Microsoft: What Is the Inspiration for Google Action Blocks?
May 22, 2020
Years ago, an outfit connected to the Microsofties invited me to a meeting. The meeting took place before the zippy Windows phone tile interface took the world like a mild mist on a spring morning. The big colorful tiles appeared in the Windows desktop interface. One thing for sure: Flashing tiles catch the eye and suck up bandwidth and CPU cycles like a fast growing dandelion.
I thought of this Windows tile thing when I read “Google Action Blocks Would Make iPhone Simple Again.” The title makes it clear that hurling digital tiles in an action filled way will klonk the iPhone and nick the Redmond empire.
The article reported:
Google Action Blocks can turn several steps into a single step – one button tap.
Tap on what?
Good question. The action block thing converts an iPhone into a semi Windows phone. Android phones are just so easy to use the way the Google intended.
The article is definitely excited about this latest me too from the Googlers:
But why, you might ask, would I need a button to open an app? Can’t I just tap the app icon? Yes, you can, but Action Block buttons can be made large. Action Blocks creates Widgets, Widgets that are resizable – as resizable as you desire. You could open a specific app with a button that’s as large as your display – it could be massive!
Innovation is alive and well at Alphabet. Users of the iPhone who work at Microsoft will experience a moment of nostalgia when Action Blocks are tackled.
Stephen E Arnold, May 22, 2020
Google: App Quality Control?
May 21, 2020
It appears APT group OceanLotus, believed to originate in Vietnam, managed to play Google Play and other app marketplaces for half a decade. DarkReading reports, “5-Year-Long Cyber Espionage Campaign Hid in Google Play.” The attack campaign, dubbed “PhantomLance” by Kaspersky and called “Operation Oceanmobile” by BlackBerry researchers, mainly targeted Android users in Southeast Asia. The malware managed to evade detection in part by changing up its code over time. BlackBerry published their investigation last October, while Kaspersky recently revealed new details. The malicious code was hidden in utility apps like ad blockers, Flash plug-ins, and cache cleaners as well as (interestingly) Vietnamese apps for finding local churches and bars. Writer Kelly Jackson Higgins cites Kaspersky researcher Alexey Firsh:
“Firsh says he and his team decided to dig deeper into a Trojan backdoor that was first revealed in a July 2019 report by researchers at Dr. Web. The relatively unusual backdoor, they found, dated back to at least December 2015, the registration date of one of the domains used in the campaign, according to Firsh. The latest sample of the spying malware was present in apps on Google Play in November 2019, he says, when Kaspersky notified Google. … The attackers created several versions of the backdoor, with dozens of samples, and when an app first went up in Google Play or other app stores, it didn’t contain malware: That was added later in the form of an update, after the user had installed it.”
Sneaky. The attackers also used different encryption keys and separate infrastructures. They even went to the trouble of writing realistic privacy policies for each app, maintaining customer service emails addresses where they actually answered questions, and creating a fake developer profile on GitHub to look legit. Higgins explains what the software was up to:
“The malware performs the usual spy stuff, gathering geolocation information, call logs, contact lists, and SMS messages, as well as information on the victim’s device, such as model, operating system, and installed apps. ‘But we see that it also has the ability to execute special shell commands from the [C2] server and download additional payloads on the victim’s device,’ Firsh explains.”
Also known as APT32, OceanLotus has targeted Vietnamese dissidents, journalists, and other citizens as well as industries in China, the Philippines, Germany, the UK, and the US.
Cynthia Murrell, May 21, 2020
JEDI? What JEDI?
May 21, 2020
The battle royale players are Amazon, Microsoft, White House officials, the Department of Defense, former employees of high profile firms, law firms, and consultants. The subject? JEDI. The procurement has been entertainment worthy of a William Proxmire Golden Fleece Award. (Remember Senator William Proxmire?)
DarkCyber spotted “Scoop: Google Lands Cloud Deal with Defense Department.” We know this is a scoop because the word “scoop” appears in the headline. Subtle.
