
Yes, there are different ways to “do” business intelligence. These range from listening in a coffee shop to buying data from a third party provider and stuffing the information into Maltego to spot previously unnoticed relationships. And there are, of course, companies eager to deliver search based applications to make finding a competitor’s proposal to a government agency easier than figuring out which Google Dork to use.
“Google Days It’s Cracked the Code to Business Intelligence” explains that the Google is going to make BI as business intelligence is known to those in the know the King of the Mountain. I noted this passage:
In business intelligence [BI], “there was always this idea of governing BI and of self-service, and there was no reconciliation of the degree of trust and the degree of flexibility,” Google’s Gerrit Kazmaier told reporters last week, ahead of the Google Cloud Next conference. “At Google, I think we have cracked that code to how you get trust and confidence of data with the flexibility and agility of self-service.”
This buzzword infused statement raises several fascinating ideas. Let’s look at a couple of them, shall we?
First, the idea of “governance.” That’s a term to which I can say I don’t know what the heck it means. But the notion of “governance” and “trust” is that somehow the two glittering generalities are what Google has “cracked.” I must say, “What’s the meaning, Gerrit Kazmaier?”
Second, I noted three buzzwords strung together like faux silver skulls on a raver’s necklace: Trust, confidence, flexibility, and agility. To me, these words mean that more users want a point-and-click solution to answer a question about a competitor or the downstream impacts of an event like sanctions on China. The reality is that like the first buzzword, these don’t communicate, they evoke. The intention is that Mother Google will deliver business intelligence.
The solution, however, is not one Google crafted. The company’s professionals could not develop a business intelligence solution. Google had to buy one. Thus, the code cracking was purchased in the form of a company called Looker. The appeal of the Looker solution is that the user does not have to figure out data sources, determine if the data are valid, wrestle to get the data normalized, run tests to determine if the data set meets the requirements of a first year statistics class problem, and figure out what one needs to know. Google will make these steps invisible and reduce knowledge work to clicking an icon. There you go. To be fair, other companies have similar goals. These range from well known US companies to small firms in Armenia. Everyone wants to generate money from easy business intelligence.
Google is an online advertising business. The company wants to knock Microsoft off its perch as the default vendor to business and government. The Department of Defense is going to embrace the Google Cloud. I am not sure that some DoD analysts will release their grip on Microsoft PowerPoint, however.
Can a company trust Google? Does Google have a mechanism for governance for data handling, managing its professional staff (hello, Dr. Gebru), and ensuring that automated advertising systems are straight and true? Does Google abandon projects without thinking too much about consequences (hello, Stadia developers and customers)?
My hunch is that reducing business intelligence from a craft to a mouse click sets the stage for:
- Potential embedded and intentional data bias
- Rapid ill-informed decisions by users
- A way to inject advertising into a service application and personalization.
Will the days of the free car washes return to the Google parking lot? Will having meetings in a tree house in the London office become a thing again? Will Google displace other vendors delivering search based applications which engage the user in performing thoughtful analyses?
Time will provide the answer or rather Looker will provide the answer. Google will collect the money.
Stephen E Arnold, October 11, 2022
Salesforce, Alibaba, and China: Is an Enterprise Superapp the Goal?
August 4, 2022
I read an announcement about a tie up among Salesforce, Alibaba, and whoever is over-seeing the high profile online outfit. “Salesforce Shutters Hong Kong Office, Leans on Alibaba in China” reports:
As a result of its tightened partnership with Alibaba, Salesforce is “optimizing our business structure to better serve the Greater China Region” and “opening new roles while eliminating some others,” the spokesperson said. The company’s career page shows it’s currently hiring a product management director and a senior software engineer in the southern Chinese city Guangzhou, where it placed its tech team.
The cited article points out:
Salesforce’s interest in China lies in serving international businesses localizing in China, but it can’t do it alone due to the country’s intricate regulatory restrictions.
What will Alibaba do?
Alibaba will be taking over the firm’s sales in mainland China and Hong Kong, while Taiwan will fall under the management of its Singapore office…
Several observations:
- Like Oracle, Salesforce is taking steps to make sure it is able to operate in some acceptable way in China
- The technology for these deals is probably sealed in a quantum secure container so that “partners” are unable to learn what’s in the black boxes. (Well, that’s the hope?)
- China faces some challenges, and it is possible that Alibaba’s overseers could make helpful suggestions which make this tie up less or completely unattractive.
What happens if Alibaba integrates Salesforce functionality into its apps and services? Will we have a commercial superapp purpose built for China and companies permitted to operate in the Middle Kingdom?
Net net: Nah, just “lean on” and lean in.
Stephen E Arnold, August 4, 2022
Swedish Radio Tunes In to the Zuckbook Baloney
June 30, 2022
Sveriges Radio AB or Swedish Radio is a combo of the US National Public Radio and a “real” newspaper. In general, this approach to information is not the core competency of the Meat (sorry, Meta) Zuckbook thing. An interesting case example of the difference between Sveriges Radio and the estimable Silicon Valley super company is described in “Swedish Radio Created Fake Pharmacy – Reveals How Facebook Stored Sensitive Information.”
The main idea is that the Sveriges team did not listen to much disco or rap. Instead the canny outfit set up a honey pot in the form of a fake pharmacy. Then Sveriges analyzed what Facebook said it did with health-related information versus what the the Zuckster actually did.
Guess how that turned out? The write up explains:
After four days, 25 000 fake visits from customers had been registered with Facebook. But they had neither shut down nor warned the owners of the made-up pharmacy – Swedish Radio News’ reporters. When the reporters log into their account, they see that Facebook has stored the type of sensitive information that they say their filter is built to delete again and again. The question that the reporters then asked themselves was whether or not Facebook even has a filter that works in the Swedish language. One of the pharmacies that Swedish Radio reported on say that they cannot find any warnings from Facebook on data transfers that have taken place. The other has not wanted to answer the question. According to state investigators in the USA last year, Facebook only filtered in English.
Interesting? Yes, for three reasons:
- The radio outfit appears to have caught the Zuckers in a bit of a logical problem: Yes, there are filters? No, we just do marketing speak.
- Dismissing the method used to snap a mouse trap on Zuck’s big toe is probably a mistake. The “I’ll get back to you, Senator” works in the lobby-rich US. In Sweden, probably the method will swim like a plate of Surströmming.
- “Real” news — at least in Sweden — still has value. Perhaps some of the US “real” news people will give the approach a spin without the social justice and political sheen.
Net net: Will Facebook change its deep swimming in the information ocean? Has the Atlantic herring changed in the last two decades?
Stephen E Arnold, June 30, 2022
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