Super Ethical Uber Wants to Determine If AI Can Be Ethical: Pot Calling Kettle What?
June 12, 2020
I spotted this headline: “Uber Researchers Investigate Whether AI Can Behave Ethically.” I immediately asked this question:
Can ethical Uber hire ethical engineers who can ethically decide if smart software can be ethical?
Then I had to sit down with a cool cloth on my forehead. The question caused me to develop a slight stitch in my side and a headache.
Uber is an interesting outfit, and I wonder if it would be the expected high-tech wonderland to delve into philosophical questions. Some Uber drivers have appeared agitated when faced with ethical decisions. Allegedly shooting, shouting, and assaulting passengers do not seem particularly difficult to resolve in terms of Kentucky ethicalities. Then Uber had a founder who engaged in interesting behavior. He is now creating the future elsewhere and presumably refining his management skills. I don’t want to overlook the triviality of the Google-Uber Lewandowski affair. That too was something which may have caught the attention of Aristotle if he were alive today and updating his Nicomachean Ethics for the with-it world of Silicon Valley.
Remarkable goal the Uber professionals have set for themselves. One assumes an Uber artificial intelligence expert will reveal the learnings from this bold initiative.
On the other hand, we might wait to see if an Uber AI equipped automobile runs over a chipmunk or a 77 year old blogger in Kentucky.
Stephen E Arnold, June 12, 2020
Is It Facebookization or Goddellization? Either Way Zation Is a Thing
June 6, 2020
DarkCyber noted the article “Facebook’s Zuckerberg Vows to Review Content Policies.” Interesting. Mr. Zuckerberg, the supreme and respected Great Leader of Facebook, is doing backtracking with a red herring. A vow. Wow. Not an actual action but a vow, a promise, an assurance of rethink-ization. The write up reports in “real news” fashion:
Facebook Inc. Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg said the company will review content policies after employees blasted their leader for his decision to leave up controversial posts … The company will review policies on posts that promote or threaten state use of force or voter suppression techniques, and will also look into options for flagging or labeling posts that are a violation but shouldn’t necessarily be removed entirely, the CEO wrote on Facebook. He also pledged to study Facebook’s review structure “to make sure the right groups and voices are at the table.”
Facebook has been a stellar example of appropriate behavior for years. There have been some slips twixt the cup and the lip. Cambridge Analytica, the role of the firm’s Board of Directors, and testimony before the US Congress. No biggies.
A “zation” for sure. Facebookization appears to mean the act of emitting statements that semi-approach issues of governance and related matters. Change could be afoot. Baloney-ization remains a possibility.
Then there is the non technical Goodellization of mental frameworks. Walt Disney’s “real news” company published “NFL Players Spoke, and Roger Goodell Responded.” Now What? Here’s What We Know.” No mouse ears were included as illustrative touch points.
In a video message released Friday night (June 5, 2020) , NFL commissioner Roger Goodell responded to a video released Thursday night (June 4, 2020) by a collection of NFL stars, including Michael Thomas, Patrick Mahomes and Deshaun Watson. Goodell’s video included three specific statements the players in Thursday’s video asked the NFL to make about racism, social injustice and peaceful protests. “We, the National Football League, condemn racism and the systematic oppression of black people,” Goodell said. “We, the National Football League, admit we were wrong for not listening to NFL players earlier and encourage all players to speak out and peacefully protest. We, the National Football League, believe that black lives matter.”
The Goodellization of a contentious issue arrives with the timeliness and possibly the sincerity of the Facebookization event.
Several observations:
- Employee push back now is more effective than an internal ethical compass for guiding a corporate construct. DarkCyber thought that fuzzy stuff like subjective data was irrelevant in today’s go go business world.
- No actual change has taken place in the isolated, self congratulating worlds of Facebook social media or the voracious maw of video.
- A threat to money and power is more effective than employees posting grumpies on an email system or fencing with attorney Mark Geragos, handwaving, and emulating Roman nobles.
Facebookization and Goddellization. New words. Maybe new behaviors in the online and video constructs?
We’ll see because this social media and TV sports watching produces money. A threat to the cash flow puts the cards on the table, the fingers on the buttons, and the thought processes of Big Wheels in a different gear. Money-ization?
