Microsoft Github: An Issue for MSFT to Resolve? Yes!
October 30, 2019
Microsoft, the open source champion and all-time wizard of software updates, were served some spoiled digital tapas. You can read the “menu order” at this link. The idea is that Github is hosting an app which allows some individuals in Spain to thwart police actions. The English and Spanish posting states:
Spain is currently facing a series of riots involving serious public disorder and main infrastructure’s sabotage. There is an ongoing investigation being carried out by the National High Court where the movement Tsunami Democratic has been confirmed as a criminal organization driving people to commit terrorist attacks. Tsunami Democratic’s main goal is coordinating these riots and terrorist actions by using any possible mean. Among them, they have developed an app that provides information about those riots and allows their users to communicate between themselves in order to coordinate those actions. This app has been uploaded in GitHub by the user [private] ([private]), where people that want to participate in riots can access his repository ([private]) and install different versions of this app in their devices. Moreover, other repositories with the same information have been created to prevent the content being withheld.
WWMD or What will Microsoft do? Fight for open source goodness, respond to a legitimate request and warrant, or output legal-marketing goodness?
Worth monitoring? Yes. DarkCyber is interested in how activist Microsoft employees respond, both in Spain and in other MSFT office locations.
Stephen E Arnold, October 30, 2019
Microsoft Buys AnyVision: Why?
October 30, 2019
We noted “Why Did Microsoft Fund an Israeli Firm That Surveils West Bank Palestinians?” The write up stated:
Microsoft has invested in a startup that uses facial recognition to surveil Palestinians throughout the West Bank, in spite of the tech giant’s public pledge to avoid using the technology if it encroaches on democratic freedoms. AnyVision, which is headquartered in Israel but has offices in the United States, the United Kingdom and Singapore, sells an “advanced tactical surveillance” software system, Better Tomorrow. It lets customers identify individuals and objects in any live camera feed, such as a security camera or a smartphone, and then track targets as they move between different feeds.
The write up covers the functions of the firm’s technology. The contentious subject of facial recognition is raised.
However, one question was not asked, “Why?” Microsoft took action despite employee push back on certain projects.
The answer is, “Possess a technology that gets Microsoft closer to Amazon’s capabilities in this particular technical niche.
Microsoft has to beef up in a number of technical spaces. It may have a demanding client and a major project which requires certain capabilities. Marketing is one thing; delivering is another.
Stephen E Arnold, October 30, 2019
Procurement Bias Alleged in Amazon Microsoft Procurement Competition
October 28, 2019
DarkCyber noted “Trump Ordered Mattis to “Screw Amazon” Out of Pentagon Contract, Book Alleges.” If the allegation is accurate, the Federal procurement process is not above influence. If the allegations are not accurate, firing people who get quoted may be a bad idea. Maybe both statements are accurate?
The write up reports second or third hand:
Trump called Mattis in the summer of 2018 and directed him to “screw Amazon” out of a chance to bid on a $10 billion cloud networking contract.
Interesting.
The shift to the cloud is an important step for the Department of Defense. An error might have a few minor downsides: Loss of life, intelligence failures, increased and unbudgeted triage expenses, and increased friction in data-centric processes.
The upside is that the Department of Defense has made a decision.
Several questions arise and may be worth considering:
First, will there be review processes? The allegation about instructions from the White House are, if true, reasonably clear.
Second, will Microsoft be able to deliver the cloud solutions the Department of Defense requires? There are a few—how shall I phrase it—impediments to effective use of information technology which must be addressed. These are a bit more challenging than shipping software updates which create problems for users.
Third, can Microsoft navigate around Amazon’s patent fences? Some of the functionality which seems to be important to the DoD are within an Amazon patent fence. If Microsoft crawls under one of these fences, Amazon may sue. The litigation and any penalties might chew into Microsoft’s profit from the hard-won deal. (Are there examples? Yes, and I address these in my chapter for a forthcoming book, but the information is not for a free blog post on a chill Sunday morning, gentle reader. Alas!)
Net net: DarkCyber has a premonition that the MSFT JEDI assertions may make Holding the Line: Inside Trump’s Pentagon with Secretary Mattis a best seller.
Intriguing. Mad Dog becomes a celebrity author.
Stephen E Arnold, October 28, 2019
Amazon Loses JEDI: Now What?
