Bugged? Hey, No One Can Get Our Data
December 22, 2023
This essay is the work of a dumb dinobaby. No smart software required.
I read “The Obscure Google Deal That Defines America’s Broken Privacy Protections.” In the cartoon below, two young people are confident that their lunch will be undisturbed. No “bugs” will chow down on their hummus, sprout sandwiches, or their information. What happens, however, is that the young picnic fans cannot perceive what is out of sight. Are these “bugs” listening? Yep. They are. 24×7.
What the young fail to perceive is that “bugs” are everywhere. These digital creatures are listening, watching, harvesting, and consuming every scrap of information. The image of the picnic evokes an experience unfolding in real time. Thanks, MSFT Copilot. My notion of “bugs” is obviously different from yours. Good enough and I am tired of finding words you can convert to useful images.
The essay explains:
While Meta, Google, and a handful of other companies subject to consent decrees are bound by at least some rules, the majority of tech companies remain unfettered by any substantial federal rules to protect the data of all their users, including some serving more than a billion people globally, such as TikTok and Apple.
The situation is simple: Major centers of techno gravity remain unregulated. Law makers, regulators, and “users” either did not understand or just believed what lobbyists told them. The senior executives of certain big firms smiled, said “Senator, thank you for that question,” and continued to build out their “bug” network. Do governments want to lose their pride of place with these firms? Nope. Why? Just reference bad actors who commit heinous acts and invoke “protect our children.” When these refrains from the techno feudal playbook sound, calls to take meaningful action become little more than a faint background hum.
But the article continues:
…there is diminishing transparency about how Google’s consent decree operates.
I think I understand. Google-type companies pretend to protect “privacy.” Who really knows? Just ask a Google professional. The answer in my experience is, “Hey, dude, I have zero idea.”
How does Wired, the voice of the techno age, conclude its write up? Here you go:
The FTC agrees that a federal privacy law is long overdue, even as it tries to make consent decrees more powerful. Samuel Levine, director of the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection, says that successive privacy settlements over the years have become more limiting and more specific to account for the growing, near-constant surveillance of Americans by the technology around them. And the FTC is making every effort to enforce the settlements to the letter…
I love the “every effort.” The reality is that the handling of online data collection presages the trajectory for smart software. We live with bugs. Now those bugs can “think”, adapt, and guide. And what’s the direction in which we are now being herded? Grim, isn’t it?
Stephen E Arnold, December 23, 2023
A High Profile Religious Leader: AI? Yeah, Well, Maybe Not So Fast, Folks
December 22, 2023
This essay is the work of a dumb dinobaby. No smart software required.
The trusted news outfit Thomson Reuters put out a story about the thoughts of the Pope, the leader of millions of Catholics. Presumably many of these people use ChatGPT-type systems to create content. (I wonder if Leonardo would have used an OpenAI system to crank out some art work. He was an innovator. My hunch is that he would have given MidJourney-type smart software a whirl.)
A group of religious individuals thinking about artificial intelligence. Thanks, MidJourney, a good enough engraving.
“Pope Francis Calls for Binding Global Treaty to Regulate AI” reports that Pope Francis wants someone to create a legally binding international treaty. The idea is that AI numerical recipes would be prevented from replacing humans with good old human values. The idea is that AI would output answers, and humans would use those answers to find pizza joints, develop smart weapons, and eliminate carbon by eliminating carbon generating entities (maybe humans?).
The trusted news outfit’s report included this quote from the Pope:
I urge the global community of nations to work together in order to adopt a binding international treaty that regulates the development and use of artificial intelligence in its many forms…
The Pope mentioned a need to avoid a technological dictatorship. He added:
Research on emerging technologies in the area of so-called Lethal Autonomous Weapon Systems, including the weaponization of artificial intelligence, is a cause for grave ethical concern. Autonomous weapon systems can never be morally responsible subjects…
Several observations are warranted:
- Is this a UN job or is some other entity responsible to obtain consensus and effective enforcement?