Stephen E Arnold, June 6, 2020
IBM Watson Is Versatile: Covid Economic Predictions
June 4, 2020
Ah, Watson, so versatile! Now IBM’s famous AI platform, in conjunction with marketing firm Wunderman Thompson, is helping communities cope with the repercussions of the covid-19 pandemic. SearchEnterpriseAI reports on “Using Data And IBM AI to Make Coronavirus Economic Predictions.” Writer Mark Labbe tells us about the Risk, Readiness, and Recovery map:
“The platform, released May 21, uses Wunderman Thompson’s data, as well as machine learning technology from IBM Watson, to predict state and local government COVID-19 preparedness and estimated economic recovery timetables for businesses and governments. … A global marketing subsidiary of British multinational communications firm WPP plc, Wunderman Thompson has collected thousands of data elements on 270 million people in the U.S, including transaction, demographic and health data. That data, which is anonymized, led the company to understand the potential economic impact of the coronavirus quickly.”
The firm has its own technology division, which developed the platform with Watson’s machine learning tech. The two companies had begun working together about this time last year. Labbe describes this latest collaboration:
“The platform, as the name suggests, focuses on three areas:
1. Risk. Health conditions, COVID-19 and census.
2. Readiness. Health support within communities.
3. Recovery. The impact of COVID-19 on the economy.
“Risk identifies how much a given local government organization or zip code area in the U.S. is at risk from COVID-19. Readiness, meanwhile, identifies how prepared an area is by looking at its hospital and intensive care unit availability, and Recovery identifies how economically affected local areas are, how fast they might recover and when they might return to normal.”
A free version of the platform is available, while the full product is being sold to governments and enterprises. The key selling point is the localized predictions which, we’re told, will vary widely even from one county to the next. Was Watson consulted to determine the economic impact of IBM’s recent round of terminations?
Cynthia Murrell, June 4, 2020
Google Search: Clutching at Elephant Parts?
June 3, 2020
The DarkCyber research team finds Google search endlessly fascinating. The group is less interested in the relevance of the results and increasingly interested in the manipulations of data. The line between objective results and weaponized results is a thin one. Figuring out what is occurring, the intent of changes in data presentation, and the actions of stakeholders like SEO (search engine optimization) professionals is similar to the behaviors we documented in our Dark Web research. (We summarized some of our data in “Dark Web Notebook. Information about that monograph is available at this link.) Our radar beeped when one of the team identified a certified SEO expert who identified himself as a “hustler.” This is street jargon for a person with behaviors which may be perceived as illegal or quasi illegal.
Consider this Reddit post from Antihero. The focus of Antihero’s attention was a search for mattress. The result returned about 761 million results. However, the first page of search results — that is the one that 95 percent of those using Google view — is entirely ads. To support the argument, Antihero includes a screen shot of the page which indeed is entirely “pay to play” content. Yep, ads, infomercials in text form, carnival barkers who get that prime real estate by paying off the entertainment company managing the event. To sum up, Google is not good.
Now consider this post from a company which depends on Google for indexing and pointing to its content. “Panda and the Death of SEO PR” explains that Google is doing an outstanding job of filtering certain content from its search results. The idea is that bogus news releases which can be output after registering for free news release services is filtered. Plus the changes in search since 2013 have made it more difficult for outputters to put certain content on Web pages which are then indexed by Google and made available to the world. To sum up, Google is good.
Let’s step back. Google is in the business of selling ads. The ad business is different from those halcyon days when Google was furiously litigating with Yahoo about certain similarities between Google’s fledgling ad service and Yahoo’s ad system and method. Google ended up inking a deal; Yahoo went back into its purple jack in the box; and the pay to play approach to “objective” search become the de facto standard in the US and then elsewhere.
When a Web site is not indexed, the webmaster or 23 year old political science major reinvented while living in mom and dad’s basement needs traffic. What are the choices?
- Create content and hope that tweets, Facebook posts, and links in LinkedIn generate hundreds of thousands of page views. Google’s algorithms and ad sales professionals monitor such traffic anomalies. A spike could mean a customer with money to spend. With more than 35 billion Web pages in the online indexes, generating a spike is possible, but it is difficult to achieve. That path is called “organic search.” The idea is that clicks flow from the video, the content, or the image posted. Organic search operates on the magnet principle. Good content pulls traffic. Yes, that happens.
