Google Versus Russia: Does Google Have SU 35 Capabilities?
February 6, 2016
I read “Kremlin Considering Google Tax on Technology Services.” The article suggests that Russia may tax online services. The services named include Google, Facebook, and Apple. I know that Facebook works hard to avoid certain conflicts. Apple has its hands full with the specter of not having any hot products in 2016. So the Google?
The world’s most valuable company may have to pay more than a UK “get out of jail” fine if the write up is accurate. I learned from the “real” news source:
Klimenko, an early Russian Internet innovator, was appointed as President Vladimir Putin’s Internet adviser in December. His suggestion of a kind of value-added tax on technology services in Russia comes only days after he asserted that Google, Facebook, and other social-media companies will be blocked in Russia “sooner or later” if they do not comply with a law enacted in August requiring them to locate facilities that store Russia data in Russia. And it comes after Russian news agencies reported that Putin on January 29 signed an executive order asking federal agencies to work with Klimenko on amending legislation to ensure equal operating conditions for companies within Russia with respect to the Internet.
Google may get a chance to demonstrate its potency if Russia boosts taxes. I recall that Mr. Brin’s space flight did not work out. Will this new chess match result in Google’s sitting on the sidelines in Russia?
Worth monitoring. Now about that source and its “real” journalists? Nah, never mind.
Stephen E Arnold, February 6, 2016
Leaky Web Pages a Call To Criminals
February 6, 2016
The Dark Web relies on the Tor network’s complex, multi-layered encryption technology to hide Web URLs and traffic sources. As we learned in “Basic Error Can Reveal Hidden Dark Web sites, however, not all hidden searches are actually hidden. Apache, the most widely used Web server software, includes a module that could make it easy for criminals to watch what Dark Web users are doing. A Facebook wizard points out that Apache’s “out-of-the-box” configuration, which is used to hide server-status page information, could inadvertently help hackers follow users as they meander through the Deep Web.
In 2012, Popular Web Sites Were Leaking System Status Information, Private Data and Passwords” confirmed what many had long suspected. Then, in 2015, a researcger discovered a Dark Web search engine not only showed what people were searching for. This begs the question:
What if a malicious actor had found that page instead of Muffet. They could have used it to assemble a trove of search data and, as we learned from the 2006 AOL search data leak, that can be enough Big Data to start unmasking people. And it gets worse. Exposed server status pages are a potential threat to users, but under some circumstances, they can completely unravel the protection that Tor provides to hidden websites.
In a perfect world, only localhost would have access to the mod-status feature. But Tor daemon also runs on localhost. All hackers have to do to access sensitive data is to exploit this weakness and anyone can see what people are looking at in the Deep Web.
Locard’s Principle tells us that criminal not only bring something of themselves to a crime scene, bad actors leave something behind, too. This clues, no matter how small, may help analysts and investigators shine a light on Dark Web criminals.
Martin A. Matisoff, MSc, February 6, 2016.
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publishers of the CyberSINT monograph.
3RDi for Enterprise Search
February 5, 2016
Health and medical search need an upgrade? T/DG 3RDi might be just what the doctor ordered. You search blues will disappear when you have natural language processing, semantic search, search relevancy, search analytics, research tools, and data integration. Very comprehensive it seems.
T/DG offers 3RDi. Now try to search for these entities. To locate the services firm offering the 3RDi system, one has to figure out how to make Bing, Google, and Yandex point to the correct entities.
Naming products and companies is tricky. Let me save you the hassle of wading through false drops.
- T/DG means “The Digital Group,” an outfit founded in 1999 and operating from New Jersey.
- 3RDi means “relevant, deep insights.” (I don’t know what the 3 means.)
The search system appears to be a “platform” based on open source technology. Here’s a block diagram of 3RDi:
Source: The Digital Group, 2015
The company’s most recent push is health care. The search system performs the type of functions which I associate with a system like the ones Autonomy and Fast Search & Transfer described in the late 1990s. There is also a hefty dose of “platformitis.” The idea is that a licensee can use the system to meet the needs of users. The support for controlled vocabularies is helpful in domain specific deployments, but these have to be maintained, which can be a financial and resource burden for some licensees.
