Daily Archives: April 2, 2022

To borrow from Ben Franklin, nothing is certain except death, taxes, and that Big Tech is alarminglybig. As Americans increasingly rely on the major tech companies to help us perform our jobs and navigate our personal lives, our trust and opinion of the digital giants continue to trend downward. Recent surveys show a mere 34 percent of the public rates Big Tech favorably.

The reasons arent hard to fathom, given the enormous control a few handful of corporations have over our lives. We are beholden to algorithms we dont understand, mystified as to who has access to our personal and financial information, and lack any faith in their promises to protect our online privacy. And this says nothing of their power to control the news, influence public opinion in their preferred direction, or put their tentacles on the scale in our elections.

Often overlooked in this discussion is the myriad of troublesome ways Big Tech wields power over small businesses that bear the burden of market concentration. For years, entrepreneurs and small business owners seeking access to market places dominated by Big Tech have been forced to strike a devils bargain. By maintaining a tight grip on the channels of online commerce and advertising, Big Tech companies use their clout to gain an overwhelming advantage over competitors while exploiting vendors and further leveraging power in a way that simply would not have been permissible in the pre-digital, brick-and-mortar economy. Fortunately, Washington is now taking action against their monopolistic fiefdoms.

New legislation proposed in the U.S. Senate titled the American Innovation and Choice Online Act (S.2992) will prohibit tech platforms such as Amazon and Google from rigging online commerce in their favor, and holding their smaller competitors hostage. This is not legislation aimed at punishing companies for being successful, but to hold them accountable for anti-competitive and anti-consumer practices which would be considered major violations of antitrust in any other context.

Examples of these practices abound across the Big Tech ecosystem.Google enjoys a monopoly on search, advertising, and mobile, making it next to impossible for other companies, especially small businesses, to compete on equal footing. Because of their search market dominance, small businesses and entrepreneurs must rely on Google to engage consumers and grow their businesses. But when Google uses their extraordinary market power to advantage their own products and the products they favor in search results, small businesses have no recourse, short of spending exorbitant sums in hopes theyll ascend to the top of search. These digital manipulations hurt consumers and restrain economic efficiency. It is hard to argue that it is not inherently anti-competitive for Google to control both the ad selling and ad buying platforms, and then sell its inventory through those platforms. Google stifles free and fair competition in the digital ad marketplace and then compounds this mercantilist arrangement by depriving consumers of seeing a wide spectrum of products and information in their search results.

Amazon presents another harrowing picture of market theft and dominance. Interviews with more than 20 former employees of Amazon confirm the company hasused data about independent sellers on the companys platform to develop competing products,in violation of their own stated policies. Because of its size and reach, businesses that make or sell consumer goods have little choice but to work with Amazon as a vendor. Amazon then canextract billions in seller feesevery year, which of course it uses to add more bricks to its impenetrable online fortress.

Amazon also uses information they collect from the sites individual third-party sellersdata those sellers view as proprietary, to develop private label merchandise which are then given preference on their search engine. Amazon may think that imitation is the highest form of flattery, but the small companies getting fleeced by these deceptive practices surely feel differently.

The senate legislation would put a stop to this market bullying by prohibiting disadvantaging rivals, or discriminating among businesses that use their platforms in a manner that would materially harm competition on the platform. It further outlines protections against misleading consumers by giving their own products preference, especially in cases where a competitors product is factually a closer match for a consumer search.

This is all entirely reasonable and closely contoured to the long-held principles of U.S. antitrust. Nobody would ever permit Wal-Mart from covering up the signs of rival stores, or paying advertisers to blacklist competitors, so these same tactics should be similarly proscribed online. Senator Charles Grassley (R-IA) makes the key point that we cant apply old and outdated marketplace rules to new technologies, stating, As Big Tech has grown and evolved over the years, our laws have not changed to keep up and ensure these companies are competing fairly.

The billionaire Big Tech companies all now have cap valuations of over $1 trillion, enabling them to laugh off fines and enforcement efforts. Too big to fail has now become too big to even give a damn when you sit atop ever-growing mountains of cash. Hopefully this welcome legislation will get their attention and hold them accountable for their continued arrogance, abuse, and market deception.