- Buy ads. This approach does work. Amazon, Facebook, Google, and others operate search systems and match ads to user interests. For product traffic, Amazon is emerging as the big dog running in front of the Bezos bulldozer to chase small animals off the trail. Facebook — despite its somewhat unstable political and social position — can deliver person centric ads. Google is the champion of free Web search on the desktop and on mobile devices. If you want traffic, you buy and ad. The ad produces traffic. There is chatter that buying ads has other upsides as well, but those are a subject for a future post.
Now back to the Reddit post. Those who buy ads for content related to mattresses and pay the most appear on the results page in Antihero’s online article.
And what about the eRelease “Google is wonderful” post? It is valid, particularly for Google partners and organizations which have an opportunity to participate in the Google ecosystem.
Net net: When organic traffic doesn’t work, one can work with a Google partner who can provide content distribution and a glide path for ad sales. When one grabs part of an elephant, even when one has one’s eyes open and one is wearing rubber boots and a rubber apron, it is difficult to see what you near.
Stephen E Arnold, June 3, 2020
Crazy Enterprise Search Report: Sketchy Astounding Info PLUS a Free Consultation
June 1, 2020
This week’s crazy enterprise search report is titled “Enterprise Search Market: Global Industry Analysis 2020-2026 by Types, Applications and Key Players.” The content seems to be a rehash, reprint, or repositioning of the weird Covid and enterprise search market report. The DarkCyber team did a little poking around, and it appears the “author” of this report is using free news release services. As we have noted in our previous crazy ESR market stories, the companies covered are a fruit salad. Elastic is left out; Concept Searching is included. Also rans like Expert System, IBM, and SAP are included. The others? Well, each company uses “enterprise search” in its marketing material. That is close enough for horse shoes for this report.
But the real plus is that after you buy the multi thousand dollar report, the buyer gets “free consulting.” From whom? Not revealed? On what? Not disclosed. How good? Not addressed.
Some people must buy these reports. Google believes these news releases are “real news.” Well, that’s a plus. If one is not in Google, one does not exist, right. That’s a bit like the market for enterprise search when Elasticsearch is a click away. The data in the report? Maybe a Hopf fibration calculation gone awry? Maybe Dr. Hopf (were he alive) would award an “A” for effort?
Stephen E Arnold, June 1, 2020
4iQ Amps Up Its Marketing
May 28, 2020
It is all about volume. Though most of us delete the ubiquitous “sextortion” emails with little thought but a passing sense of distaste, enough victims fork over Bitcoin to make it a lucrative scam. 4iQ’s blog examines the tactic in, “Demystifying ‘Sextortion’ & Blackmail Scams.”
Lest you, dear reader, are so fortunate as to be unfamiliar with such emails, the post includes examples. Dripping scorn for those who would exploit fears and threaten people during a pandemic, writer ClairelfEye explains these deceivers purchase real email addresses and passwords stolen in one of the large-scale data breaches that have become all too common. They then leverage this information to convince marks they possess more, very personal, details. She writes:
“I reached out to my social networks to see if this is widespread, and sure enough, many people confirmed that they — or someone they know — have received these types of scams in the past five weeks. … While most people get annoyed, roll their eyes and delete these blackmail e-mails, this is a numbers game. There will be a few people that fall for these low-level scams. Out of the many sextortion scams forwarded to me by friends and family, one [Bitcoin] address received 0.270616 BTC, which equals $2,082.03 USD as of April 27, 2020.”
Regarding the data breaches that make this scam possible, ClairelfEye explains:
“Working at 4iQ, I am almost too aware of data breaches happening on a daily basis. We investigate, validate and report on breached data every day. In fact, I can probably accurately surmise that this scammer got my email and clear text password in the 1.4 billion clear text credentials trove our breach hunters found back in 2017. Same goes for many of the forwarded scam emails I received. Interesting to see this information run full circle.”
The author’s colleague Alberto Casares, she tells us, is aggregating, investigating, and reporting on these extortion attempts. To participate, receivers of such emails can send them to report.email.threats@gmail.com. Dubbing itself the “Adversary Intelligence Company,” 4iQ offers consumer protection products and curates and normalizes compromised identities to help combat fraud and other crimes. Founded in 2016, the company is based in Los Altos, California.
