Two Internets: Preparing for a Google Centric Walled Garden
September 24, 2018
In my “The Google Legacy” I included a diagram which showed a diagram of a Google centric Internet. Here’s a diagram from that monograph written in 2004:
This is an old diagram. To modernize it, we need to add more closed systems such as a Russian Internet, an EU Internet, and maybe an Amazon Internet.
The idea is that information flows into a Google construct. Users use the system. Think of the diagram as illustrating an Internet which is, in effect, inside Google.
I thought about this now 15 year old diagram when I read “Former Google CEO Predicts the Internet Will Split in Two and One Part Will Be Led by China.” The write up reports:
If you think of China as like ‘Oh yeah, they’re good with the Internet,’ you’re missing the point. Globalization means that they get to play too. I think you’re going to see fantastic leadership in products and services from China. There’s a real danger that along with those products and services comes a different leadership regime from government, with censorship, controls, etc.
The subtext, of course, is that Google wanted China to change, a laughable moment like solving death.
Today Google finds itself faced with losing its walled garden. Think of the problem as AMP and online advertising under pressure from outsiders. These are people who can withdraw cash from an ATM but not understand its plumbing.
I interpreted the remark in the context of “The Google Legacy.”
- Two Internets means that Google will have to find a way to be a big dog in the other Internets which are likely to try and exclude the Silicon Valley scooter riders
- An explanation of why Google’s smart search system has to be given some special training
- A signal that Google will change, maybe taking another step down the road that Hewlett Packard followed. (Remember HP owned AltaVista? I do.)
To sum up, I think more allegedly helpful insights are revealing more than than paying for coffee with a mobile phone.
Stephen E Arnold, September 24, 2018
The Semantic Web: Technology Roadkill or a Roadside Snack?
September 24, 2018
I spotted a quote to note. Here it is:
The Semantic Web is as dead as last year’s roadkill.
The statement appears in “Whatever Happened to the Semantic Web?” The write up provides a run through of the starts and stops associated with making the Web into a more organized place.
I would point out that the state of the Semantic Web can be glimpsed in the TweetedTimes’ auto generated list of articles called “Semantic Search.” The collection of items focuses on a range of topics, but the thrust seems to be getting traffic for a Web site; for example, “How to Optimize Content for Semantic SEO.”
If you are an adherent of the Semantic Web, check out the included footnotes. I would point out that the Google has a number of Guha patents in its portfolio. I think the Semantic Web may be of interest to some at the online ad search giant.
Guha’s patents plus the work by Alon Halevy may suggest some interesting use cases for the mark up, triplet, smart agent system and methods.
Stephen E Arnold, September 24, 2018
Google: Stomping Out Bad Music Types
September 20, 2018
Google has a lot of content to lord over. And with that responsibility comes the need to police that content when it is misused. Perhaps nowhere does this happen more often than YouTube. While they have clever tools for finding rule breakers, sometimes it fails. We learned more from a recent ARS Technica story, “Google: Sorry, Professor, Old Beethoven Recordings on YouTube Copyrighted.”
According to the story:
“ContentID is a system, developed by YouTube, which checks user-uploaded videos against databases of copyrighted content in order to curb copyright infringement. This system took millions of dollars to develop and is often pointed to as a working example of upload filters by rights holders and lawmakers who wish to make such technology mandatory for every website which hosts user content online.”
Despite following copyright laws, the author (also a music teacher) had several musical pieces removed from the platform, despite being public domain. Maybe the problem isn’t within the code of YouTube’s software, but rather its parent company’s loose attitude toward the topic. Take, for example, the time they recently tried to patent a public domain algorithm. We think that maybe the problem isn’t all digital, but the smash-and-grab mentality of Google.
Patrick Roland, September 20, 2018
High School Science Club Management Method: Protecting the In Crowd Culture
September 17, 2018
I read a quasi news / semi MBA write up with the clicky title “A Wave of News Leaks Is Triggering a Crackdown at Google and Causing Fears That the Culture Is Being Openly Destroyed.” You know my procedure. First, I check out the loaded words in a write up. Not too tough because “crackdown” and “fear” are front and center. But the keeper is “destroyed.” Not damaged. Destroyed. Yikes.
There is one word I hoped the write up would define. It is “culture.” This may be one of the “I will know it when I encounter it” terms. Here in Harrod’s Creek we have culture. When one wants to shoot a squirrel in a neighbor’s tree, one pulls the trigger. Squirrels are fair game no matter where they are. Neighbors? Hah. Should have spotted the critter first and nailed it.