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Americans Deserve a Fair Fight Against Big Tech InsideSources - InsideSources

Hello and welcome to Protocol Enterprise! Today: why this years Turing Award winner is worried about the future of government tech efforts, Nvidia takes a closer look at the health care market, and the debut of Pixel Pat.

Intel is still the leader in chips for cloud infrastructure by a large margin, but AMD continues to gain ground in this lucrative market. According to a research note from Jefferies, AMDs chips made up 72% of all new cloud instances in February and overall, it now enjoys 14.8% of the cloud market to Intels 78.6%.

Turing Award winner Jack Dongarras new Nobel Prize of computing trophy for his supercomputing work comes with a cool $1 million courtesy of Google. But Dongarra would rather the company and its Big Tech brethren quit drafting talent from his lab system.

In fact, he said he is tired of the government labs acting as a proverbial farm team for Big Tech.

Dongarra is a professor at University of Tennessee and a researcher at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, both places where big tech companies have looked for science and tech talent.

In general, its been tough for government agencies and labs to compete for talent against bigger private-sector salaries and benefits like gourmet lunches and kombucha kegs (and dont forget those enticing stock options).

Despite close collaborations, sometimes tensions among private-sector researchers and those from academia and government labs rise to the surface. Case in point: the quantum dustup between the White House and Google.

Ultimately, Dongarra said, government labs and scientific research could falter if things continue this way.

Kate Kaye (email | twitter)

Seeking to triple its employee base, Whisk, a fully remote team, sought diverse talent from a wide variety of regions through Upwork, a work marketplace that connects businesses with independent professionals and agencies around the globe.

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For most of its early life, tech industry insiders thought of Nvidia largely in terms of its largest business: video game chips. But the company in recent years has sought to defy that impression, expanding its software effort and making big bets on the data center.

One of the lesser-known markets Nvidia has pursued in recent years is medical care, which is a $10 trillion industry, according to Nvidia Health Care Vice President Kimberly Powell. Powell recently spoke with Protocol about the companys efforts for an upcoming interview:

We can make a significant contribution in the area of medical imaging and medical devices. One of the largest workloads in supercomputing, and accelerated computing, is in the area of life sciences. To be able to do simulation of diseases, and chemical compounds interacting and trying to stop the behavior [its] to do drug discovery, essentially in silicon, in a computer.

Our charter is to say how do we take these modern computing approaches of accelerated computing, artificial intelligence, computer graphics, and help the health care industry benefit from it.

Max A. Cherney (email | twitter)

Its been a little over a year since Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger, arguably one of the most significant employees in Intels 53-year history, returned to the company. To celebrate the occasion, Intel released a cute 8-bit video game called Pixel Pat, where you assume control of Intels chief geek and try to navigate through a chip fab filled with prizes (chip wafers) and obstacles (these blob-like things that look kinda like the ghosts in Pac-Man).

Along the way, you learn fun facts about Intels history, although somebody forgot to include its legal disputes with AMD and the federal government. Its a little challenging at first, and its habit of having you respawn directly over a huge chasm was kind of annoying, but give it a whirl this weekend.

Whisk isnt alone in unlocking the global marketplace to find the right types of employees to support its business goals. More than three-quarters of U.S. companies have used remote freelancers, according to research from Upwork, and more than a quarter of businesses plan to go fully remote in the next five years.

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Thanks for reading see you Monday!

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Government tech shouldnt be the minor leagues - Protocol

Billions of people log onto social media platforms every day. As we spend an increasing portion of our lives online, our exposure to hate-based content becomes routine. The Anti-Defamation Leagues 2021 survey of hate and harassment on social media found that 41 percent of Americans experienced online harassment, while 27 percent experience severe harassment, which includes sexual harassment, stalking, physical threats, swatting, doxing, and sustained harassment. We are inundated with conspiracy theories, scams, misinformation, or racist speech that frustrate users or, worse, threaten our safety.

One way technology companies can create safer and more equitable online spaces is to moderate content more consistently and comprehensively. Tech companies have been frequently criticized for inconsistently enforcing their stated policies at the scale of billions of users, causing seismic levels of harm. It is unclear how content moderation teams are trained to recognize and address various forms of hate, such as antisemitism. Their training materials or even operational definitions have not been made public or shared privately with civil society. Additionally, as tech companies increasingly rely on artificial intelligence to remove offensive posts on social media platforms, we have no idea whether the perspective of targets of online hate is used to create these technologies.

