Google 20% Time Policy Projects Take Users Around the World
February 18, 2016
The article on StumbleUpon titled 12 Lesser-Known Google Projects That Are Absolutely Amazing describes how certain Google employees took advantage of their creative time, or “20% time polcy” that dictates one day a week should be used experimentally. Hence some of these whimsical concepts like Google Sky, which functions similarly to Google Earth but in the far-out setting of space. Another idea is the game Ingress,
“Ingress transforms the real world into the landscape for a global game of mystery, intrigue, and competition. Our future is at stake. You must choose a side. A mysterious energy has been unearthed by a team of scientists in Europe. The origin and purpose of this force is unknown, but some researchers believe it is influencing the way we think. We must control it or it will control us.”
Other projects offer outlets to explore global culture and history, such as the World Wonders Project, which enables users to view high-res photos and 3D views of distant places like the Pyramids of Giza and Angor Wat. The Google Art Project contains quality images of important artworks from 400 art museums all over the world and allows users to build their own collections for take audio tours to learn more about famous pieces. Overall, the projects encourage increased engagement with technology, culture, and creativity.
Chelsea Kerwin, February 18, 2016
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
Was the Silk Road Trial Fair?
February 17, 2016
The Dark Web burst into the general consciousness with underground Web site called the Silk Road was busted. Ross Ulbricht aka the Dread Pirate Roberts ran the crime ridden Web site Silk Road that was a darknet playground for drug pushers, sex traffickers, money launders, hackers, and just about every other relatable crime that wants an untraceable presence. The Naked Security blog by Sophos proposes the question “Ross Ulbricht Appeals Silk Road Conviction-Did He Get A Fair Trial?”
In 2015, Ulbricht was convicted for money laundering, drug and hacking-related charges, and sentenced to two life terms with an additional forty years for running the entire Silk Road network. Ulbricht’s lawyers appealed the case based on the grounds that the law enforcement officials were guilty themselves of stealing bitcoins and extorting from Ulbricht. The evidence proving this was, of course, withheld in the trial and any favorable pro-Ulbricht evidence was suppressed.
“Ulbricht’s family paints a very different picture of him than federal prosecutors. The family has been waging a campaign to “Free Ross Ulbricht” that accuses the government of framing Ulbricht as part of the “failed War on Drugs,” and depicting his case as a milestone in the government’s crackdown on Internet freedom. Ulbricht’s defense attorneys argued at trial, and in his appeal, that Ulbricht had founded the Silk Road using the pseudonym Dread Pirate Roberts, but that he had sold his stake and was framed by subsequent operators.”
Ulbricht’s family says that the two corrupt agents Shaun Bridges and Carl Force had administrative privileges on Silk Road and would have been able to manipulate information in their favor. They claim the information was withheld when Ulbricht’s case went to court and the government kept it under seal to protect its agents.
Ulbricht and his family have many supporters saying that the two consecutive life terms without parole was too harsh of a punishment. They also claim that Ulbricht’s Fourth Amendment rights were breached.
The US government, however, thinks otherwise. They want to make an example of Ross Ulbricht and send a message to cyber criminals that they cannot hide behind the Dark Web’s invisibility cloak. The Dark Web might be a mask criminals wear, but a light can unmask them.
Whitney Grace, February 17, 2016
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
A Guide to Google-Ize Your Business
February 16, 2016
To Google is a verb, meaning to search specifically for information on the Google search engine. If a user is unable to find information on Google, they either change their key words or look for a different option. In other words, if you are not pulling up on Google than you might as well not exist. Perhaps it is a little drastic to make the claim, but without a Web presence users, who double as consumers, are less likely to visit your business. Consumers take an active approach to shopping these days by doing research before they visit or purchase any goods or services. A good Web presence alerts them to a company’s capabilities and how it can meet the consumers’ needs.
If you are unsure of how to establish a Web presence, much less a Google Web presence then there is a free eBook to help you get started. The Reach Local blog posted information about “Master Google My Business With Our New Ebook.” Google My Business is a free tool from Google about how to publish your business information in Google+, Google Maps, and local search results.