- Who develops the criteria for “good” AI, “neutral” AI, and “bad” AI?
- What are the penalties for implementing “bad” AI?
For me the Pope’s statement is important. It may be difficult to implement without a global dictatorship or a sudden change in how informed people debate and respond to difficult issues. From my point of view, the Pope should worry. When I look at the images of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, the riders remind of four high profile leaders in AI. That’s my imagination reading into the depictions of conquest, war, famine, and death.
Stephen E Arnold, December 22, 2023
Cyber Security Crumbles When Staff Under Stress
December 22, 2023
This essay is the work of a dumb dinobaby. No smart software required.
How many times does society need to say that happy employees mean a better, more profitable company? The world is apparently not getting the memo, because employees, especially IT workers, are overworked, stressed, exhausted, and burnt out like blackened match. While zombie employees are bad for productivity, they’re even worse for cyber security. BetaNews reports on an Adarma, a detection and response specialist company, survey, “Stressed Staff Put Enterprises At Risk Of Cyberattack.”
The survey responders believe they’re at a greater risk of cyberattack due to the poor condition of their employees. Five hundred cybersecurity professionals from UK companies with over 2000 employees were studied and 51% believed their IT security are dead inside. This puts them at risk of digital danger. Over 40% of the cybersecurity leaders felt that their skills were limited to understand threats. An additional 43% had little or zero expertise to respond or detect threats to their enterprises.
IT people really love computers and technology but when they’re working in an office environment and dealing with people, stress happens:
“‘Cybersecurity professionals are typically highly passionate people, who feel a strong personal sense of duty to protect their organization and they’ll often go above and beyond in their roles. But, without the right support and access to resources in place, it’s easy to see how they can quickly become victims of their own passion. The pressure is high and security teams are often understaffed, so it is understandable that many cybersecurity professionals are reporting frustration, burnout, and unsustainable stress. As a result, the potential for mistakes being made that will negatively impact an organization increases. Business leaders should identify opportunities to ease these gaps, so that their teams can focus on the main task at hand, protecting the organization,’ says John Maynard, Adarma’s CEO.”
The survey demonstrates why it’s important to diversify the cybersecurity talent pool? Wait, is this in regard to ethnicity and biological sex? Is Adarma advocating for a DEI quota in cybersecurity or is the organization advocating for a diverse talent pool with varied experience to offer differ perspectives?
While it is important to have different education backgrounds and experience, hiring someone simply based on DEI quotas is stupid. It’s failing in the US and does more harm than good.
Whitney Grace, December 22, 2023
Scientific American Spills the Beans on Innovation
December 21, 2023
This essay is the work of a dumb dinobaby. No smart software required.
It happened! A big, mostly respected publication called Scientific American explains where the Google type outfits got their best ideas. Note: The write up “Tech Billionaires Need to Stop Trying to Make the Science Fiction They Grew Up on Real” does not talk about theft of intellectual property, doing shameless me-too products, or acquiring promising start ups to make eunuchs of potential competitors.
Instead the Scientific American story asserts:
Today’s Silicon Valley billionaires grew up reading classic American science fiction. Now they’re trying to make it come true, embodying a dangerous political outlook.
I can make these science fiction worlds a reality. I am going to see Star Wars for the seventh time. I will invent the future, says the enthusiastic wizardette in 1985. Thanks, MSFT Copilot. Know anyone at Microsoft like this young person?
The article says:
These men [the Brin-Page variants] collectively have more than half a trillion dollars to spend on their quest to realize inventions culled from the science fiction and fantasy stories that they read in their teens. But this is tremendously bad news because the past century’s science fiction and fantasy works widely come loaded with dangerous assumptions.
The essayist (a science fiction writer) explains:
We are not trying to accurately predict possible futures but to earn a living: any foresight is strictly coincidental. We recycle the existing material—and the result is influenced heavily by the biases of earlier writers and readers. The genre operates a lot like a large language model that is trained using a body of text heavily contaminated by previous LLMs; it tends to emit material like that of its predecessors. Most SF is small-c conservative insofar as it reflects the history of the field rather than trying to break ground or question received wisdom.