The write up reports as a real news scoop:
Google Cloud has landed a deal to help the Defense Department detect, protect against, and respond to cyber threats, Axios has learned. The deal, with the Defense Innovation Unit (DIU), is in the “seven figures…”
The main point is to make clear that it will be business as usual at the Pentagon. The single vendor idea is not making much headway when it comes to information technology.
What’s next? Awards to Hewlett Packard, IBM, and Oracle?
Good question. We thought we heard cheers from the buildings near the old SeaWorld in Silicon Valley. Maybe that was a party held at IBM Federal off Quince Orchard Road in Gaithersburg?
Probably our team’s collective tinnitus.
Stephen E Arnold, May 21, 2020
Googler Word Choice: A Delight for Rhetoricians
May 20, 2020
DarkCyber readers may find the “we are excited to talk with you” interview transcript interesting. The star of the interview is the Google boss Sundar Pichai. The expert real news people grilling the replacement for the duo of Larry Page and Sergey Brin are survivors from the downsizing at the Verge. Please, read “Sundar Pichai on Managing Google through the Pandemic: The CEO of Google and Alphabet Joins the Vergecast.”
We noted these Googley words and phrases used by the top Googler, presented as they appear in the interview transcript. The flow is as interesting as words.
Really
Big
Diversity
Foundational
Deeply as in “deeply committed”
Transparency as in “transparency reports”
Shared
Progress as in “modest progress”
Important as in “really important”
Scale as in “scale up better”
Definitely, quite a few definitely
Viewpoints as in “political viewpoints”
Progress as in “made a lot of progress”
hiccups as in “definitely going to have hiccups”
Deeper as in “deeper efforts” and “deeper investments”
Business as in “sustainable business”
Go to as in “go to market investments”
Financial as in “financial sustainability goal”
Ecosystem as in “guide our ecosystem”
Pivotal
Committed as in “pretty committed”
Demonstrated as in “we clearly have demonstrated”
Care as in “we care all the way”
Deeply as in “deeply passionate”
Well as in “really well”
Stuff as in “all that stuff”
Search as in “highly ROI driven”
For sure
Reverted back
Hard as in “hard for me to say”
Clearly
Conservative as in “conservative on the return back for the broad company”
Prioritizing as in “prioritizing people”
Actually as in “actually kind of need to be there”
Buckets as in “have people in two different buckets”
Play as in “to make that play out”
Understand as in “understand what works”
Data as in “driven by data”
Phase as in “brainstorming phrase” and “next phase”
Lines as in “blurred the lines”
Herd as in “herd a bunch of people”
Momentum
Place as in “get to the right place”
RCS
WebRTC
Common as in “common work” and “common teams”
Iterate
Flexibility
Answer as in “user answer” and “technical answer”
Align
Platform
Integration
Behind as in “Android has been behind”
Fragmentation as in “fragmentation in Android”
pain as in “real pain”
Simplifying
Efficiency
Productivity
Touch as in “in touch”
Constraints
Everything as in “we want to do everything”
Onus
Communicating
Breakthrough as in “AI breakthrough”
Separation as in “structural separation”
Think as in “think through that breadth”
Bets as in “different bets”
Play as in “technology play”
Commonality as in “underlying commonality”
Space as in “Internet space”
Convergence
Folks
Focus as in “a lot of focus”
Terrific as in “terrific effort”
Easy as in “make it easy”
Obviously as in “obviously with user consent and privacy protection”
Consistently
Toolkit as in “one more toolkit”
Public as in “just go public”
Conversation as in “responsible conversation”
Basically as in “we basically made that decision”
Extraordinarily as in “extraordinarily public moment”
Information as in “high quality information”
Trumps as in “trumps everything”
Deep as in “deep technological underpinnings”
Need as in “need to step up”
Big as in “big value chain”
Surface as in “surface the highest quality information”
Evolved as in “evolved our approaches”
Inputs as in “we took inputs”
Expertise
Learnings
Flexible
Something as in “something like that”
Compartmentalize
Normalcy as in “real sense of normalcy”
Disruptions as in “disruptions are kind of concerning”
Transitions
Space as in “space to think quietly”
Progress as in “progress better”
Reiterative as in “reiterative process”
Horror
Force block as in “force block times”
Boundaries
Pizza
YouTube as in “YouTube cooking video”
Pattern shifts
Revert as in “people revert back”
Long run
Shifts
Moments as in “moments of opportunity”
Worth
Global as in “global movement”
Humanity
Whole
Trends
Common
Abstractions, colloquialisms, and platitudes would make a 15th century rhetoric teacher chuckle.