For example, evidence from the leaked Facebook documents submitted by whistleblower Frances Haughen to the SEC in 2021 suggest that the haphazard way automated content moderation technologies are developed are overbroad in their understanding of hate and ineffective. The document states that current automated methods are removing less than 5% of all of the hate speech posted to Facebook. Furthermore, studies have shown that algorithms that detect hate speech online can often be racially biased.

It is crucial to find ways for communities that are often the targets of hate to contribute to the creation of technology tools that automate and augment content moderation. To model what this process might look like, the ADL Center for Technology and Society is building the Online Hate Index (OHI), a set of machine learning classifiers that detect hate targeting marginalized groups on online platforms. The first of this set, the OHI antisemitism classifier, draws upon the knowledge of both ADLs antisemitism experts and Jewish community volunteers who may have experienced antisemitism. Together, these groups are the best positioned to understand and operationalize a definition of antisemitism.

To better grasp how machine learning classifiers work, imagine a child taking in information that, through practice, helps them discern and understand their world. Machine learning works similarly. In the case of OHI, our machine learning antisemitism classifier takes in pieces of information (here, text) that have been determined to be antisemitic, or not, by ADL experts and Jewish volunteers.

Through practice, the algorithm learns to recognize antisemitic content and starts to generalize language patterns when given numerous examples of both antisemitism and not antisemitic content. In the same way, a child might take in specific information about a situation (This cup is orange) and start to generalize to their broader experience of the world (This is what the color orange looks like). Over time, the model gets better at predicting the likelihood that a piece of content it has never seen before a tweet, comment, or post is or is not antisemitic.

In August 2021, ADL conducted what we believe to be the first independent, AI-assisted, community-rooted measurement of identity-based hate across Reddit and Twitter. We found that the rate of antisemitic content on Twitter during the week we investigated was 25% higher than on Reddit. The potential reach of the antisemitic content we found on Twitter in that one week alone was 130 million people. If this is the case on some of the most responsible tech platforms, it stands to reason that these issues are much more dire on platforms run by other less forward-thinking tech companies, such as Facebook.

If all platforms were as open to sharing data as Twitter and Reddit, the future might be brighter. Groups like ADL would be able to employ tools like the OHI to audit all social platforms, rooted in the perspective of targeted communities, and ascertain the prevalence of hate against those groups on those platforms. We would then be able to evaluate whether efforts by the tech company were sufficient in decreasing hate on their platforms. We would be able to compare rates between platforms using the same measurements and determine what methods of mitigating hate have been most successful.

Unfortunately, as we described in our data accessibility scorecard, platforms other than Reddit and Twitter are not providing the necessary data to make this a reality. Platforms should provide the necessary data to make this a reality and if they do not, governments should find thoughtful means to require it.

ADL hopes the way that the OHI combines machine learning and human expertise and centers targeted communities in technology development offers a practical path to holding platforms accountable. The potential exists for other civil society organizations to develop similar tools using volunteers to label homophobia, transphobia, misogyny, and racism.

We need more technology that detects identity-based hate. If social media platforms are to effectively fight hate, they must allow the people most affected by it to lead the way.

Daniel Kelley is the Director of Strategy and Operations for the ADLCenter for Technology and Society

Originally posted here:

To Stop Online Hate, Big Tech Must Let Those Being Targeted Lead the Way - Algemeiner

Major technology companies are becoming faster at fixing security vulnerabilities, incentivized to close gaps for customers.

Vendors took an average of 52 days to fix security vulnerabilities in 2021, down from 80 days three years ago, data from Google's Project Zero show.

Between 2019 and 2021, Apple fixed 87% of its bugs in 90 days; Microsoft fixed 76% in the same period.

"The tech community is getting faster at fixing discovered security issues for a variety of reasons, including advancing DevOps and CI/CD technological advancements, adopting bug bounty programs into the mainstream, embracing open source platforms' security issue tracking, and Project Zero making an impact," said Eylam Milner, director, Argon Technology with Aqua Security.

There is a caveat to this progress. The largest tech companies handle their bug bounty programs differently than smaller or lesser-known companies.

"Companies such as Microsoft, Facebook, Oracle, Mozilla, and Linux are very different in the way they operate, let alone handle security issues, than most software vendors and open source projects," