NSO Group: PR Push?
July 26, 2021
I checked my Overflight system to see what’s shakin’ with the NSO Group pickle. (I ran these queries on July 25, 2021.) I noted a series of write ups. Here’s a sampling:
Economic Times of India, “Millions Sleep Well at Night, Walk Safely on Streets Due to Technologies like Pegasus: NSO”
New Indian Express, “Millions Sleep Well at Night, Walk Safely on Streets Due to Technologies Like Pegasus: NSO”
ABP Live, “Millions Sleep Well At Night, Walk Safely On Streets Thanks To Technologies Like Pegasus: NSO”
Technology for You, “Millions Sleep Well, Walk Safely Due To Technologies Like Pegasus, Says NSO”
Devdiscourse, “Millions Sleep Well at Night, Walk Safely on Streets Due to Technologies like Pegasus: NSO”
And there are more, quite a few more.
Here’s a screenshot from the low profile Web search engine called 50 Thousand Feet. Notice that this is the fourth page of results:
After making brilliant statements over the last week, NSO Group is now demonstrating content marketing carpet bombing. The idea is to flood certain channels with the message about getting a good night’s sleep. In a market niche characterized by people and organizations keeping a low profile, NSO Group is a veritable Vasco de Gama. The company has launched its stout marketing in order to open a new path to understanding.
Several questions:
- Will the good news content marketing about NSO Group’s positive contributions to a good night sleep deflect the investigative journalists collecting information about the company?
- Was the PR effort a result of a suggestion from an Israeli government task force?
- What content marketing firm pushed out the stories?
- How will the deduplication functions of the stunning Bing.com search, the chart-topping Google search, and the bear-like Yandex handle the same story in numerous outlets?
- How much did this NSO content marketing campaign cost?
- Is the “sleeping well” story the first wave of content bombs or is it a one and done assault?
- Does the content marketing carpet bombing capture the attention of TikTok and YouTube consumers?
I find this an interesting PR campaign. Good news is welcome by many. For some, the flood of “sleeping well” assurances raises the question: “What’s NSO Group trying to accomplish?” The news organizations loosing their investigative reporters on this story may find the smoke, sound, and shock waves from the content marketing carpet bombing like a lavish picnic lunch on a blanket adjacent a fire ant mound:
Those Solenopsidini critters can be industrious, very industrious when content marketing pops the lids on picnic goodies as the campfire grills the mixture of lamb and ground beef. Where’s there is smoke, there is fire. Where there is fire in the summer, it’s either a picnic or disaster.
Stephen E Arnold, July 26, 2021
The NSO Group Story: Inspiring, Incriminating, or Obfuscating?
July 23, 2021
The Washington Post or Wapo to some in the DC orbit is an influential newspaper. The outfit has a connection to the world’s richest man. That billionaire’s idea for an online bookstore spawned a massive online service. One of the customers using that service was allegedly given some good news. The idea was that this particular customer could go elsewhere for online services. This factoid does not appear in “Somebody Has to Do the Dirty Work: NSO Founders Defend the Spyware They Built.” I mention this omission because the ties within the intelware and policeware industry are many and often quite important.
The write up explains:
This week, The Washington Post and a consortium of 16 other media partners reported that the company’s military-grade spyware was used in attempted and successful hacks of 37 smartphones belonging to journalists, business executives, and two women close to the murdered Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi.
This week refers to the period from July 19 to July 22, 2021, when information about the use of once-classified technology became readily available. What’s happened is that a single intelware and policeware company, the commercial-government connections in Israel, and the threads which tie many of the Herliya-based intelware and policeware companies to American firms is a subject of interest to lots of investigative journalists. I want to point out that the best investigative journalists fit the profile of intelligence operatives and first-class detectives working in government institutions. A few journalists have this type of work experience as well.
This means that a poster child for intelware and policeware is going to be a focal point for a news cycle or two. That’s the good news. The bad—actually really bad, bad news—is that the collateral information could be untangled. Then what will the investigative journalists find?