So what? The writer answers:
It’s a worryingly accurate summary of the situation in Silicon Valley right now: the billionaires behind the steering wheel have mistaken cautionary tales and entertainments for a road map, and we’re trapped in the passenger seat. Let’s hope there isn’t a cliff in front of us.
Is there a way to look down the runway? Sure, read more science fiction. Invent the future and tell oneself, “I am an innovator.” That may be true but of what? Right now it appears that reality is a less than enticing place. The main point is that today may be built on a fairly flimsy foundation. Hint: Don’t ask a person to make change when you pay in cash.
Stephen E Arnold, December 21, 2023
Palantir to Solve Banking IT Problems: Worth Monitoring
December 21, 2023
This essay is the work of a dumb dinobaby. No smart software required.
Palantir Technologies recast itself as an artificial intelligence company. The firm persevered in England and positioned itself as the one best choice to wrestle the UK National Health Service’s IT systems into submission. Now, the company founded 20 years ago is going to demonstrate its business chops in a financial institution.
A young IT wizard explains to a group of senior executives, “Our team can deal with mainframe software and migrate the operations of this organization to a modern, scalable, more economical, and easier-to-use system. I am wearing a special seeing stone, so trust me.” Thanks, MSFT Copilot. It took five tries to get a good enough cartoon.
Before referencing the big, new job Palantir has “won,” I want to mention an interesting 2016 write up called “Interviewing My Mother, a Mainframe COBOL Programmer” by Tom Jordan. I want to point out that I am not suggesting that financial institutions have not solved their IT problems. I simply don’t know. But my poking around the Charlie Javice matter, my hunch is that banks IT systems have not changed significantly in the last seven years. Had the JPMC infrastructure been humming along with real-time data checks and smart software to determine if data were spoofed, those $175 million dollars would not have flown the upscale coop at JP Morgan Chase. For some Charlie Javice detail, navigate to this CNBC news item.
Here are several points about financial institutions IT infrastructure from the 2016 mom chat:
- Many banks rely on COBOL programs
- Those who wrote the COBOL programs may be deceased or retired
- Newbies may not know how undocumented legacy COBOL programs interact with other undocumented programs
- COBOL is not the go-to language for most programmers
- The databases for some financial institutions are not widely understood; for example, DL/1 / IMS, so some programmers have to learn something new about something old
- Moving data around can be tricky and the documentation about what an upstream system does and how it interacts with a downstream system may be fuzzy or unknown.
Anyone who has experience fiddling with legacy financial systems knows that changes require an abundance of caution. An error can wreck financial havoc. For more “color” about legacy systems used in banks, consult Mr. Jordan’s mom interview.
I thought about Mr. Jordan’s essay when I read “Palantir and UniCredit Renew Digital Transformation Partnership.” Palantir has been transforming UniCredit for five years, but obviously more work is needed. From my point of view, Palantir is a consulting company which does integration. Thus, the speed of the transformation is important. Time is money. The write up states:
The partnership will see UniCredit deploy the Palantir Foundry operating system to accelerate the bank’s digital transformation and help increase revenue and mitigate risks.
I like the idea of a financial services institution increasing its revenue and reducing its risk.
The report about the “partnership” adds:
Palantir and UniCredit first partnered in 2018 as the bank sought technology that could streamline sales spanning jurisdictions, better operationalize machine learning and artificial intelligence, enforce policy compliance, and enhance decision making on the front lines. The bank chose Palantir Foundry as the operating system for the enterprise, leveraging a single, open and integrated platform across entities and business lines and enabling synergies across the Group.
Yep, AI is part of the deal. Compliance management is part of the agreement. Plus, Palantir will handle cross jurisdictional sales. Also, bank managers will make better decisions. (One hopes the JPMC decision about the fake data, revenues, and accounts will not become an issue for UniCredit.)