Stephen E Arnold, May 20, 2020
The Cloud Winner? It Is Definitely the Google Opines InfoWorld
May 19, 2020
I find “real” news interesting. Consider “13 ways Google Cloud beats AWS.” Clouds are becoming more alike. Microsoft is making friends at Oracle. IBM (yep, the Watson wizards) are reaching out to Amazon.
But IBM did not reach out to Google. Maybe HP’s cloud division will be Googley. After reading the objective article, the Googley cloud is the big dog.
Let’s look at some of the 13 reasons, excluding the Firebase reference and the use of predatory pricing to win business. (If it worked for Oracle when fighting for some Zoom love, deep and steep discounts may work again.) DarkCyber calls this the Walmart way.
On to the objective, totally factual statements. Not 12 or 14, exactly 13. Must be a lucky number? There was neither an illustration of a Googler walking under a ladder or a black cat risking death wandering Shoreline Drive.
Google has a health care API. Google’s Deepmind also found itself squabbling publicly about its use of certain health care in the UK. Has Google sanitized its act with soap or ultraviolet light? Some evidence about the value of Google’s health care API would be helpful.
Embedded machine learning. The hyperbole about smart software reaches Harrod’s Creek, Kentucky. The idea that one can use the cloud and plug into pre-crafted, ever flexible, smart machine learning modules is an interesting one. Are Google’s systems and methods “better than” SageMaker and the dozens of other AWS doodads littering the company’s oddly disjointed, sometimes bizarro documentation? No, but at least AWS has documentation.
Custom cloud machines. Are most enterprise cloud vendors touting the thrills and excitement of non-standard “machines”? Is Google “better than” Amazon in this aspect of enterprise cloud computing. A standard engineering practice is not unique without some checklists, benchmarks, and technical feature comparison. I can say that Kentucky bourbon is good for “real” journalists, but that statement requires some “proof” beyond a factless article.
There are 10 more of these Google PRish gems in the original article.
But let’s come back to deep discounts. Buying business is going to be a go to strategy for most cloud vendors. What will people buy? Smart software or security? Price or performance? Commodities or cheerleading?
Yikes, Google is the winner.
Stephen E Arnold, May 19, 2020
Rah, Rah, Google Under the Monopoly Filter of the US Government
May 16, 2020
Emails. Phone calls. My goodness, news reports from the Wall Street Journal (a Murdoch “real news” outfit) AND ZeroHedge, an insider’s news service.
The basic factoid is that an antitrust lawsuit is chugging along. Twenty two years after leaving the station, government lawyers are ready to board the Google train.
At this moment, anti Googlers are getting their pom poms fluffed. The pro Googlers know that the effort will be like the patient drips of water that form stalactites.
Legal processes take time, and Google will not be in a hurry. Presidents will come and go. Young lawyers will work in their government “socially distanced” spaces, then move into a law firm only to return and pick up where they left off.
Eventually there will be penalties. The penalties will be negotiated.
As the wheels of justice grind forward on government time, the Alphabet Google thing will hurtle along. Its timing is cadenced to Internet time. Lobbyists will lobby. Funds will be donated in proper ways to candidates who are into Google tchotchkes like the treasured Google mouse pad. You know the one. It has multi colored balls on it. A collectors’ item!