The Wapo article cited above adds some interesting detail; for example, “it was not appropriate to have any direct knowledge of the internal national security matters of foreign countries. They also thought they weren’t equipped to make political decisions about whom to sell to.”
And this factoid: One of the founders “was on a volunteer search-and-rescue mission in Haiti, pulling bodies out of the rubble of a collapsed university.”
Plus, one founder runs on “little sleep, Diet Coke and takeout sushi.”
There is a suggestion about managing the cyber security industry. How about this idea:
The situation would be better …if the cybersecurity industry were regulated by a global body. More importantly, he said, the Israeli government has a role to play: Countries that violate their agreements should be banned from being recipients of any of Israel’s cyber technology.
One can hypothesize about the questions my DarkCyber research team might raise about this statement, but I won’t speculate.
This article strikes me as a “make nice” write up. That’s good for NSO Group. However, I am not sure the 80 journalists and 17 news organizations are going to leave the NSO Group with stories about hard working entrepreneurs who created a successful company. Some questions I think this group of intrepid “real news” professionals could explore include:
- What’s the story behind NSO Group selling itself to Francisco Group and then buying itself back?
- Who have become the primary stakeholders in the NSO Group since Eddy Shalev made an investment in the company?
- What government contracts has the NSO Group landed in the last two years?
- What vendors resell or provide hosting services to the NSO Group?
- What partnerships exist between NSO Group and other companies?
- What conferences does NSO Group attend? What are the presentations NSO Group professionals deliver?
- What interactions exist among NSO Group and other intelware and policeware companies in Herzliya?
- What companies are now employing former NSO Group professionals?
- Who are the principal technical contractors NSO Group compensates to assist with technology development?
- What university professionals are associated with NSO Group?
- Who has nominated NSO Group for intelware and policeware awards?
There are other questions the 80 journalists and 17 news organizations can address. Digging might yield more useful information than “how quickly the pace of tech and the
advent of smartphones had enabled criminals to outrun law enforcement” or the the founders “didn’t have the background of the typical Israeli entrepreneur.”
Isn’t there more to this story? Weren’t the founders in the Israeli Army? Is that important? Perhaps the 80 journalists and 17 news organizations can answer this question, a question I think it is quite important to pull the knots from this puzzle.
Stephen E Arnold, July 23, 2021
Gartner: Does Analysis Register?
July 23, 2021
I read “Where on Gartner’s Hype Cycle is Gartner’s Hype Cycle?” This is a very insightful write up which raises some interesting issues about misinformation, disinformation, and fact reformation. The principal interrogatory pivots on the phrase “hype cycle.” If you are not familiar with “hype cycle”, it is a curve that looks like this:
The curve with labels on the x and y axis looks like this from the Matplotlib here just without numbers. Do mid tier consulting firms generating billions each year need numbers? Obviously not.
What is the “information payload” of a Garter hype cycle I found from the Yandex Web index:
Notice the x axis is time and the y axis is the subjective “expectations.” Is this consulting “science”? I do like the tag “SmarterWithGartner.” More examples of the Gartner content can be found at this link to the Yandex image search service.
What does the Register’s opinion column address? Please, read the original. I have identified three points which I found interesting; your mileage may vary, particularly if you are one of the Gartner confederation of whiz bang experts.
Gartner’s business positioning
I quote from the characterization of an information company and consulting services firm:
Gartner is an odd fish.
Validity of the information in the hype cycle
I quote from a passage referencing hype cycles for a five year period:
if search engines or ARM chips or OLEDs are in there anywhere, I missed them. Whatever happened to that Google thing, anyway?
Expertise
I quote from what is a discussion of self-referential marketing and feedback sales:
Gartner absorbs the reportage and opinion about how well corporate portals are doing this year, slaps them in or not, and the result gets reported in the press with more or less reaction. Which is duly noted, and fed back into the next time, all the while carrying the name of Gartner through the media with a strong whiff of broad, deep tech mastery.
Accuracy
I quote from the value of the information arrayed in a hype cycle graph without “numbers” or apparent verifiable data:
Gartner would do well to appoint a proper historian, and perhaps a proper ethicist, in recognition of some of the truths about itself that never appear in a PowerPoint deck. The world is ready for a bit less flannel.
