Microsoft and the Open Source Trojan Horse
March 30, 2016
Quite a few outfits embrace open source. There are a number of reasons:
- It is cheaper than writing original code
- It is less expensive than writing original code
- It is more economical than writing original code.
The article “Microsoft is Pretending to be a FOSS Company in Order to Secure Government Contracts With Proprietary Software in ‘Open’ Clothing” reminded me that there is another reason.
No kidding.
I know that IBM has snagged Lucene and waved its once magical wand over the information access system and pronounced, “Watson.” I know that deep inside the kind, gentle heart of Palantir Technologies, there are open source bits. And there are others.
The write up asserted:
For those who missed it, Microsoft is trying to EEE GNU/Linux servers amid Microsoft layoffs; selfish interests of profit, as noted by some writers [1,2] this morning, nothing whatsoever to do with FOSS (there’s no FOSS aspect to it at all!) are driving these moves. It’s about proprietary software lock-in that won’t be available for another year anyway. It’s a good way to distract the public and suppress criticism with some corny images of red hearts.
The other interesting point I highlighted was:
reject the idea that Microsoft is somehow “open” now. The European Union, the Indian government and even the White House now warm up to FOSS, so Microsoft is pretending to be FOSS. This is protectionism by deception from Microsoft and those who play along with the PR campaign (or lobbying) are hurting genuine/legitimate FOSS.
With some government statements of work requiring “open” technologies, Microsoft may be doing what other firms have been doing for a while. See points one to three above. Microsoft is just late to the accountants’ party.
Why not replace the SharePoint search thing with an open source solution? What’s the $1.2 billion MSFT paid for the fascinating Fast Search & Transfer technology in 2008? It works just really well, right?
Stephen E Arnold, March 30, 2016
Google Reveals Personal Data in Search Results
March 30, 2016
Our lives are already all over the Internet, but Google recently unleashed a new feature that takes it to a new level. Search Engine Watch tells us about, “Google Shows Personal Data Within Search Results, Tests ‘Recent Purchases’ Feature” and the new way to see your Internet purchases.
Google pulls the purchase information most likely from Gmail or Chrome. The official explanation is that Google search is now more personalized, because it does pull information from Google apps:
“You can search for information from other Google products you use, like Gmail, Google Calendar, and Google+. For example, you can search for information about your upcoming flights, restaurant reservations, or appointments.”
Personalized Google search can display results now only from purchases but also bills, flights, reservations, packages, events, and Google Photos. It is part of Google’s mission to not only organize the world, but also be a personal assistant, part of the new Google Now.
While it is a useful tool to understand your personal habits, organize information, and interact with data like in a science-fiction show, at the same time it is creepy being able to search your life with Google. Some will relish in the idea of having their lives organized at their fingertips, but others will feel like the NSA or even Dark Web predators will hack into their lives.
Whitney Grace, March 30, 2016
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
Predictive Analytics on a Budget
March 30, 2016
Here is a helpful list from Street Fight that could help small and mid-sized businesses find a data analysis platform that is right for them—“5 Self-Service Predictive Analytics Platforms.” Writer Stephanie Miles notes that, with nearly a quarter of small and mid-sized organizations reporting plans to adopt predictive analytics, vendors are rolling out platforms for companies with smaller pockets than those of multinational corporations. She writes:
“A 2015 survey by Dresner Advisory Services found that predictive analytics is still in the early stages of deployment, with just 27% of organizations currently using these techniques. In a separate survey by IDG Enterprise, 24% of small and mid-size organizations said they planned to invest in predictive analytics to gain more value from their data in the next 12 months. In an effort to encourage this growth and expand their base of users, vendors with business intelligence software are introducing more self-service platforms. Many of these platforms include predictive analytics capabilities that business owners can utilize to make smarter marketing and operations decisions. Here are five of the options available right now.”
Here are the five platforms listed in the write-up: Versium’s Datafinder; IBM’s Watson Analytics; Predixion, which can run within Excel; Canopy Labs; and Spotfire from TIBCO. See the article for Miles’ description of each of these options.
Cynthia Murrell, March 30, 2016
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
Google Dorking: It Is Search, Folks
March 29, 2016
I received a call from a former client this morning (March 28, 2016). The question? Google dorking. Relax. Google dorking is another way to say advanced search. In those How to Search with Google seminars I used to do for an outfit where the metros are unreliable and trust is a weird concept, I covered a number of Google dorking methods.