The reality is that Google is a government. No government can allow its citizens to revolt. Imagine turning in one’s search box for a Prime membership. Maybe both, but not one or the other.
To sum up: The legal action will chug along. And in the course of that journey, the Google will morph, evolve, and become something quite different.
Like the break up of IBM which never happened, the same destination perhaps. What if a digital Judge Harold H Green chops up Google as AT&T was dismembered. In case you haven’t checked lately, there are two phone companies and one may end up buying the other.
The telecommunications train may have completed a round trip if that happens. Sure, the T Mobile Sprint thing may become a player, but the Bell heads know the number to dial to make a connection.
Net net: Long ride, some excitement, two different time scales. One is on the slow local train; the other is the Osaka Tokyo bullet train.
Stephen E Arnold, May 16, 2020
Google: Regular Search Not Up to Covid19 Queries. Who Knew?
May 15, 2020
Google has launched a new semantic search tool designed to help researchers fight this pandemic. The Google AI Blog reveals “An NLU-Powered Tool to Explore COVID-19 Scientific Literature.” As one might expect, researchers around the world have been turning out an enormous number of papers on the disease and how we might fight it. Why does this call for a special tool? Google researcher Keith Hall writes:
“Traditional search engines can be excellent resources for finding real-time information on general COVID-19 questions like ‘How many COVID-19 cases are there in the United States?’, but can struggle with understanding the meaning behind research-driven queries. Furthermore, searching through the existing corpus of COVID-19 scientific literature with traditional keyword-based approaches can make it difficult to pinpoint relevant evidence for complex queries. To help address this problem, we are launching the COVID-19 Research Explorer, a semantic search interface on top of the COVID-19 Open Research Dataset (CORD-19), which includes more than 50,000 journal articles and preprints.”
Based on the BERT technology recently injected into the general Google Search, this bespoke semantic AI has been trained on biomedical literature. The team chose to build a hybrid term-neural retrieval model for this platform—a combination of keyword search and neural retrieval; see the article for the technical details. Here’s how the search functions:
“When the user asks an initial question, the tool not only returns a set of papers (like in a traditional search) but also highlights snippets from the paper that are possible answers to the question. The user can review the snippets and quickly make a decision on whether or not that paper is worth further reading. If the user is satisfied with the initial set of papers and snippets, we have added functionality to pose follow-up questions, which act as new queries for the original set of retrieved articles.”
The open-alpha platform is available for free to the research community, and Google plans to continue refining the system over the next few months. May this tool help scientists find solutions that much faster.
Cynthia Murrell, May 15, 2020
Semantic SEO: Solution or Runway for Google Ads, Formerly AdWords?
May 14, 2020
I participated in a conversation with Robert David Steele, a former CIA professional, and a former Google software engineer named Zack Vorhies. One of the topics touched upon was Google’s relaxing of its relevance thresholds. A video of extracts from the conversation contains some interesting information; for example, the location of a repository of Google company documents Mr. Vorhies publicly released.
My contribution to the discussion focused on how valuable “relaxed” relevance is. The approach allows Google to display more ads per query. The “relaxed” query means that an ad inventory can be worked through more quickly than it would be IF old fashioned Boolean search were the norm for users. Advertisers’ eyes cross when an explanation of Boolean and “relaxing” a semantic method have to be explained.
DarkCyber’s research team prefers Boolean. None of the researchers need training wheels, Mother Google (which seems to emulate Elsa Krebs of James Bond fame) and WFH Googlers bonding with their mobile phones like a fuzzier, semantic Tommy Bahama methods.
The team spotted “The Newbie’s Information to Semantic Search: Examples and Instruments.” Our interpretation of “newbies” is that the collective noun refers to desperate marketers who have to find a way to boost traffic to a Web site BEFORE going to his or her millennial leader and saying, “Um, err, you know, I think we have to start buying Google Ads.”
Yes, there is a link between the SEO rah rah and the Google online advertising system. The idea is simple. When SEO fails, the owner of the Web page has to buy Google Ads (formerly Google AdWords). In a future post, someone on the team will write about this interesting business process. Just not in this post, thank you.