My take is that numbers are helpful. Also, I hope the Register take a look at the number free Gartner Magic Quadrant; for instance, the apparently subject examples at this link on Yandex.
I think that the word “flannel” means:
Collins’ Dictionary of Slang says that the noun “flannel” has been used to mean “rubbish, albeit plausible rubbish” since the 1920s, and the verb “to flannel” has meant “to talk nonsense in a soothing, plausible manner, esp for the purposes of charming a woman one wishes to seduce” since the 1940s.
Has Gartner been called out? PT Barnum allegedly said, “I don’t care what people say about me as long as they say something.”
A perfect complement to self-referential information marketing? Smarter with Gartner is a compelling coda.
Stephen E Arnold, July 23, 2021
Three Here and Now Amazon Management Milestones
July 21, 2021
July 21, 2021, is a day of Amazon management milestones. In my newsfeeds this morning, I noted three items. Obviously none or some or all of these “real news” stories could be falsification from the fecund multi-verse. Who knows? Perhaps the error corrected Google quantum computer’s “supremacy” or IBM Watson can answer the “know” question. What do you think?
ITEM 1: More Competitive Zing
“Build a SQL-Based ETL pipeline with Apache Spark on Amazon EKS” states:
The Arc processing framework strives to enable data personas to build reusable and performant ETL pipelines, without having to delve into the complexities of writing verbose Spark code. Writing your ETL pipeline in native Spark may not scale very well for organizations not familiar with maintaining code, especially when business requirements change frequently. The SQL-first approach provides a declarative harness towards building idempotent data pipelines that can be easily scaled and embedded within your continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) process. Arc simplifies ETL implementation in Spark and enables a wider audience of users ranging from business analysts to developers, who already have existing skills in SQL. It further accelerates users’ ability to develop efficient ETL pipelines to deliver higher business value.
Remember Elastic, the open source search champion? What about Lucidworks? Oracle, anyone? Amazon wants to get the ingest, normalize, and analyze market in the AWS environment. Will these just named outfits be invited to the celebration of open source life? I don’t need a super smart DeepMind Alpha gizmo or the outstanding IBM Watson to answer this question.
ITEM 2: Big Rocket, Big Boat, Big or Small Body Dysmorphic Disorder
I missed the launch of the brilliantly named Blue Origin. I know. The story was everywhere. I live in rural Kentucky and the power was out. I did read “Jeff Bezos Says His Launch to Space Gave Him Greater Appreciation of Earth’s Fragility.” If true, maybe Green Origin would have been a more poetic name. Have those Bezos delivery trucks, servers, and automated warehouses gone green? Once again, no smart software like Sagemaker is needed. The answer is, “Maybe in one’s imagination” like an expensive amusement part ride powered by solar energy.
ITEM 3: Sensitive Human Resource Management
I spotted “Amazon Denied a Worker Pregnancy Accommodations. Then She Miscarried.” I did some quick checks, and this “real news” item is not too popular in the technology feeds I monitor. The write up states:
Patty Hernandez, a 23-year-old Amazon warehouse worker in Tracy, California, miscarried after pleading with her manager and human resources for lighter duty… Amazon’s human resources denied Hernandez’s doctor’s note, according to Hernandez who said the denial was communicated verbally by a human resources rep. “[HR] just told me there was no specific area for light work that wouldn’t require over 15 pounds of lifting, or for me to be off my feet,” she said.
To sum up: Brilliant competitor tactics management, outstanding management messaging about the environment, and the human resources management approach. Should I mention that some of NSO Group’s processes were allegedly running on AWS servers? Nah, probably just a rumor like Amazon being in the policeware and intelware business itself.