I don’t think too many Googlers or Alphabeters think about squirrels. I assume that if a squirrel were to find itself in need at the Googleplex, a squad of high technology wizards with minors in animal husbandry would rush to aid the furry creature. Another group of Googlers with degrees in food science would debate the virtues of frying versus grilling the animal. A third group of Googlers might make signs and protest improper intervention into the life of the confused rat like creature.
Ah, Google.
The write up, however, does not address these issues, whether squirrely or not.
I learned:
The increasingly heated and contentious atmosphere within Google mirrors the highly politicized nature of the country. As on the political stage, behavior within Google that was once considered unthinkable is now occurring with increasing regularity.
Okay, no definition of culture. Not too much about the destroy and fear thing.
Maybe crackdown? I noted after a bit of chatter about employees who send Twitter messages during meetings:
“People who leak are hated” internally, one source said. “There’s a reasonably open culture that many feel is being openly destroyed…. “There’s a perception that if you leak you’re destroying communication,” the source said.”
None of that anonymous stuff. This is a “source.” Helpful.
There’s a new security measure too:
Google informed employees in a weekly email update that the TGIF meetings would no longer be available to be streamed on individual laptops. Instead, employees who were not at the main event at a cafe in Google’s Mountain View, Calif. campus, would need to show up at special designated locations within its satellite offices to watch a feed of the proceedings. Anyone working from home or wishing to tune in from their desk while working was now out of luck.
Okay, the high school science club management method of restricting meetings and keeping the non sciclub types out. Insiders only. But only insiders who are actually inside something.
So much for the legions of remote employees, those traveling, or the hapless consultants who are “sort of like” employees.
I will keep looking for more HSSCM methods. These are useful and informative. Almost as nifty as leaked videos and real time Twitter messages, the follow up real news stories, and the wild and crazy apologia which Silicon Valley pundits contribute to the Gray Lady.
And the squirrel? Not qualified to be a Google target yet. And what is “culture” anyway. If it is not defined, can it be destroyed?
Stephen E Arnold, September 17, 2018
Google: Making Cross Correlation Factually Fluffy General Tso Dish?a
September 15, 2018
I read “Google China Prototypes Links Searches to Phone Number”. This is one of those write ups which offers some possibly accurate information attributed to anonymous sources or “sources familiar with the project.”
Nifty. Nothing like anonymity.
But for the moment, let’s assume that queries from mobile devices are explicitly linked to the a specific mobile device. What’s the big deal?
According to the write up:
“This is very problematic from a privacy point of view, because it would allow far more detailed tracking and profiling of people’s behavior,” said Cynthia Wong, senior internet researcher with Human Rights Watch. “Linking searches to a phone number would make it much harder for people to avoid the kind of overreaching government surveillance that is pervasive in China.”
What I find interesting is that the Google China service would be a joint venture. That means that both parties to the deal can perform cross correlation from unencrypted, direct data flows from the individuals who use the alleged Google China search system.
From my point of view, those with these data streams could:
- Identify patterns of behavior related to queries, locations, and purchases in real time
- Use the sensor devices on the mobile devices to discern useful items of information; for example, pass codes
- Make relationship maps which reveal who calls whom or who texts whom under what circumstances part of the normal data stream.
I can visualize a scenario in which Cambridge Analytica style reports about who is interested in what, when, and under what “circumstances” an action, event, or idea occurs.
I don’t have any anonymous sources to cite. I am just thinking about how difficult it is to determine what’s accurate and what’s a confection spun by a fictionist like Alastair Reynolds.
Speculation is fun and easy. Maybe not accurate? Slight downside. But “real” journalism is almost as interesting as revelation space. But if the write up is accurate, Google may be operating in a galaxy far, far away from Harrod’s Creek and its outmoded ideas about objective search.
Stephen E Arnold, September 15, 2018
Google and the Right to Be Mostly Removed from an Index
September 14, 2018
Yeah, the deletion thing.
I am able to recall some exciting “deletion” events over my 50 year working career. Let me recount one amusing deletion event. The year is 1980 (give or take a year or two). The topic was the Capital Holding IBM mainframe system running the mission critical IBM CICS (Customer Information and Control System). The CICS system and its many components was designed to make it theoretically impossible to delete a record when a high priority process was running in memory. Yes, gentle reader, in memory with data not yet written to disc. The technically fascinating Capital Holding computer center and its mainframes are no more, and on that day in 1980 neither was the data which, according to the IBM CICS manual could not be deleted.