I don’t make those lectures’ content available for free in this blog, but you can round up some basic info at these links:
- The Science of Google Dorking
- How to Use Google to Hack(Googledorks)
- Untangling the Web which maybe is available at this link. No promises, gentle reader.
The dear, dear Alphabet Google thing kills or breaks useful search functions. This weekend, the FILETYPE: instruction performed like the University of Virginia men’s basketball team. You will have to do some thinking.
By the way, as Google shifts to its magical artificial intelligence methods, finding information via Google is getting more and more difficult.
We do webinars on how to deal with the Alphabet Google thing. Write seaky2000 at yahoo dot com and inquire about a 75 minute webinar. Yep, the same one I do for government types.
Stephen E Arnold, March 29, 2016
Expert System Does a Me Too Innovation
March 29, 2016
Years ago I was a rental to an outfit called i2 Group in the UK. Please, don’t confuse the UK i2 with the ecommerce i2 which chugged along in the US of A.
The UK i2 had a product called Analysts Notebook. At one time it was basking in a 95 percent share of the law enforcement and intelligence market for augmented investigatory software. Analysts Notebook is still alive and kicking in the loving arms of IBM.
I thought of the vagaries of product naming when I read “Expert System USA Launches Analysts’ Workspace.”
According to the write up:
Analysts’ Workspace features comprehensive enterprise search and case management software integrated with a customizable semantic engine. It incorporates a sophisticated and efficient workflow process that enables team-wide collaboration and rapid information sharing. The product includes an intuitive dashboard allowing analysts to monitor, navigate, and access information using different taxonomies, maps, and worldviews, as well as intelligent workflow features specifically designed to proactively support analysts and investigators in the different phases of their activities.
The lingo reminds me of the early i2 Group marketing collateral. The terminology has surfaced in some of Palantir’s marketing statements and, quite recently, in the explanation of the venture funded Digital Shadows’ service.
I love me-too products. Where would one be if Mozart had not heard and remembered the note sequences of other composers.
Now the trick will be to make some money. Mozart, though a very good me too innovator, struggled in that department. Expert System, according to Google Finance, is going to have to find a way to keep that share price climbing. Today’s (March 22, 2016) share price is in penny stock territory:
Stephen E Arnold, March 29, 2016
Elasticsearch for Text Analysis
March 29, 2016
Short honk: Put your code hat on. “Mining Mailboxes with Elasticsearch and Kibana” walks a reader through using open source technology to do text analysis. The example under the microscope is email, but the method will work for any text corpus ingested by Elasticsearch. The write up includes code samples and enough explanation to get the Elastic system moving forward. Visualizations are included. These make it easy to spot certain trends; for example, the top recipients of the email analyzed for the tutorial. Worth a look.
Stephen E Arnold, March 29, 2016
Slack Hires Noah Weiss
March 29, 2016
One thing you can always count on the tech industry is talent will jump from company to company to pursue the best and most innovating endeavors. The latest tech work to jump ship is Eric Weiss, he leaps from Foursquare to head a new Search, Learning, & Intelligence Group at Slack. VentureBeat reports the story in “Slack Forms Search, Learning, & Intelligence Group On ‘Mining The Chat Corpus.’” Slack is a team communication app and their new Search, Learning, & Intelligence Group will be located in the app’s new New York office.
Weiss commented on the endeavor:
“ ‘The focus is on building features that make Slack better the bigger a company is and the more it uses Slack,” Weiss wrote today in a Medium post. “The success of the group will be measured in how much more productive, informed, and collaborative Slack users get — whether a company has 10, 100, or 10,000 people.’”
For the new group, Weiss wants to hire experts who are talented in the fields of artificial intelligence, information retrieval, and natural language processing. From this talent search, he might be working on a project that will help users to find specific information in Slack or perhaps they will work on mining the chap corpus.
Other tech companies have done the same. Snapchat built a research team that uses artificial intelligence to analyze user content. Flipboard and Pinterest are working on new image recognition technology. Meanwhile Google, Facebook, Baidu, and Microsoft are working on their own artificial intelligence projects.
What will artificial intelligence develop into as more companies work on their secret projects.