Stephen E Arnold, July 21, 2021
The Gray Lady Grinds on Big Blue
July 20, 2021
The New York Times may not be successful in selling ad space to IBM in the next few months. The estimable “real” news outfit published an entertaining discussion of Watson. Navigate to “What Ever Happened to IBM’s Watson.” Pay up. Read the 2,000 word business school, essay, opinion piece. Then check your portfolio to verify that IBM stock is down again, has new executives in new roles, and the tenacity to keep on with the “little engine that could” approach to dealing with the likes of Amazon, Google, and Microsoft as well as start ups offering everything from i2 Analyst Notebook clones to federating data systems to consulting services at a discount.
Yikes. Big Blue. The New York Times.
The write up has a number of zingers; for example:
- “Beware what you promise” about the “future of knowing.”
- “Watson has not remade any industries. And it hasn’t lifted IBM’s fortunes.”
- [Watson] “was not realistic.”
- [Watson was] “a learning journey.”
- “… The grand visions of the past are gone.”
- “Watson is no longer the next big thing, but it may become a solid business for IBM.”
Yep, that is a conditional and instead of an Amazon AWS Sagemaker gusher of cash, a “solid business.” The wonderfulness of the NYT article omits a couple of minor points:
- The “cognitive computing” pitch. Baloney in my opinion.
- The manual effort required to train the mash up of home brew code, open source, and stuff acquired from outfits like Vivisimo takes time and subject matter experts. The result? Expensive stuff for sure. And once the system is trained, one has to keep on training whilst optimizing.
- The complexity of taking a bunch of parts and implementing them as “smart software” is very difficult. Amazon seems to be going for the “off the shelf” approach and “ready to roll” models.
Net net: Let’s ask Watson how about those AI start ups as acquisition targets. Marketing, not innovation, seems to be the go to strength of IBM. What do you say, Watson? Watson, are you there? Wow, that latency is a killer isn’t it?
Stephen E Arnold, July 20, 2021
Microsoft Code Recommendations: Objectivity and Relevance, Anyone?
June 30, 2021
The “real news” outfit CNBC published an interesting news item: “Microsoft and OpenAI Have a New A.I. Tool That Will Give Coding Suggestions to Software Developers.” The write up states:
Microsoft on Tuesday announced an artificial intelligence system that can recommend code for software developers to use as they write code…The system, called GitHub Copilot, draws on source code uploaded to code-sharing service GitHub, which Microsoft acquired in 2018, as well as other websites. Microsoft and GitHub developed it with help from OpenAI, an AI research start-up that Microsoft backed in 2019.
The push to make programming “easier” is moving into Recommendation Land. Recommendation technology from Bing is truly remarkable. Here’s a quick example. Navigate to Bing and enter the query “Louisville KY bookkeeper.” Here are the results:
The page is mostly ads and links to intermediaries who sell connections to bookkeepers accepting new clients, wonky “best” lists, and links to two bookkeeping companies. FYI: There are dozens of bookkeeping services in Louisville, and the optimal way to get recommendations is to pose a query to the Nextdoor.com Web site.
Now a question: How “objective” will these code suggestions be? Will there be links to open source supported by or contributed to by such exemplary organizations as Amazon, Google, and IBM, among others?
My hunch is that Bing points the way to the future. I will be interested to see what code is recommended to a developer working on a smart cyber security system, which may challenge the most excellentness of Microsoft’s own offerings.
Stephen E Arnold, June 30, 2021
Intel and Its Horse Code
June 29, 2021
Do your remember the absolutely marvelous technical breakthrough of the quantum junction transformer magic technology called Horse Ridge? No, I am trying to forget too. The idea was that Intel’s cryogenic quantum chip would enable commercially viable quantum computing. The key words in these marketing announcements are “cryogenic” and “commercial.” Get out your wallet. Cryogenics can be more expensive than a $25 Arctic Freezer 7.
The new “horsey” metaphor is Horse Creek. I can’t use the phrase horse feathers again; otherwise, I risk the wrath of my seventh grade English teacher. Maybe hair, doody, drool, or blanket? I will have to give this some thought.