October 26, 2019
Friday (October 25, 2019) Amazon and the Bezos bulldozer drove into a granite erratic. The Department of Defense awarded the multi-year, multi-billion dollar contract for cloud services to Microsoft. “Microsoft Snags Hotly Contested $10 Billion Defense Contract, Beating Out Amazon” reported the collision between PowerPoint’s owner and the killing machine which has devastated retail.
CNBC reports:
If the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure deal, known by the acronym JEDI, ends up being worth $10 billion, it would likely be a bigger deal to Microsoft than it would have been to Amazon. Microsoft does not disclose Azure revenue in dollar figures but it’s widely believed to have a smaller share of the market than Amazon, which received $9 billion in revenue from AWS in the third quarter.
The write up pointed out:
While Trump didn’t cite Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos by name at the time, the billionaire executive has been a constant source of frustration for the president. Bezos owns The Washington Post, which Trump regularly criticizes for its coverage of his administration. Trump also has gone after Amazon repeatedly on other fronts, such as claiming it does not pay its fair share of taxes and rips off the U.S. Post Office.
There are other twists and turns to the JEDI story, but I will leave it to you, gentle reader, to determine if the Oracle anti-Amazon campaign played a role.
There are some questions which I discussed with my DarkCyber team when we heard the news as a rather uneventful week in the technology world wound down. Let’s look at four of these and the “answers” my team floated as possibilities.
Question 1: Will this defeat alter Amazon’s strategy for policeware and intelware business?
Answer 1: No. Since 2007, Amazon has been grinding forward in the manner of the Bezos bulldozer with its flywheel spinning and its electricity sparking. As big as $10 billion is, Amazon has invested significant time and resources in policeware and intelware inventions like DeepLens, software like SageMaker, and infrastructure designed to deliver information that many US government agencies will want and for which many of the more than 60 badge-and-gun entities in the US government will pay. The existing sales team may be juggled as former Microsoft government sales professional Teresa Carlson wrestles with the question, “What next?” Failure turns on a bright spotlight. The DoD is just one, albeit deep pocket entity, of many US government agencies needing cloud services. And there is always next year which begins October 1, 2020.
Question 2: Has Amazon tuned its cloud services and functions to the needs of the Department of Defense?
Answer 2: No. Amazon offers services which meet the needs of numerous government agencies at the federal as well as local jurisdictional levels. In fact, there is one US government agency deals with more money than the DoD that is a potential ATM for Amazon. The Bezos bulldozer drivers may be uniquely positioned to deliver cloud services and investigative tools with the potential payout to Amazon larger than the JEDI deal.
Talking Down: A Specialty of High-Tech?
October 10, 2019
I am not angry nor am I annoyed. I am surprised. I read “Nadella Warns Government Conference Not to Betray User Trust.” “Nadella”, readers are supposed to know, is a big dog at Microsoft. The write up explains that attendees at an event called Microsoft Government Leaders Summit learned what Microsoft expects them to think and do.
According to TechCrunch (the article may be paywalled, require registration, or just disappear when you view it) reports:
He [Nadella] said it is essential to earn user trust, regardless of your business.
Now a direct quote from Mr. Nadella:
Now, of course, the power law here is all around trust because one of the keys for us, as providers of platforms and tool, trust is everything…. That means you need to also ensure that there is trust in the technology that you adopt, and the technology that you create and that’s what’s going to really define the power law on this equation. If you have trust, you will have exponential benefit. If you erode trust, it will exponentially decay.
Ho, ho, ho.
Mr. Nadella seems indifferent to the problems updating the vaunted Windows 10 operating system is causing users, integrators, and information technology professionals.
What problems?
First, Microsoft has warned 800 million users to install a specific patch in order to avoid terminating with extreme prejudice one’s computer. You can get ore information from the capitalist tool here. Will I trust Microsoft after it killed my computer? Nope.
Second, Windows updates have in the last few weeks killed network adaptors, printers, USB functions, and some audio features. Will a user trust Microsoft’s updates? Nope.
Third, Microsoft is lecturing at a Microsoft sponsored event for government related people. Will these people trust Microsoft when computers in their department cannot print, connect, or play a video? Nope.
To sum up, those dishing out advice about trust may want to make certain that their products and services earn trust.