3RDi embraces the semantic marketing jargon enthusiastically; for example, this diagram shows how “knowledge” and “semantics” make the “experience” work for licensees:
Source: The Digital Group, 2015
Users of the system do not have to deal with results lists. The system presents information in a visual manner; for example:
Source: The Digital Group, 2015
In short, 3RDi appears to deliver the type of utility I associate with systems from outfits like BAE Systems and Palantir.
If your organization wants an open source system with the bells and whistles found in seven figure platforms, you may want to explore 3RDi.
The urls you need are:
I assume that the company will make the “3” clearer going forward. There is a live demo available. You will need to register. The system balks at non commercial domains like my Yahoo account.
The recent marketing push given 3RDi signals that the enterprise search sector is alive and well. As the company says, “Start experiencing.” I wonder what the “3” means.
Stephen E Arnold, February 5, 2016
HP Enterprise Investigative Analytics
February 5, 2016
Shiver me timbers. Batten the hatches. There is a storm brewing in the use of Autonomy-type methods to identify risks and fraud. To be fair, HP Enterprise no longer pitches Autonomy, but the sprit of Dr. Mike Lynch’s 1990s technology is there, just a hint maybe, but definitely noticeable to one who has embraced IDOL.
For the scoop, navigate to “HPE Launches Investigative Analytics, Using AI and Big Data to Identify Risk.” I was surprised that the story’s headline did not add “When Swimming in the Data Lake.” But the message is mostly clear despite the buzzwords.
Here’s a passage I highlighted:
The software is initially geared toward financial services organizations, and it combines existing HPE products like Digital Safe, IDOL, and Vertica all on one platform. By using big data analytics and artificial intelligence, it can analyze a large amount of data and help pinpoint potential risks of fraudulent behavior.
Note the IDOL thing.
The write up added:
Investigative Analytics starts by collecting both structured sources like trading systems, risk systems, pricing systems, directories, HR systems, and unstructured sources like email and chat. It then applies analysis to query “aggressively and intelligently across all those data sources,” Patrick [HP Enterprise wizard] said. Then, it creates a behavior model on top of that analysis to look at certain communication types and see if they can define a certain problematic behavior and map back to a particular historical event, so they can look out for that type of communication in the future.
This is okay, but the words, terminology, and phrasing remind me of more than 1990 Autonomy marketing collateral, BAE’s presentations after licensing Autonomy technology in the late 1990s, the i2 Ltd. Analyst Notebook collateral, and, more recently, the flood of jabber about Palantir’s Metropolitan Platform and Thomson Reuters’ version of Metropolitan called QA Direct or QA Studio or QA fill in the blank.
The fact that HP Enterprise is pitching this new service developed with “one bank” at a legal eagle tech conference is a bit like me offering to do my Dark Web Investigative Tools lecture at Norton Elementary School. A more appropriate audience might deliver more bang for each PowerPoint slide, might it not?
Will HP Enterprise put a dent in the vendors already pounding the carpeted halls of America’s financial institutions?
HP Enterprise stakeholders probably hope so. My hunch is that a me-too, me-too product is a less than inspiring use of the collection of acquired technologies HP Enterprise appears to put in a single basket.
Stephen E Arnold, February 5, 2016
Bing Searches for Continuous Development
February 5, 2016
I read “Microsoft Shifts Bing Search Engine To ‘Continuous’ Development Cycle.” Frankly I had never considered the frequency of Bing updates. I do pay attention when Microsoft relies on Baidu or Yandex for search. I may or may not notice when Bing “hides” its shopping service. I have given up trying to locate Microsoft academic search and trying to figure out how to eliminate pop culture references from a Bing results set. In short, I know about Bing, but I don’t think about Bing unless I read articles like “Bing Search for Android Gets New Design and Lots of Bugs in Latest Update.”
Recently Bing realized that it was not making modifications to the site quickly enough. I learned:
The Bing team has openly stated that it was finding its deployment cycle was limiting innovation.
The idea is that Bing will just get better more quickly. Okay, that sounds good. I learned also:
Some people call this learning to fail fast i.e. get features tested and only keep the stuff that works.