“Without accurate and up to date information on Google, you could be missing out on leads and potential customers either by having the wrong phone number and address listed or by not appearing at all in local search results for products and services relevant to your business. We want to help you take control of your information on the web, so we put together a helpful eBook that explains what Google My Business is, how to set up and verify your business, and tips for managing your information and tracking your progress.”
The free eBook “Your Guide To Google My Business” written by the Reach Local folks is an instruction manual on how to take advantage of the Google tool without going through the headache of trying to understand how it works. Now if only Windows 10 would follow a similar business pattern to help users understand how it works.
Whitney Grace, February 16, 2016
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
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Gartner and Business Intelligence Magic Thing
February 14, 2016
I love consultants, especially mid tier consultants. The idea is that folks who are reasonably pleasant can become experts in various market sectors is a signal that optimism is alive and thriving in a sketchy economic swamp.
The mid tier consultants are a fave. These outfits provide more tradition than the webmaster or Visual Basic programmer who is out of a job. The ease with which one can become a consultant lends a certain squishiness to Lone Rangers offering expertise for hire.
The blue chip outfit are just too expensive for many folks who know they need help. Think of the difference between someone who jets to Lyon for lunch and the person who grabs a slice in Midtown.
Thus, blue chip outfits (the top drawer firms), the azure chip firms (companies either on their way up or down in the expertise Great Chain of Being), and the gray chip folks. The gray chip folks are the disaffected middle school teacher who decides to become a self appointed expert in sponsored content for search engine optimization.
The write up “Critiquing the Gartner BI and Analytics MQ” will not elicit much of a response from the mid tier outfit responsible for the “analysis.” Legal eagles slap when the actual quadrant thing is reproduced.
But the write up hits some nerves in the sagging neck of the azure chip services firm; for example:
- Companies excluded for no apparent reason. (Maybe these outfits rejected the azure chip firm’s blandishments to buy services and be better understood?)
- A “kitchen sink” approach. (Maybe this means dumping stuff into a container and binge watching Happy Days on Hulu? Stuff breaks when hasty hands place dirty dishes in a sink.)
- Products are mixed up. The example is Design Studio. (Aren’t these software components pretty much the same? Sure they are, gentle mid tier consultant getting smart by searching Google for info. Sure they are.)
- Inconsistency. (The write up displays actual, high value, super secret, for some eyes only magic thingies. I looked at each graph and was confused in terms of what was presented and how the classifications changed in the span of one fiscal year. Aren’t I the dunce?)
The write up is not about hell fire and brimstone. Here’s the peace offering after the carpet bombing:
To be fair on Gartner, they have made a solid effort at explaining their rationale and, given there are some 500 vendors globally, vying for attention, narrowing down to this selection is a valiant effort. The care with which Gartner has made its understanding known is also commendable, even if some of those explanations are questionable. Another problem with the report is that it is static. It is a snapshot at a point in time that is biased in favor of one constituency and which does not, in my view, adequately recognize the necessary and sometimes difficult tensions that exist between IT and lines of business when it comes to rationalizing or consolidating BI tools in an enterprise setting. I think Gartner has done the industry a major favor by decoupling the reporting element and focusing upon the modern approach to BI. But that’s not enough.
Maybe another azure chip outfit will leap into this opportunity. A mere 500 vendors. The number seems low to me. I eagerly await the next intellectual semi-truck load of insights from the azure chip sector. Yes, eager am I.
Stephen E Arnold, February 14, 2016
Barry Zane and SPARQL City Acquired by Cambridge Semantics for Graph Technology
February 12, 2016
The article titled Cambridge Semantics Acquires SPARQL City’s IP, Expanding Offering of Graph-Cased Analytics at Big Data Scale on Business Wire discusses the benefits of merging Cambridge’s Semantics’ Anzo Smart Data Platform with SPARQL City’s graph analysis capacities. The article specifically mentions the pharmaceutical industry, financial services, and homeland security as major business areas that this partnership will directly engage due to the enhanced data analysis and graph technologies now possible.