Another specialized services firm amps up its marketing. This quest for sales and venture funding may be a trend.
Cynthia Murrell, May 28, 2020
Policeware Marketing: Medium Blog Post a Preferred Channel
May 27, 2020
Just a short note. Sintelix, a developer of policeware, published a white paper called “Sintelix – The Text Intelligence Solution.” The document is available on Medium, a popular publishing platform. The white paper / product description is about 1,500 words in length. The article contains illustrations, diagrams, and lists. One of the DarkCyber team said, “It reads like a product brochure.” I thought the information was useful. The Sintelix decision to use Medium is one additional example of the stepped up marketing policeware and intelware vendors are taking. Shadowdragon is using Twitter to promote its policeware system. Palantir Technologies’ CEO has used public forums and video to explain use cases for its investigative and analytic system. LookingGlass has moved forward with online demonstrations and webinars for potential licensees of its cyber system.
Observations:
- Tradition has dictated that vendors of specialized services developed for law enforcement and intelligence agencies market via personal contacts or restricted/classified events. The fierce competition for available government contracts may be forcing a change.
- Face-to-face events like breakfasts, brown bag presentations, and lectures for LE and intel professionals may be difficult to supplement with online-only initiatives. Plus, there is the danger of webinar fatigue or the sign up and no show problem. Security is also a consideration because some attendees may not be whom they purport to be on registration form.
- Expanded visibility like that achieved by NSO Group may have unexpected consequences. Some government procurement processes shy away from high-profile vendors. As a result, obtaining information about the activities of a Leidos, for example, is difficult. Increased visibility may repel some potential customers.
The shift in marketing, no matter how minor, is important. The downstream consequences of visibility are difficult to predict because conference organizers, procurement processes, customers who prefer face-to-face interactions, and similar pre Rona methods may no longer work as well.
Stephen E Arnold, May 27, 2020
Palantir Technologies: A Very Unusual Emission from a Specialized Services Firm
May 26, 2020
The PR battle among the firms providing specialized services to law enforcement and intelligence entities has taken an unusual turn. If you send email to an outfit like BlackDot, you will probably be ignored. The same non response holds true for the vast majority of firms delivering solutions that put bad actors at a disadvantage. Sure, there are less low profile uses of these technologies, but applications like eDiscovery do not capture the attention of the real media.
DarkCyber spotted “Our Product Is Used on Occasion to Kill People’: Palantir’s CEO Claims Its Tech Is Used to Target and Kill Terrorists.” DarkCyber has noted that NSO Group has found itself in the PR spotlight due to allegations from Facebook and assertions about an NSO professional using the firm’s system for personal activities. But the “kill people” thing is sure to catch the attention of the hundreds of specialized service firms’ attention.
What’s even more interest catching is that one of the senior managers of Palantir Technologies serves as a member of the Axel Springer shareholder committee. What’s an Axel Springer? The company owns Business Insider, the “real news” outfit which reported Mr. Karp’s rather intriguing statement about a use case for Gotham and other Palantir modules.
The story also provides a link to a video from an outfit called Axios, presumably to buttress the “true fact” of Mr. Karp’s statement.
For a low profile outfit to offer this alleged admission about software’s link to termination with extreme prejudice may have some downstream consequences. With low profile companies like Shadowdragon publicizing its system on Twitter, will PR become the go-to marketing method in the future?
Making sales is one thing, but some government customers are wary of specialized services vendors who hum the 1960s song “Talk Too Much.” Some licensees can consult the “seeing stone” or just hit Philz and listen for some Palantirian chatter.
Stephen E Arnold, May 26, 2020
Search Engine Optimization: Designed to Sell Google Advertising
May 26, 2020
Many years ago, I gave a talk at one of Search Engine Land’s conferences. I am not sure how I ended up on the program. At that time I was focused on enterprise search and some work for the US government. I showed up, gave a talk about enterprise search, and sat in on several round tables. The idea was, as I recall, that speakers sat at a table and people could sit down and talk about search. I was like a murder hornet at a five year old’s birthday party. Not only did I have any context for questions like “How do I get my department’s content to rank highly in our local search engine?” And “What ideas do you have for making content relevant?” That was the last time I accepted an invitation to give a talk at a search engine optimization conference. If you want to manipulate corporate content, just do it directly. What’s with the indexing thing?