Yeah, well.
I did not work at Capital Holding; I worked at the Louisville Courier Journal database unit, and we supported our electronic products on IBM MVS TSO systems at Bell Labs. Close enough for horseshoes, right. I sat in the meeting for an hour and contributed one comment, “Fiddling with live CICS processes by deleting a record is not a good idea. Find a work around. I have to go.” I left the wizards of the insurance business to sort out the reality of what happens when you poke around in an IBM in memory process. By the way, you can kill an AS/400 database process and the data with an ill advised delete.
At Capital Holding, one of the Job Control Language crew managed to issue a command and trash the database and whatever else was in memory at the time.
Yeah, well.
In retrospect, this was a useful reminder to me that one does not remove things from an index. One finds a way to leave the thing in the index and make sure the thing does not show up in a query. To the outsider, the data are gone. To someone who knows how the “gone” was implemented, the data are still in the index, probably on disc somewhere, and maybe on a tape in an Iron Mountain cave too. But “gone” means that the managers and lawyers in carpetland can demonstrate the datum is indeed gone.
Yeah, well. Like the internal Google video, gone is relative.
I thought of this when I read “Google Digs In Heels Over Global Expansion of EU’s Right to Be Forgotten.” The write up does not explain that stuff in an index may never really go away. I don’t think the EU cares, and I know that users who want information about people who want certain information to never be displayed don’t care about how. The goal is to have the information disappear.
Yeah, well.
Google may have some business, political, social, and economic reasons to stop this deletion demand.
From my rural Kentucky redoubt, I wonder if the Google wants to figure out how to delete information from an index without creating more work, more computational costs, and more headaches when the CICS behavior surfaces somewhere in the sensitive plant that is the global Google computing infrastructure. Of course, one can rebuild the indexes and really make the datum disappear, but rebuilds are interesting. Really expensive too when measured in terms of machine time, lost uptime, etc., etc.
The write up does a good job of explaining the non technical aspects of the issue.
I am sitting here wondering if Google when forced to delete lots of stuff from its indexes is concerned about the specific methodology of removing and removing and removing from a dynamic, distributed index.
IBM asserted that its delete function could not operate when a CICS process was chugging along.
Yeah, well.
Stephen E Arnold, September 14, 2018
How Many Lawsuits Can Fit on the Shoulders of the Google?
September 14, 2018
Google users who disabled its location tracking services are very upset, because Google is still tracking them. According to Gizmodo, there is now, “A Lawsuit Over Google’s Sneaky Location Tracking Could Be A Game-Changer.” Google is not apologetic about its sneak tactics and have changed its location policy. California resident Napoleon Patacsil is upset enough to take Google to court. Patacsil wants a judge to grant his case a class-action status so other Google users can join.
Google fooled users by making it seem very simple to opt out of location tracking, but it is not:
“A slider control on the Location History section seemed to state that this was a one-stop shop to prevent Google hanging onto your location data. A support page for the feature read, “With Location History off, the places you go are no longer stored.” But that wasn’t entirely true. In order to fully opt-out of having your location activity stored by Google, you have to also pause the Web & Activity control as well. This is acknowledged if a user digs deeper into Google’s product documentation.”
Google responded by changing the wording in its location policy, stating that some of its services will continue to track users. Patascil’s case includes evidence showing how Google continued to track user information, even when the option was turned off. The argument is that his violates California privacy laws and an individual’s privacy expectations.
“The biggest question the courts will have to consider is whether or not Google met its legal obligation to obtain consent from its users. Does burying all of the information a user needs deep within separate documents on separate web pages adequately inform a user about what they are agreeing to? If all that information is collected in one document located at a separate portal, would that qualify as sufficient explanation of a company’s policies?”
If the lawsuit does become gain traction, then others could grab the fire wagon. Google still does not admit any fault, but has agreed not to misrepresent its privacy practices anymore. Google is probably going to wait for this to blow over. The company spurs too much of California’s economy to lose its business license.
Whitney Grace, September 2, 2018
Quote to Note: The Election. Yes, That Election
September 13, 2018
I read CNBC’s “Leaked Video Shows Upset Alphabet Executives Responding to President Trump’s Election in Company-Wide Meeting.”