I suppose one could use Bing or the revised Fast Search & Transfer services to look for more information. But these search services can erode trust as well.
Arrogance, superiority complexes, and confidence — attributes to engender trust? Not in Harrod’s Creek.
Stephen E Arnold, October 10, 2019
IBM Says Hub-and-Spoke Model Will Make Watson a Winner.. What about a Bottleneck?
October 4, 2019
Business Insider amuses me. It recycles IBM marketing material and slaps a paywall on collateral.
One possible example is the write up titled “The Head of IBM’s Watson Walks Us Through the Exact Model Tech Leaders Can Use to Build Excitement Around Any AI project.”
Not the word “exact.” Sounds like a winner. I like the “any AI project”, but I would wager a copy of the IBM PC 704 RAID documentation that if the AI project relied on Amazon, Google, or Microsoft technology, IBM might want to rethink that “any AI project” assurance.
DarkCyber noted this statement which is allegedly spontaneous, unedited, and prose worthy of Cicero, a wordsmith alive when the Romans were using the hub-and-spoke system to organize the Empire as the Barbarians destroyed what Rome built:
One way to ensure projects advance is to appoint leaders within each respective business unit to help support the chief technology, data, or innovation officers, argues IBM’s Rob Thomas, a system he refers to as the “hub-and-spoke” model because the structure resembles one in which a central point is connected to several secondary points. “You need somebody that has a seat at the table at the top that’s saying it’s important to the company,” he told Business Insider. Organizations also “need somebody in those business units that owns this day-to-day, but is accountable back to the company strategy.”
Now the hub-and-spoke analogy is different from the distributed information and computing model. The reason is visible when it snows in Chicago. Flights are delayed because the hub doesn’t work. Contrast that the architecture used by some of the Eastern European pirate streaming video sites.
A node dies and an origin server communicates with a control server to bring the node back up. What is an origin server is taken down? The smart software activates a hot spare origin server and the system comes back up. Magic? Nope, just side deals with some ISPs with interesting perceptions of right and wrong.
What will save IBM? The “thousands of O’Hare flights are cancelled approach” or the distributed system which cyber criminals have embraced enthusiastically.
The fact is that the hub-and-spoke model is unlikely to breathe much life into IBM. The top down approach is conceptually useful because it explains some of the issues arising from Industrial Revolution management: Blue suit, red tie, white shirt, etc.
Not only is the IBM solution unusual, it is not special content. What proof? Check out:
Microsoft’s 2009 encomium to SQLServer called “Using SQL Server to Build a Hub-and-Spoke Enterprise Data Warehouse Architecture.”
New? Yeah, well. Convinced? Nope. One could combine Microsoft AI with SQLServer in a corporation. Will IBM support that?
Let’s ask Watson.
Stephen E Arnold, October 4, 2019
Will the Real Disintermediating Entity Step Forward?
October 3, 2019
Big Microsoft day. It’s back in the mobile phone business. Sometime next year, probably coincident with a delayed Win 10 update, the Microsoft Surface Dual Screen Folding Android Phone becomes available. You can get the scoop and one view of Microsoft’s “we’re in phones again strategy” in “Microsoft’s Future Is Built on Google Code.” Do I agree? Of course not, that’s my method: Find other ways to look at an announcement.
The write up posits:
Google underpins Microsoft’s browser and mobile OS now.
I noted this statement as well:
… it could come as quite a shock that the CEO of Microsoft doesn’t care that much about operating systems. But there it is, in black and white. Microsoft obviously isn’t abandoning Windows — it announced a new version of it today — but it matters much more to Microsoft that you use its services like Office. That’s where the money is, after all.
Money. A phone that is not here?
But there’s another side to Microsoft. Amazon, the evil enemy, makes it possible run Microsoft on the AWS platform.
Now who is going to disintermediate whom?
Will Google get frisky and nuke Microsoft’s Android love?
Will Amazon just push MSFT SQLServer and other Microsoft innovations off the AWS platform and suck up the MSFT business.
Will Microsoft find that loving two enemies is more a management hassle than getting a Windows 10 server out the door?
Will Amazon and Google escalate their skirmishes and take actions that miss one enemy and plug the Redmond frenemy?
The stakes are high. Microsoft has done a pivot with an double backflip.