“We believe this IP acquisition is a game-changer for big data analytics and smart data discovery,” said Chuck Pieper, CEO of Cambridge Semantics. “When coupled with our Anzo Smart Data Platform, no one else in the market can provide a similar end-to-end, semantic- and graph-based solution providing for data integration, data management and advanced analytics at the scale, context and speed that meets the needs of enterprises. The SPARQL City in-memory graph query engine allows users to conduct exploratory analytics at big data scale interactively.”
Barry Zane, a leader in database analytics with 40 years experience and CEO and founder of SPARQL City, will become the VP of Engineering at Cambridge Semantics. He mentions in the article that this acquisition has been a long time coming, with the two companies working together over the last two years.
Chelsea Kerwin, February 12, 2016
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
A Data Lake: Batch Job Dipping Only
February 11, 2016
I love the Hadoop data lake concept. I live in a mostly real time world. The “batch” approach reminds me of my first exposure to computing in 1962. Real time? Give me a break. Hadoop reminded me of those early days. Fun. Standing on line. Waiting and waiting.
I read “Data Lake: Save Me More Money vs. Make Me More Money.” The article strikes me as a conference presentation illustrated with a deck of PowerPoint goodies.
One of the visuals was a modern big data analytics environment. I have seen a number of representations of today’s big data yadda yadda set ups. Here’s the EMC take on the modernity:
Straight away, I note the “all” word. Yep, just put the categorical affirmative into a Hadoop data lake. Don’t forget the video, the wonky stuff in the graphics department, the engineering drawings, and the most recent version of the merger documents requested by a team of government investigators, attorneys, and a pesky solicitor from some small European Community committee. “All” means all, right?
Then there are two “environments”. Okay, a data lake can have ecosystems, so the word environment is okay for flora and fauna. I think the notion is to build two separate analytic subsystems. Interesting approach, but there are platforms which offer applications to handle most of the data slap about work. Why not license one of those; for example, Palantir, Recorded Future?
And that’s it?
Well, no. The write up states that the approach will “save me more money.” In fact, one does not need much more:
The savings from these “Save me more money” activities can be nice with a Return on Investment (ROI) typically in the 10% to 20% range. But if organizations stop there, then they are leaving the 5x to 10x ROI projects on the table. Do I have your attention now?
My answer, “No, no, you do not.”
Stephen E Arnold, February
The History of ZyLab
February 10, 2016
Big data was a popular buzzword a few years ago, making it seem that it was a brand new innovation. The eDiscovery process, however, has been around for several decades, but recent technology advancements have allowed it to take off and be implemented in more industrial fields. While many big data startups have sprung up, ZyLab-a leading innovator in the eDiscovery and information governance-started in its big data venture in 1983. ZyLab created a timeline detailing its history called, “ZyLab’s Timeline Of Technical Ingenuity.”
Even though ZyLab was founded in 1983 and introduced the ZyIndex, its big data products did not really take off until the 1990s when personal computers became an indispensable industry tool. In 1995, ZyLab made history by being used in the OJ Simpson and Uni-bomber investigations. Three years later it introduced text search in images, which is now a standard search feature for all search engines.
Things really began to take off for ZyLab in the 2000s as technology advanced to the point where it became easier for companies to create and store data as well as beginning the start of masses of unstructured data. Advanced text analytics were added in 2005 and ZyLab made history again by becoming the standard for United Nations War Crime Tribunals.
During 2008 and later years, ZyLab’s milestones were more technological, such as creating the Zylmage SharePoint connector and Google Web search engine integration, the introduction of the ZyLab Information Management Platform, first to offer integrated machine translation in eDiscovery, adding audio search, and incorporating true native visual search and categorization.
ZyLab continues to make historical as well as market innovations for eDiscovery and big data.
Whitney Grace, February 10, 2016
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
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
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
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