Here’s the quote I noted. I even circled it with my True Blue marker which I usually reserve for IBM Watson factoids:
Myself as an immigrant and a refugee, I certainly find the selection deeply offensive and I know many of you do too. I think it’s a very stressful time and conflicts with many of our values.
Who made this statement? According to the “real” news source CNBC, the answer is Sergey Brin, one of the founders of Google.
The “real” news outlet reports “real” news from Google. The article reproduces text of an alleged statement made by a Google spokesperson (yes, this is similar to an anonymous source so keep this in mind). That statement asserts:
At a regularly scheduled all hands meeting, some Google employees and executives expressed their own personal views in the aftermath of a long and divisive election season. For over 20 years, everyone at Google has been able to freely express their opinions at these meetings. Nothing was said at that meeting, or any other meeting, to suggest that any political bias ever influences the way we build or operate our products. To the contrary, our products are built for everyone, and we design them with extraordinary care to be a trustworthy source of information for everyone, without regard to political viewpoint.
Interesting stuff. Is it possible that an algorithm, particularly a Clever one like Google’s, could be influenced by individuals who set thresholds, sequence the order of numerical recipes, and feed inputs into a system. Could these individuals make the math perform like a circus pony.
Here in Harrod’s Creek we know that companies like Google let the math do the talking. Well, there are exceptions like company wide meetings and anonymous statements.
Stephen E Arnold, September 13, 2018
Google Changes More Than How Some Companies Do Business
September 13, 2018
There is little doubt out there that the internet, and more specifically, Google, has changed the way we act and talk and even think. However, some experts argue that maybe it’s not our thinking that is changing, but the way we interpret. We learned more from a recent TIME article, “How Google Changed The Way We Think About Information.”
According to the story, we’ve always been info-hungry creatures. However, instead of falling into an encyclopedia entry, we find more specific info.
“The more we use services like Google, the more our brains organize the world in an index-based fashion. This also means people who make a living providing information are increasingly organizing their presentation to catch eyeballs looking for specific details in indexes.”
This is a much less scary view of our brains and the way the digital age is molding them. While we’d like to jump onboard and think that search isn’t shifting our senses, others argue to the contrary. Scientists in Europe claim that our capacity for small bits of information, like trivia and dates, is diminishing because of smartphones and Google. We can’t say that that hasn’t happened to us. Hopefully, the truth is somewhere in between where we are adapting, but not changing on a molecular level.
Put the business and the cognitive changes together and the sum may be more significant than its individual parts.
Patrick Roland, September 13, 2018
Can Algorithms Be Designed to Perform Like Trained Dogs?
September 11, 2018
The Sydney Morning Herald reported that Trump thinks Google search results are rigged in the article, “Here’s What We Really Know About Google’s Mysterious Search Engine.” Trump claims that Google and other social media search results are rigged for their lack of conservative, right wing views on the networks. The president even warned Facebook, Google, and Twitter that they are treading on thin ice.
Mr. Trump, like some Web site operators receiving minimal traffic, has arrived at this conclusion because of the dominance these platforms have on people’s lives. However does it have any stock? Google claims that it does not pollute its search results, but the company has also shown it does not like the president. After a short explanation about how Google search works, the article moves into information about “Google News’ secret sauce.” Google News has an algorithm that personalizes news results for each user. People and companies can influence the search results with their content, but how much does Google intervene in the results?
We learned:
“Google’s algorithm, particularly for search, is a master algorithm that is applied in real time against each search query as it comes in, according to the company. Although the algorithm itself frequently changes as Google makes tweaks, it is applied identically to each search. If the results differ from person to person, that could be because they may be using a browser in incognito mode, which deletes the cookies and other third-party tracking software. Or they may be searching from a different location, triggering Google’s reflex to return local results. Or they may simply be performing a search slightly later in time than another, said Christo Wilson, a computer science professor at Northeastern University who has studied Google’s search practices for six years.”
We like the idea of a master algorithm? We also believe that filtering information can have interesting consequences.
How political are free systems which display answers to questions? Is it possible for a disgruntled person to tweak wrapper code to return certain results or to down check a certain concept?
Answers to these questions are difficult to evaluate. After two decades of providing ad supported information, why would anyone doubt the objectivity of mathematical recipes?
Woof, woof.
Stephen E Arnold, September 11, 2018
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