Palantir is optimistic about the partnership renewal and five years of billing for what may be quite difficult work to do without errors and within the available time and resource window. A Palantir executive said, according to the article:
Palantir has long been a proud partner to some of the world’s top financial institutions. We’re honored that UniCredit has placed its confidence in Palantir once again and look forward to furthering the bank’s digital transformation.
Will Palantir be able to handle super-sized jobs like the NHS work and the UniCredit project? Personally I will be watching for news about both of these contract wins. For a 20 year old company with its roots in the intelligence community, success in health care and financial services will mark one of the few times, intelware has made the leap to mainstream commercial problem solving.
The question is, “Why have the other companies failed in financial services modernization?” I have a lecture about that. Curious to know more. Write benkent2020 at yahoo dot com, and one of my team will respond to you.
Stephen E Arnold, December 18, 2023
Vendor Lock In: Good for Geese, Bad for Other Birds
December 21, 2023
This essay is the work of a dumb dinobaby. No smart software required.
TechCrunch examines the details behind the recent OpenAI CEO exodus and why vendors are projecting a clear and present danger to tech startups: “OpenAI Mess Exposes The Dangers Of Vendor Lock-In For Start-Ups.” When startups fundraise for seed capital, they attract investors that can influence the company’s future.
OpenAI’s leaders, including ex-CEO Sam Altman and cofounder Greg Brockman, accepted investments from Microsoft. This forced OpenAI into a vendor lock-in situation, where they relied on Microsoft as their business model and vendor of OpenAI products. While there are many large language model products on the market, ChatGPT 3.5 and 4 were touted as the best product on the market. It’s in no small part to Microsoft’s investment and association with the respected and powerful tech company.
As Sam Altman and his OpenAI friends head to Microsoft, it points to the importance of diversifying a company’s vendor portfolio. While ChatGPT was the most popular solution, many tech experts believe that it’s better to research all options instead of relying on one service:
“The companies that chose a flexible approach over depending on a single AI model vendor must be feeling pretty good today. If there is any object lesson to be learned from all this, even as the drama continues to play out in real time, it’s that it’s never, ever a good idea to go with a single vendor.
Founders who put all of their eggs in the OpenAI basket now find themselves suddenly in a very uncomfortable situation, as the uncertainty around OpenAI continues to swirl.”
This is what happens when you rely on one vendor to supply all technology and related services. It’s always best to research and have multiple backup options in case one doesn’t work out.
Whitney Grace, December 21, 2023
Google AI and Ads: Beavers Do What Beavers Do
December 20, 2023
This essay is the work of a dumb dinobaby. No smart software required.
Consider this. Take a couple of beavers. Put them in the Cloud Room near the top of the Chrysler Building in Manhattan. Shut the door. Come back in a day. What have the beavers done? The beavers start making a dam. Beavers do what beavers do. That’s a comedian’s way of explaining that some activities are hard wired into an organization. Therefore, beavers do what beavers do.
I read the paywalled article “Google Plans Ad Sales Restructuring as Automation Booms” and the other versions of the story on the shoulder of the Information Superhighway; for example, the trust outfit’s recycling of the Information’s story. The giant quantum supremacy, protein folding, and all-round advertising company is displaying beaver-like behavior. Smart software will be used to sell advertising.
That ad DNA? Nope, the beavers do what beavers do. Here’s a snip from the write up:
The planned reorganization comes as Google is relying more on machine-learning techniques to help customers buy more ads on its search engine, YouTube and other services…
Translating: Google wants fewer people to present information to potential and actual advertisers. The idea is to reduce costs and sell more advertising. I find it interesting that the quantum supremacy hoo-hah boils down to … selling ads and eliminating unreliable, expensive, vacation-taking, and latte consuming humans.
Two real beavers are surprised to learn that a certain large and dangerous creature also has DNA. Notice that neither of the beavers asks the large reptile to join them for lunch. The large reptile may, in fact, view the beavers as something else; for instance, lunch. Thanks, MSFT Copilot. Good enough.