I took another look at the write up. The author is a “contributor” to Forbes. Does this mean that the write up is an advertorial? That’s okay, but the conclusion left me scratching my head:
Quite why Bing isn’t the new Google is another topic altogether. Microsoft may never challenge the search giant’s simplicity, functionality and query intelligence – or it might, we don’t know. What we do know is that software updates have to work a whole lot faster than they used to and only the successful ‘code shops’ will now follow this pattern.
My thoughts on why Bing lags behind Google boils down to:
- The Bing index strikes me as less robust than Google’s
- The Bing system does not deliver results that give me access to content on sites which are smaller and often quite difficult via the Bing tools.
Google is not perfect, so I rely on Ixquick.com, Yandex, Unbubble.eu and other systems. Bing is not a second choice for me. Speed of code changes is, like many of my Bing search query results, irrelevant.
Stephen E Arnold, February 5, 2016
Its Official: Facebook and the Dark Web
February 5, 2016
A piece from Nextgov suggests just how ubiquitous the Dark Web could become. Published as Facebook is giving users a new way to access it on the ‘Dark Web’, this article tells us “a sizeable community” of its users are also Dark Web users; Facebook has not released exact figures. Why are people using the Dark Web for everyday internet browsing purposes? The article states:
“Facebook’s Tor site is one way for people to access their accounts when the regular Facebook site is blocked by governments—such as when Bangladesh cut off access to Facebook, its Messenger and Whatsapp chat platforms, and messaging app Viber for about three weeks in November 2015. As the ban took effect, the overall number of Tor users in Bangladesh spiked by about 10 times, to more than 20,000 a day. When the ban was lifted, the number dropped back to its previous level.”
Public perception of the darknet is changing. If there was any metric to lend credibility to the Dark Web being increasingly used for mainstream purposes, it is Facebook adding a .onion address. Individual’s desire for security, uninterrupted and expansive internet access will only contribute to the Dark Web’s user base. While the Silk Road-type element is sure to remain as well, it will be interesting to see how things evolve.
Megan Feil, February 5, 2016
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
Elasticsearch Works for Us 24/7
February 5, 2016
Elasticsearch is one of the most popular open source search applications and it has been deployed for personal as well as corporate use. Elasticsearch is built on another popular open source application called Apache Lucene and it was designed for horizontal scalability, reliability, and easy usage. Elasticsearch has become such an invaluable piece of software that people do not realize just how useful it is. Eweek takes the opportunity to discuss the search application’s uses in “9 Ways Elasticsearch Helps Us, From Dawn To Dusk.”
“With more than 45 million downloads since 2012, the Elastic Stack, which includes Elasticsearch and other popular open-source tools like Logstash (data collection), Kibana (data visualization) and Beats (data shippers) makes it easy for developers to make massive amounts of structured, unstructured and time-series data available in real-time for search, logging, analytics and other use cases.”
How is Elasticsearch being used? The Guardian is daily used by its readers to interact with content, Microsoft Dynamics ERP and CRM use it to index and analyze social feeds, it powers Yelp, and her is a big one Wikimedia uses it to power the well-loved and used Wikipedia. We can already see how much Elasticsearch makes an impact on our daily lives without us being aware. Other companies that use Elasticsearch for our and their benefit are Hotels Tonight, Dell, Groupon, Quizlet, and Netflix.
Elasticsearch will continue to grow as an inexpensive alternative to proprietary software and the number of Web services/companies that use it will only continues to grow.
Whitney Grace, February 5, 2016
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
Big Data: A Shopsmith for Power Freaks?
February 4, 2016
I read an article that I dismissed. The title nagged at my ageing mind and dwindling intellect. “This is Why Dictators Love Big Data” did not ring my search, content processing, or Dark Web chimes.
Annoyed at my inner voice, I returned to the story, annoyed with the “This Is Why” phrase in the headline.
Predictive analytics are not new. The packaging is better.
I think this is the main point of the write up, but I an never sure with online articles. The articles can be ads or sponsored content. The authors could be looking for another job. The doubts about information today plague me.
The circled passage is:
Governments and government agencies can easily use the information every one of us makes public every day for social engineering — and even the cleverest among us is not totally immune. Do you like cycling? Have children? A certain breed of dog? Volunteer for a particular cause? This information is public, and could be used to manipulate you into giving away more sensitive information.