Whitney Grace, March 29, 2016
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
Surfing Safely on the Dark Web
March 29, 2016
The folks at Alphr want us to be safe if we venture onto the Dark Web, so they offer guidance in their article, “Is the Dark Web Safe?” The short answer, of course, is “parts of it.” Writer Thomas McMullan notes that, while the very act of accessing hidden sites through Tor is completely legal, it is easy to wander into illegal territory. He writes:
“‘Safe’ is a bit of a vague term. There is much of worth to be found on the dark web, but by its nature it is not as safe as the surface-level internet. You can only access pages by having a direct link (normally with a .onion suffix) and while that makes it harder to accidentally stumble across illegal content, you’re only a click away from some pretty horrible stuff. What’s more, the government is cracking down on illegal material on the dark web. In November 2015, it was announced that GCHQ and the National Crime Agency (NCA) would be joining forces to tackle serious crimes and child pornography on the dark web. Director of GCHQ Robert Hannigan said that the new Joint Operations Cell (JOC) will be ‘committed to ensuring no part of the internet, including the dark web, can be used with impunity by criminals to conduct their illegal acts’.”
The article goes on to note that plugins which can present a false IP address, like Ghostery, exist. However, McMullan advises that it is best to stay away from anything that seems questionable. You have been warned.
Cynthia Murrell, March 29, 2016
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
Google and Reverse Engineering
March 28, 2016
I don’t want to make a big deal out of the information presented in “Google’s Reverse Engineering Software BinDiff Now Free for Researchers.” The write up reports that Zynamics’ code is now free. The write up explained:
What’s the code’s application? The write up reports:
BinDiff is a comparison tool for scrutinizing disassembled binary files and finding both similarities and differences in code through reverse engineering. The software can be used to identify and isolate flaws and bugs in software, namely, “fixes for vulnerabilities in vendor-supplied patches and to analyze multiple versions of the same binary,” according to Blichmann. Binary files for x86, MIPS, ARM/AArch64, PowerPC, and other architectures can be analyzed with the software.
Are there other uses for this software? The write up identifies a number of benign uses; for example port function names.
The article concludes:
Interested parties can download the software directly from Zynamics.
Stephen E Arnold, March 28, 2016
Alphabet Google Wants to Spell GE
March 28, 2016
I read a whizzy MBA-in-Silicon-Valley type analysis of the GOOG, which is now Alphabet. After working through the write up, I focused on one statement as interesting:
One way to understand Alphabet is as a vehicle to build essential physical infrastructure in the real world. What if you were to build a next-generation GE today?
GE had Neutron Jack, whom I had the pleasure of meeting. My employer (which shall remain nameless) screwed up a project and GE refused to pay a six figure bill. My boss took me to a meeting to learn how to get the bill paid AND to sell more work to Neutron Jack. To cut to the cob, my boss sold a $1 million job and got the unpaid bill settled in full.
What’s the difference between the new Google as described in “Learning Larry Page’s Alphabet”?
The answer is not Neutron Jack, although he was a canny manager. The answer is, “My boss.”
The Alphabet Google thing is riding high. It has more money in the bank than the current president of the University of Louisville. (Keep trying, Dr. Ramsey. Keep trying.)
For Alphabet Google to become more than an online advertising outfit, the company is going to have to do more than cook up science club projects. A person who can look adversity in the eye (Neutron Jack) and then manage the situation into a big payday has to have his or her hands on the steering wheel. Sorry, an autonomous auto kill switch won’t do the job.
The article pivots on the assumption that many motor boats can maneuver more quickly than an aircraft carrier. How has that worked out at Google. After more than 15 years of effort, Alphabet Google’s stallion remains saddled with Steve Ballmer’s insight:
Google is a one trick pony.
I noted this passage in the write up:
Here’s another way to view the company’s costly moonshot habit: as a marketing expense.
Isn’t that evidence for the one trick pony observation by a person who owns a basketball team?
What’s the strategic vision? I highlighted this passage as a possible answer to the question:
This is why Alphabet is more than just a spectacular corporate reengineering. Page picked the perfect time to reset his company—at the very moment that analysts were heralding Peak Google. He knew that traditional corporate structure limits innovation at the pace he wants and needs. He broke his business into smaller pieces to make them simpler and focused them more narrowly to discourage drift and distraction, while trying to maintain the advantages of scale and resources and a compelling culture to recruit talent. Page isn’t ready to settle for status quo. He wants to make the world a better place—with electric cars and smart cities and universal Internet access and no more disease—and also find lucrative new businesses that keep the company part of the present and future. He wants everything, from A to Z.
The friction building in the Alphabet Google machine may cause the rocket ship to veer off course. Alphabet Google has to traverse the air space of the EC, Russia, and China. The US does not have a “no fly zone” in place to bedevil Google…yet. And there is the pesky annoyances doing business as Amazon and Facebook.
Stephen E Arnold, March 28, 2016
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