Are there other ad-related changes afoot at the Google? According to “Google Confirms It is Testing Ad Copy Variation in Live Ads” points out:
Google quietly started placing headlines in ad copy description text without informing advertisers
No big deal. Just another “test”, I assume. Search Engine Land (a publication founded, nurtured, and shaped into the search engine optimization information machine by Dan Sullivan, now a Googler) adds:
Changing the rules without informing advertisers can make it harder for them to do their jobs and know what needs to be prioritized. The impact is even more significant for advertisers with smaller budgets, as assessing the changes, especially with responsive search ads, becomes challenging, adding to their workload.
Google wants to reduce its workload. In pursuing that noble objective, if Search Engine Land is correct, may increase the workload of the advertisers. But never fear, the change is trivial, “a small test.”
What was that about beavers? Oh, right. Certain behaviors are hard wired into the DNA of a corporate entity, which under US law is a “person” someone once told me.
Let me share with you several observations based on my decades-long monitoring of the Google.
- Google does what Google wants and then turns over the explanation to individuals who say what is necessary to deflect actual intent, convert actions into fuzzy Google speech, and keep customer and user pushback to a minimum. (Note: The tactic does not work with 100 percent reliability as the recent loss to US state attorneys general illustrates.)
- Smart software is changing rapidly. What appears to be one application may (could) morph into more comprehensive functionality. Predicting the future of AI and Google’s actions is difficult. Google will play the odds which means what the “entity” does will favor its objective and goals.
- The quaint notion of a “small test” is the core of optimization for some methods. Who doesn’t love “quaint” as a method for de-emphasizing the significance of certain actions. The “small test” is often little more than one component of a larger construct. Dismissing the small is to ignore the larger component’s functionality; for example, data control and highly probable financial results.
Let’s flash back to the beavers in the Cloud Room. Imagine the surprise of someone who opens the door and sees gnawed off portions of chairs, towels, a chunk of unidentifiable gook piled between two tables.
Those beavers and their beavering can create an unexpected mess. The beavers, however, are proud of their work because they qualify under an incentive plan for a bonus. Beavers do what beavers do.
Stephen E Arnold, December 20, 2023
Forget AI Borrowing: Human Writers Take Stuff Too
December 20, 2023
This essay is the work of a dumb dinobaby. No smart software required.
I am beginning to think that most people take short cuts, assuming no one will know or take the time to do old-fashioned research. To the embarrassing actions at Stanford University and Harvard College, I can add the work of a person identified as Kristin Loberg. How do I know about this individual. I read the LA Times’s story “Nine Months after Scandal, Publishers Are Still Sorting Out a Plagiarism Mess.”
Boiling down a fairly long write up, it seems that some famous authors need people to help them write their books. These people are ghostwriters. Ms. Loberg is one of these individuals, and it appears that she borrowed information from others. The article includes this statement from Ms. Loberg:
“I accept complete responsibility for any errors my work may have contained,” Loberg said at the time in a statement that acknowledged “allegations of plagiarism” and apologized to writers whose work was not properly credited.
That’s clear enough. But the issue that concerns me is that the article includes this factoid:
Publishers pledged to review all of her books and take corrective steps where necessary. In the nine months since, they have been quietly cleaning up an editorial mess that some industry observers say is partly of their own making.
A famous 16th-century author ponders this question, “Should I rip off Kit Marlowe or that rowdy Ben Jonson character?” Thanks, MSFT Copilot. I did not know Shakespeare was a forbidden word. Poor Will. I am glad I did not ask about Nick Bottom’s wall comment.
I asked myself, “What do publishers do if they don’t check what the authors write for accuracy and the absence of legal time bombs?” And what about the “author,” the person who craves appearing on podcasts and possibly getting five minutes with a cable news talking head? The author is supposed to be informed about a topic, have great insights, and be someone who does not pay another person to do the work. My hunch is that my expectation of an ink-stained wretch is out of date.