“Intel to Create RISC-V Development Platform with SiFive P550 Cores on 7nm in 2022” is a very objective type of write up. I would like to point out that Intel has not been the leader in the tiny nanometer chip derby. In fact, I learned that a Chinese outfit named Biren Technology is getting in the 7nm graphics chip business. I remember when Chinese chip foundries were creating chips about as wide as a city sidewalk. Intel? How is that small trace stuff working out? Will there be enough water in Arizona to make the AMD Ryzen wannabes a reality?
The write up states:
Despite Intel recently committed to bringing its 7nm to market in 2023 with the compute tile for its Meteor Lake processor as its first 7nm product, we’re being told that Horse Creek silicon will be ready in 2022, which would make Horse Creek its first 7nm product. For what it is worth, it’s unlikely that the Intel RISC-V solution is tile-based, but it might be easy enough to bring a small RISC-V chip development platform to market around then. The chip is likely to be small, so that might work in favor of its costs as well. A question does remain as to whether Intel’s involvement here is purely in the hardware, or whether there will be an Intel-based software stack to go along with it.
Is this doubt? Nope. Marketing. How about horse cutlets from your local hippophagie. Better yet. Step away from an undifferentiated “horse” and hire Megan Thee Stallion and license her music and name to brand the Intel horses.l
Stephen E Arnold, June 29, 2021
Google and Unreliable Results: Like the Jack Benny One Liner, I Am Thinking, I Am Thinking
June 25, 2021
I read a “real” news story called “Google Is Starting to Warn Users When It Doesn’t Have a Reliable Answer.” (No, I will not ask, What’s reliable mean.)
Here’s the statement which snagged my attention in the write up:
“When anybody does a search on Google, we’re trying to show you the most relevant, reliable information we can,” said Danny Sullivan, a public liaison for Google Search. “But we get a lot of things that are entirely new,” Sullivan said the notice isn’t saying that what you’re seeing in search results is right or wrong — but that it’s a changing situation, and more information may come out later.
I think Mr. Sullivan, a former search engine optimization guru and conference organizer, is the “new” Matt Cutts, a Google professional helping to point the way to the digital future at the US government. Is key word packing the path to more patents than China?
I loved this statement which I know is pretty Tasmanian devil like: “Most relevant, reliable information we can.” I did a query for garage floor epoxy coating in Louisville. I gathered about 20 businesses display on the first two pages of Google search results. Two companies were in this business. Others were out of business. One “company” called me back and said, “My loser son has been gone for two years.”
I have other examples as well of search either being out of date, spoofed, or just weird.
Let’s look at some of the reasons why Google made a statement about “reliable answers.”
First, I think the difficulty of providing real-time indexing is beyond three Google capabilities: Outfits with real time content won’t play ball with Google unless Google pays up and works out a mechanism to move the content to a Google indexing queue. (Yep, queue as in long line at the McDonald’s drive through.)
Second, Google is not set up to do real time. I think the notion of having a short list of “must ping frequently sites” may be a hold over from the distant past. The reason? As the cost of indexing, updating, and making the Google indexes “consistent” – some of the practices no longer fit the current iteration of “relevant” and “reliable.” Google is not Twitter, and it is not Facebook. Therefore, the pipelines for real time content simply don’t exist. Googlers tried but seemed to be better at selling ads than dealing with new content types.
Third, hot info appears in non text form on Instagram, TikTok, and even places like DailyMotion and Vimeo sometimes days before the content plops into YouTube. Ever try to locate a video using the creator assigned index terms. That’s an exercise in futility. Ads, gentle reader, not relevant and reliable information.
From my vantage point on the porch overlooking a mine drainage pond, I have some hypotheses:
- Google is under financial pressure, a competitive pressure from Amazon and Facebook, and a legal pressure. Almost any nation state with an appetite to drag the Google into court is in gear.
- Google is just not able to handle the real time flows of content, either textual or imagery. Too bad, but that’s the excitement of Hegel’s these, antithese, synthese which “real” Googlers learn along with search engine optimization marketing methods.
- Google’s propagandistic and jingoistic assurances that it returns relevant and reliable results is more and more widely seen as key word spam.