The only hitch in the git along is that this is not just old news. The systems and methods for making decisions based on the munching of math in numerical recipes has been around for a while. Autonomy? A pioneer in the 1990s. Nope. Not even the super secret use of Bayesian, Markov, and related methods during World War II reaches back far enough. Nudge the ball to hundreds of years farther on the timeline. Not new in my opinion.
I also noted this comment:
In China, the government is rolling out a social credit score that aggregates not only a citizen’s financial worthiness, but also how patriotic he or she is, what they post on social media, and who they socialize with. If your “social credit” drops below a certain level because you post anti-government messages online or because you’re socially associated with other dissidents, you could be denied credit approval, financial opportunities, job promotions, and more.
Just China? I fear not, gentle reader. Once again the “real” journalists are taking an approach which does not do justice to the wide diffusion of certain mathy applications.
Net net: I should have skipped this write up. My initial judgment was correct. Not only is the headline annoying to me, the information is par for the Big Data course.
Stephen E Arnold, February 4, 2016
Google: A Cyber Caliphate Target?
February 4, 2016
I don’t think of Google as a particularly good target for hackers. However, if the information in “ISIS Affiliate Cyber Caliphate Announces Plans to Hack Google” is accurate, my favorite search service is on notice.
According to the write up:
IS affiliate ‘Cyber Caliphate’ forms a Google Hacking Team to Hack Google Remember Cyber Caliphate? Yes, the hacking group affiliated to IS or ISIS/Daesh is planning to hack Google. According to International terrorism watchdog group Terror Monitor, the Islamic State “cyber army” has announced plans to hack Google.
I am not sure what “hack Google” means, but the message seems less than positive.
The Googlers have a reasonably good security system. Worth watching the developments if there are any beyond what seems to be a news release type message.
Stephen E Arnold, February 4, 2016
Hip SXSW Media Conference to Probe the Dark Social
February 4, 2016
This year’s SXSW Conferences & Festivals will be exploring the world of Dark Social, a term introduced by The Atlantic senior editor Alexis C. Madrigal in “Dark Social: We Have the Whole History of the Web Wrong.”
In a SWSX interview, Marc Jensen, Chief Technology Officer of space150 and his associate Greg Swan, Vice President of Public Relations talked about Dark Social and the perception of privacy. They also shared their thoughts on the shift from traditional social sites such as Facebook and Twitter to more alluring Dark Social. In my view their main point was:
This [no referrer data] means that this vast trove of social traffic is essentially invisible to most analytics programs. I call it Dark Social. It shows up variously in programs as “direct” or “typed/bookmarked” traffic, which implies to many site owners that you actually have a bookmark or typed in www.theatlantic.com into your browser. But that’s not actually what’s happening a lot of the time. Most of the time, someone Gchatted someone a link, or it came in on a big email distribution list, or your dad sent it to you. Nonetheless, the idea that “social networks” and “social media” sites created a social web is pervasive. Everyone behaves as if the traffic your stories receive from the social networks (Facebook, Reddit, Twitter, StumbleUpon) is the same as all of your social traffic.
Bob Lefsetz speaks about the differences in social behaviors in The Lefsetz Letter states:
Oldsters are rarely early adopters. They know the value of money, they’re set in their ways. For all the old bloviators bemoaning the loss of privacy online, it’s the kids who got the memo, that if they post pictures of illicit activity they might not get a job in the future. Kids believe in evanescence, oldsters believe in the permanent record.
These differences in social behavior are not only generational, they are transformational. Children and young adults want the freedom to say and do as they please, particularly when it comes to social sites. The more ephemeral the site, the less inhibited they feel. There is a sense of false safety on Snapchat, WeChat and WhatsApp then there is on Facebook or Twitter.Are young people soon to be pawns in a dangerous game of criminal “pickle?”
Dark Social network more likely than not will become breeding grounds for predators. Dark Social could prove to be one of the most powerful tools in criminal’s toolkit. This begs the question: Do the benefits of privacy outweigh the dangers of corruption?
Martin A. Matisoff, MSc, February 4, 2016
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