Perfect 10 or broken foot? Enron tried something like Microsoft’s approach. The landing was bumpy. The cloud may not cushion a lousy landing.
Stephen E Arnold, October 3, 2109
Microsoft Finds the UK an AI Loser
October 1, 2019
DarkCyber was surprised to learn that the United Kingdom is a loser when it comes to smart software. This conclusion will be a surprise to those in UK universities engaged in artificial intelligence research and development.
“New Microsoft Report Claims U.K. Is Behind The Rest Of The World On AI” alleges that:
British organizations risk being overtaken by their global counterparts unless the use of artificial intelligence (AI) technology is accelerated.
The full report is available at this link.
Much of Google’s smart software shares some DNA with the DeepMind outfit. Cambridge University, a reasonably good school, has been cranking out smart software luminaries for decades.
What’s Microsoft’s agenda?
That an easy question to answer.
The Microsoft report wants the UK to use more Microsoft. The Redmond giant needs 80 pages and an 80 gigabyte file to make its point. Terse. Tasty. Terrific. Nope.
Will this approach cause a spike in UK grabbing more Microsoft goodness?
Yeah, well, maybe. But the report seems to have an agenda; specifically, making the point that the UK should use more Microsoft and less of the “other guy’s technology.” The other guy may be none other than Google. Microsoft wants AI to work for everyone (page 39). The “other guy” may be less catholic.
Stephen E Arnold, October 2, 2019
Microsoft and Software Problems
September 30, 2019
Microsoft wants DarkCyber to trust its cloud solutions. Not going to happen.
Navigate to “Windows 10 Problems Are Ruining Microsoft’s Reputation – and the Damage Can’t Be Understated.” The article asserts:
Reputation deflation is the path to damnation…
What? The data dignity company is on the path to hellfire?
We learned from the article:
According to ACSI, customer satisfaction with software for PCs has dropped by 1.3% compared to last year, with Microsoft slipping the most out of all software makers with a 3% decrease. The report further notes: “According to ACSI data, customer perceptions of quality have deteriorated significantly for Microsoft over the past year, as the manufacturer has encountered a host of customer issues with its Windows 10 updates.”
The write up stated:
This bug-related reputational damage isn’t just about desktop operating systems, though. The wider public perception of Microsoft flailing around in an almost amateurish fashion could well have a knock-on effect when it comes to the levels of trust in the company, and all those future dreamy cloud products we mentioned at the outset could be subsequently affected…
Microsoft wants to catch up with Amazon. Amazon, on the other hand, does not seem worried about catching up with Microsoft.
Microsoft may be creating problems for itself.
Stephen E Arnold, September 30, 2019
Just Like Amazon: Prepackaged AI Available from Microsoft
September 16, 2019
Fast food computer software got its start with Microsoft Windows and Bill Gates was the short order cook. Technology has certainly become user friendlier, although programming, coding, and the more advanced functions remain special orders on the technology menu. Forbes describes how Microsoft wants to continue its fast food services with a brand new idea that could make it the go to name for AI, “Microsoft Offers ‘Premade’ No-Code Artificial Intelligence.”
Quick serve software and technology is not a new concept, but making AI follow the same route as an OS is conventional. Microsoft is the most used to system for most businesses in the western world and now it wants to offer its customers AI capabilities through its Power Platform. The Power Platform combines Microsoft Power BI, PowerApps, and Flowing into one platform. Flow is a powerful function, because it allows non-technical users to create/automate workflows that span multiple apps and services. One new tool in the Microsoft Power Platform concerns AI development:
“Newest among the Microsoft Power Platform goodies is Microsoft AI Builder, a no-code AI capability which also supports integrations with PowerApps and Flow. Microsoft AI Builder is (if you hadn’t guessed from the name) a means of shortcutting to almost ‘premade’ AI tasks that enterprises often need in regularly occurring business situations. It takes common AI scenarios and provides point-and-click solutions for app makers to solve everyday tasks like forms processing, object detection and text and binary classification.”
Microsoft AI Builder will be useful to manufacturing, banking, hospitality, retail, and other industries that require real-time customer feedback.
The Microsoft Power Platform allows users to build high grade AI based tools and other functions that would usually require an IT expert to develop.
Whitney Grace, September 16, 2019
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