The topics were designed to give a marketer who knew essentially zero about search of any kind information to game a relevance ranking system. The intent of the conference organizer (who eventually became a search evangelist or apologist for Google) and the attendees had zero, zilch, nada, to do with getting on point answers to a query.
I typically confine my annoyance at search engine optimization to comments I offer in my blog Beyond Search/Dark Cyber. If a scam artist sends me asking me to include a link to another blog, I respond and point out I will reproduce those emails about cyber crime. That usually causes the bot or whoever is sending me emails to go away.
I want to take this opportunity to state what was obvious to me when the SEO (the acronym for the relevance-killing discipline of search engine optimization) industry began taking bait dangled by Google.
Here’s how this multi-year, large-scale digital pipeline works. The diagram below shows a marketer or Web site owner eager to get the site into a search engine. Being indexed, of course, is not enough. The Web site must appear on the first page of a Web search system’s results pages. The person seeking traffic has two choices and only two choices: Get traffic with the content (text, audio, or video) providing the magnetism or pay to play. Buy ads. Get traffic. Period.
Put content on the page with index terms (now called tags) and make sure the Web page conforms to Google’s rules. Despite Google’s protestations, the company accounts for an astounding 95 percent of the search queries in the US and Western Europe. Google has competition in China which holds down Google’s share of market in the Middle Kingdom. For all practical purposes, embracing Google’s web master guidelines, conforming to AMP, and making modifications decreed by Google is helpful in getting indexed. The first path appears to be easy. When it fails, the search engine optimization experts are ready to assist.
The second path to traffic is to buy Google Advertising. Google has a desire to become the premier place for large-scale media campaigns. Google will sell ads to small outfits, but the money comes from having Fortune 1000 companies and their ilk buy Google advertising. The problem is that Google Advertising costs money. The interface is designed to be like a game, a gambling game at that. The results from Google ads can be difficult to connect to a specific sale. Nevertheless, ads are option two.
How does the pipeline work? What is the feedback mechanism that enriches some SEO experts? Why are the two options symbiotic? I want to provide brief answers to each of these questions.
How does the pipeline work? (Perhaps the word “grooming” might be appropriate here?)
This is an easy question. Not buying ads means that most Web sites will get almost zero traffic. Web search is a pay-to-play operation. Google has its own list of bluebirds, canaries, and sparrow. (A bluebird is a Web site that Google must index no matter what. An example is whitehouse.gov, stanford.edu, and cnn.com. A sparrow is an uninteresting Web site which may get indexed on an irregular or relaxed cycle. The canary? That’s a Web site which may not be indexed comprehensively or if indexed, updated on a delayed basis.) With more than 35 billion Web sites wanting to be indexed by Google and the lesser online systems, the no-ads option seems attractive. Therefore, Google encourages SEO experts to pitch their services.
Now here’s the kicker. Web sites which do not buy ads struggle to get clicks. SEO experts make suggestions and may make changes in their customers’ Web pages. But nothing delivers traffic unless an anomaly or a particular item of information catches attention which delivers large numbers of clicks. Google dutifully indexes that which attracts clicks, thus creating more demand. More demand means that indexing those “magnetic” pages makes ad sales “obvious”. Traffic allows Google to chop through its ad inventory. Relaxed queries for words related to “magnetic” sites is an obvious technical play to sell more ads. Thus, SEO experts lucky enough to have a customer pulled into the maelstrom of a “magnetic” page is happy. If Google wants a change, that Web site operator will make the change. If an SEO expert is involved, the Google change is packaged with assurance that “traffic will arrive in an organic way.” Organic in the lingo of the SEO expert means “you don’t have to pay to get traffic.”
So what? Groomed or indoctrinated SEO experts set the stage to help Google get their requirements and methods adopted without telling a Web site operator “You must do this.” Second, the SEO experts make money pushing the fluff about organic traffic. Third, Web site operators who benefit from the effect of “magnetic” sites on their Web site become noisy advocates of SEO.
There is a but.
At any time, Google’s algorithms can decrement a Web site living by organic traffic. Google can also manually intervene and slow the flow of traffic to a Web site. The mechanism ranges from blacklists to adding a url or entity to a list of sites with “negative” quality scores. I have explained the notion of “quality” as defined by Google in my The Google Legacy and Google Version 2.0 monographs, originally published by Infonortics but out of print due to the skill print publishers have in committing hair Kari.