The article triggering this essay includes what looks like simplified semi-technical diagrams. Plus, there are screenshots featuring Yo Yo Ma. And SEOish jargon; for example:
Coding
Elements
Knowledge as in “knowledge of any Web page.” DarkCyber finds categorical affirmatives a crime against logicians living and semantically dead.
Mapping as in “semantic mapping”
Markup
Semantic
Plus, the write up some to be an advertorial weaponized content object for a product called Optimizer. DarkCyber concluded that the system is a word look up tool, sort of a dumbed down thesaurus for hustlers, unemployed business administration junior college drop outs, and earnest art history majors working in the honorable discipline of SEO.
What’s the semantic analysis convey to a reader unfamiliar with the concepts of “semantic,” “mark up,” and “knowledge.”? The answer, in the view of the DarkCyber team, is less and less useful search results. Mr. Vorhies makes this point in the video cited above. In fact, he wants to go back to the “old Google.” Why? Today’s Google outputs frustratingly off point results.
The article’s main points, based on the DarkCyber interpretation of the article, are:
First, statements like this: “…don’t actually recognize how troublesome it’s to elucidate what’s being communicated with out the assistance of all “beyond-words” indicators.” Yeah, what? DarkCyber thinks the tortured words imply that smart software and data can light up the dark spaces of a user’s query. Stated another way: Search results should answer the user’s question with on point results. Yes, that sounds good. A tiny percentage of people using Google want to conduct an internal reference interview to identify what’s needed, select the online indexes to search, formulate the terms required for a query, and then run the query on multiple systems. Very few users of online search systems wants to scan results, analyzed the most useful content, dedupe and verify data, and then capture facts with appropriate bibliographic information. Many times, this type of process is little for than input for a more refined query. Who has time for a systematic, thorough informationizing process. Why? Saying the word “pizza” to a mobile phone is the way to go. If it works for pizza, the simple query will work for Inconel 235 chemical properties, right? This easy approach is called semantic. In reality it is a canned search with results shaped by advertisers who want clicks.
Second, a person desperately seeking traffic to a Web site must index content on a Web page. Today, “index” is a not-so-useful term. Today one “tags” a page with user assigned terms. Controlled vocabularies play almost no role in modern Web search systems. Just make up a term, then to a TikTok video and become a millionaire. Easy, right? To make tags more useful, one must use synonyms. If a page is about pizza, then a semantic tag is one that might offer the tag “vegetarian.” At least one of the DarkCyber team is old enough to remember being taught how to use a thesaurus and a dictionary. Today, one needs smart software to help the art major navigate the many words available in the English language.
Third, to make the best use of related words, the desperate marketer must embrace “semantic mapping.” The idea is to “visualize relationships between ideas and entities.” (The term “entity” is not defined, which the DarkCyber team is perfectly okay for newbies who need help with indexing.) The idea of a semantic map is a Google generated search page — actually a report of allegedly related data — created by Google’s smart software. In grade school decades ago, students were taken to the library, taught about the “catalog”. Then students would gather information from “sources.” The discovered information was then winnowed and assembled into an essay or a report. If something looked or seemed funny, there was a reference librarian or a teacher to inform the student about the method for verifying facts. Now? Just trust Google. To make the idea vivid, the article provides another Google output. Instead of Yo Yo Ma, the topic is “pizza.” There you go.
The write up reminds the reader to use the third party application Text Optimizer for best results. And the bad news is that “semantic codes” must be attached to these semantically related index terms. One example is the command for deleted text. Indeed, helpful. Another tag is to indicate a direct quotation. No link to a source is suggested. Another useful method for the practicing hustler.
Let’s step back.
The article is all too typical of search engine optimization expertise. The intent is wrapped in the wool of jargon. The main point is to sell a third party software which provides training wheels to the thrashing SEO hungry individual. Plus, the content is not designed to help the user who needs specific information.