- Google’s management methods are not tuned for the current business environment. I may be alone in noticing that high school science club thinking and management from assumed superiority is out of favor. (If Sergey Brin were to ride a Russian rocket into space, wou8ld he attract more signatures that Jeff Bezos. The quasi referendum did not want Mr. Bezos to return to earth. Mr. Brin’s ride did not materialize, so I won’t know who “won” the most votes.)
Net net: Relevant and reliable. That’s a line worthy of Jack Benny when he is asked about Fred Allen. I give up, “What does ‘reliable’ mean, Googlers.” My suggestion is marketing hoo haa with metatags.
Stephen E Arnold, June 25, 2021
A $2 Trillion Market Cap and Tops at Diversity and Inclusion
June 25, 2021
Forget the Windows 10 (the last version of Windows once). Forget the SolarWinds’ misstep. Forget the complexity of Teams for a consultant used to Zoom. Think about this milestone. Fortune has named the Redmond outfit the big dog in diversity and inclusion.
For a big tech firm, the company is refreshingly free of discrimination-based scandals. Windows Central reports, “Microsoft Tops Fortune 500 Charts for Diversity and Inclusion.” Writer Sean Endicott shares some data from this year’s Fortune 500 report on the subject:
Fortune and Refinitiv partnered together to gather data and rank organizations based on 14 key metrics, including the percentage of minorities on a company’s board, the percentage of employees that are women, and the percentage of employees with disabilities. This list also includes Measure Up, a ranking of the most progressive companies based on diversity and inclusivity. Microsoft measures well in several key areas. Fortune highlights that it provides day-care services and has an employee resource group voluntarily formed by workers. The company also has targets for diversity and inclusion and policies regarding gender diversity. According to Fortune, 39.7% of Microsoft’s board is made up of racial and ethnic minorities. Overall, Microsoft’s workforce is 49.8% racial or ethnic majorities. 41.3% of managers at Microsoft are racial or ethnic minorities. While Microsoft has positive figures regarding racial and ethnic diversity, it falls behind in gender diversity. According to 2020 data reported by Microsoft, only 28.6% of its employees were women. 26.3% of managers at Microsoft were women in the same timeframe.”
The Windows cheerleaders may see some room for improvement. The write-up reminds us Microsoft makes a habit of emphasizing diversity and inclusion, linking to examples here, here, here, and here. Perhaps Google could learn a thing or two from that company. For example, reduce the management goofs that lead to global awareness of stuff like the Timnit Gibru and ethical AI matter. And Fortune knows a lot about diversity and inclusion, right?
Stephen E Arnold, June 25, 2021
Mitre and Its Mad Ave Inspired Naming
June 25, 2021
I keep a list of neologisms, jargon, and odd ball phrases. Examples include anting (crows which allow ants to clean up the feathery friends of horror movie script writers), industrial athlete (a Bezos bulldozer rah rah for warehouse workers who are sometimes allowed to visit the facilities), and pillbillies (residents of West Virginia and Kentucky who are addicted to opioids). I have others too including AIM (asymmetric information management) which I don’t understand at all.
Now I have a new one: ATT&CK. This is a coinage from a wordsmith at Mitre (the old MIT Research outfit) and its “Engenuity” unit. Those folks are heirs to assorted Boston poets I think. I am not sure what the letters mean, but here’s the explanation in “Tool Lets Users Supplement Mitre ATT&CK Knowledge Base with Their Own Threat Intel”:
Called ATT&CK Workbench, the free and open-source tool was designed to reduce the barriers preventing defenders from aligning their aggregated TTP intel with Mitre ATT&CK’s content. Officially announced today via press release and blog post, Workbench is a creation of Mitre Engenuity’s Center for Threat-Informed Defense, with contributions from Center members AttackIQ, HCA Healthcare, JPMorgan Chase, Microsoft and Verizon.
I want to point out that as far as my DarkCyber research team has been able determine, exactly none of the threat intelligence outfits alerted their customers to the SolarWinds’ misstep.
I have a buzzword for this in my collection too: Nonperformative. I think this means, “May not work.”
Stephen E Arnold, June 24, 2021
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