What happens when a Web site loses traffic? Some sue like Foundem; others go out of business. Many simply accept the loss of traffic as fate and either buy Google Advertising or run back into the La-La land of SEO assurances that traffic will again flow organically after we wave our magic wand.
Other companies bite the bullet and buy Google advertising. Examples range from companies who pull advertising because their ads appear adjacent objectionable content. These companies go back because Google is a de facto gatekeeper for high-volume online traffic. Other companies decide that they need to pay SEO experts AND buy Google Advertising.
This is a sweet operation because:
Google has evangelists who tell those with Web pages what specific changes are needed to make a Web page conform to a Google-defined standard. Conformance to Google standards reduces computational load. There are tens of thousands of Google’s “SEO helpers” creating what Google wants and needs.
When the SEO experts fail to deliver clicks, you know what happens? Google Advertising to the only life saver on the digital beach.
SEO is a game played for free or organic traffic. Google controls the information highway. Stay in your lane and do what we want. Make a tiny error. Well, Google Advertising, a friendly Google inside sales professional or certified SEO expert can get you out of the mud.
SEO experts are sure to object to my characterization of their efforts as Google pre-sales. But some SEO experts make money and one SEO expert became an honest-to-goodness Googler.
From my point of view, SEO is a complement to Google Advertising. Want traffic? Buy Google’s ads. The Google knows, and it gets the pay-to-play money, its gets the support and love of the SEO “experts”, and Google gets a third party pounding Web sites into the Google cookie cutter.
What happens if an outfit doesn’t play Foosball by Google’s rules? Just ask Foundem or the TradeComet executives.
If you are not on Google, you may not exist. That’s what makes the pipeline work and plugs in the Google money machine: Pay to play. It is a business model guaranteed to cement increasingly irrelevant results to users’ minds. And what happens when Google shapers results? You decide based on the information you “find” in Google, usually above the fold and more than 90 percent of the time without clicking to Page 2.
If you want more search engine optimization information, point your browser to this page of titles and hot links on Xenky.com. (Some of these articles identify SEO experts who are avowed hustlers. Is SEO a playground for digital Larry Flynts?)
Stephen E Arnold, May 26, 2020
Crazy Enterprise Search Market Report for May 25, 2020
May 25, 2020
Another crazy enterprise market report is now available. This one skips when the report was written, falling back on the vague word “recent.” In fact, my hunch is that this is one dicey report marketed under different aliases in order to gin up sales.
What’s in this gem from Market Study Report. The write up about the report promises:
The recent document on the Enterprise Search market involves breakdown of this industry as well as division of this vertical. As per the report, the Enterprise Search market is subjected to grow and gain returns over the predicted time period with an outstanding growth rate y-o-y over the predicted period.
Yep, outstanding. Obviously the global economic downturn has not had an impact on the half century young enterprise search software sector.
Enterprise search solutions are hot items. Forget hand sanitizer and surgical masks, enterprise search solutions are the barn burners. Are their lines of eager customers queuing outside of Algolia, Coveo, Elastic, IBM Omnifind’s office, Lucidworks, and Microsoft’s search facility in Beijing? Sure, sure, long lines. No social distancing either. Jostling and crowding is what happens when a sizzler is on offer.
The report presents information “with regards to the geographical landscape.” Yep, but how many languages do enterprise search systems support?
What’s interesting is the list of companies analyzed in the report? Here you go:
Attivio Inc
Concept Searching Limited
Coveo Corp
Dassault Systemes
Expert System Inc
Hyland
IBM Corp
Lucid Work (Would it be helpful if the report authors spelled the name of the company correctly, wouldn’t it?)
Marklogic Inc
Micro Focus
Oracle
SAP AG
Microsoft
X1 Technologies
There are some notable omissions, but I won’t provide these names. Obviously I am not hip to where enterprise search is at at this moment.
In the three editions of the Enterprise Search Report I wrote, it never crossed my mind to include this a manufacturing cost structure analysis. Poor stupid me.
What seems clear is that whoever is marketing this report recycles the content under different names, hoping for a sale.
The data in the report, one hopes, is more polished than the promotional material.
Stephen E Arnold, May 25, 2020
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