The focus of SEO is to add fluff to content. When the SEO words don’t do the job, what does the SEO marketer do?
Buy Google Ads. This is “pay to play”, and it is the one thing that Google relies upon for revenue.
Stephen E Arnold, May 14, 2020
Deindexing: Does It Officially Exist?
May 14, 2020
DarkCyber noted “LinkedIn Temporarily Deindexed from Google.” The rock solid, hard news service stated:
LinkedIn found itself deindexed from Google search results on Wednesday, which may or may not have occurred due to an error on their part. The telltale sign of an entire domain being deindexed from Google is performing a “site:” search and seeing zero results.
Mysterious.
DarkCyber has fielded two reports of deindexing from Google in the last three days. I one case a site providing automobile data was disappeared. In another, a site focused on the politics of the intelligence sector was pushed from page one to the depths of page three.
Why?
No explanation, of course.
LinkedIn is owned by Microsoft. Is that a reason? Did LinkedIn’s engineers ignore a warning about a problem in AMP?
Google does not make errors. If a problem arises, the cause is the vaunted Google smart software.
DarkCyber’s view is that Google is taking stepped up action to filter certain types of content. We have documented that one Google office has access to controls that can selectively block certain content from appearing in the public facing Web search system. The content is indeed indexed and available to those with certain types of access.
What’s up? Here are our theories?
- Google is trying to deal with problematic content in a more timely manner by relaxing constraints on search engineers working in Google “virtual offices” around the world. Human judgments will affect some Web site. (Contacting Google is as difficult as it has been for the last 20 years.)
- Google wants to make sure that ads do not appear next to content that might cause a big spender to pull away. Google needs the cash. The thought is that Amazon and Facebook are starting to put a shunt in the money pipeline.
- Google is struggling to control costs. Slowing indexing, removing sites from a crawl, and pushing content that is rarely viewed to the side of the Information Superhighway reduces some of the costs associated with serving more than 95 percent of the queries launched by humans each day.
Regardless of the real reason or the theoretical ones, Google’s control over findable content can have interesting consequences. For example, more investigations are ramping up in Europe about the firm’s practices (either human or software centric).
Interesting. Too bad others affected by Google actions are not of the girth and heft of LinkedIn. Oh, well, the one percent are at the top for a reason.
Stephen E Arnold, May 14, 2020
Google: Responding to the Bezos Bulldozer Just Slowly
May 14, 2020
Bulldozers have a top speed of what 10 kilometers per hour, maybe less if grinding through abandoned retail store fronts? As part of the DarkCyber research for our Amazon blockchain report, we put in our files “Amazon considers Entering Insurtech Market.” The date of this write up was 2017. The bulldozer has been making progress. AWS seems to be making progress. Amazon’s outstanding online marketing and documentation provides a semi-clear picture of what the Bezos bulldozer has accomplished. See, for example, Insurance.
We found the “truth” centric Thomson Reuters’ story “Insurer Brit and Google Cloud to Launch First Digital Lloyd’s Syndicate” intriguing. We learned:
Insurance company Brit and Google Cloud are together launching the first digital Lloyd’s of London syndicate, accessible from anywhere and at any time.
Thomson Reuters’ perceives that insurers are “in a race to team up with tech giants such as Google.”
Several questions:
- Did the Amazon insurance push fizzle and Thomson Reuters miss the two year old story?
- Did Google overlook the Amazon announcements which began flowing in 2017? For instance, “Amazon Is Coming for the Insurance Industry – Should We Be Worried?”
- Will regulators pay more attention to the financial services push from US technology giants?
DarkCyber cannot answer these questions. However, it would be helpful if a time context for Google’s activities were provided. The information makes clear how quickly or slowly Google responds to the slow moving Bezos bulldozer which is chugging along in some interesting financial markets. Are those camels watching the bulldozer moving forward? Nah, the bulldozer is probably delivering groceries.
Stephen E Arnold, May 14, 2020
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