The LA Times’s article reports on good news. Here is an example from the write up:
Simon & Schuster said it has released updated versions of six books by Agus and Gupta with the problematic passages either reworked or excised. Loberg’s name is scrubbed from the credits and acknowledgments in the latest editions on Amazon’s Kindle store.
Classic modern management: Take action after the horse has fled and the barn burned, leaving ashes and evidence of sub-standard construction methods.
The LA Times took action. An illustration in the article says:
A Times investigation of books by Dr. David Agus found more than 120 passages that are virtually identical to the language and structure of previously published material from other sources.
It is amazing what a journalism professional can accomplish with a search engine, some time, and patience. Apparently ghost writers, publishers, authors, and other people in the publishing chain are too busy to do actual work to ensure that a book is not chock full of pirate material.
Have the publishers learned their lessons? Have the authors who don’t write their semi-original books? Does anyone care?
That last question is the best one I asked. I know the answer, however. Not too many care and an increasing number of people could not find plagiarism or fabricated information.
Encouraging.
Stephen E Arnold, December 20, 2023
FTC Enacts Investigative Process for AI Technology
December 20, 2023
This essay is the work of a dumb dinobaby. No smart software required.
Creative types and educational professionals are worried about the influence of AI-generated work. However, law, legal, finance, business operations, and other industries are worried about how AI will impact them. Aware about the upward trend in goods and services that are surreptitiously moving into the market, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) took action. The FTC released a briefing on the new consumer AI protection: “FTC Authorities Compulsory Process For AI-Related Products And Services.”
The FTC passed an omnibus resolution that authorizes a compulsory process in nonpublic investigations about products and services that use or claim to be made with AI or claim to detect it. The new omnibus resolution will increase the FTC’s efficiency with civil investigation demands (CIDs), a compulsory process like a subpoena. CIDs are issued to collect information, similar to legal discovery, for consumer protection and competition investigations. The new resolution will be in effect for ten years and the FTC voted to approve it 3-0.
The FTC defines AI as:
“AI includes, but is not limited to, machine-based systems that can, for a set of defined objectives, make predictions, recommendations, or decisions influencing real or virtual environments. Generative AI can be used to generate synthetic content including images, videos, audio, text, and other digital content that appear to be created by humans. Many companies now offer products and services using AI and generative AI, while others offer products and services that claim to detect content made by generative AI.”
AI can also be used for deception, privacy infringements, fraud, and other illegal activities. AI can causes competition problems, such as if a few companies monopolize algorithms are other AI-related technologies.
The FTC is taking preliminary steps to protect consumers from bad actors and their nefarious AI-generated deeds. However, what constitutes a violation in relation to AI? Will the data training libraries be examined along with the developers?
Whitney Grace, December 20, 2023
Is Google Really Clever and Well Managed or the Other Way Round?
December 19, 2023
This essay is the work of a dumb dinobaby. No smart software required.
“Google Will Pay $700 Million to Settle a Play Store Antitrust Lawsuit with All 50 US States” reports that Google put up a blog post. (You can read that at this link. The title of the post is worth the click.) Neowin.net reported that Google will “make some changes.”
“What’s happened to our air vent?” asks one government regulatory professional. Thanks, MSFT Copilot. Good enough.
Change is good. It is better if that change is organic in my opinion. But change is change. I noted this statement in the Neowin.net article:
The public reveal of this settlement between Google and the US state attorney generals comes just a few days after a jury ruled against Google in a similar case with developer Epic Games. The jury agreed with Epic’s view that Google was operating an illegal monopoly with its Play Store on Android devices. Google has stated it will appeal the jury’s decision.
Yeah, timing.
Several observations:
- It appears that some people perceive Google as exercising control over their decisions and the framing of those decisions
- The business culture creating the need to pay a $700 million penalty are likely to persist because the people who write checks at Google are not the people facilitating the behaviors creating the legal issue in my opinion
- The payday, when distributed, is not the remedy for some of those snared in the Googley approach to business.
Net net: Other nation states may look at the $700 million number and conclude, “Let’s take another look at that outfit.”
Stephen E Arnold, December 19, 2023
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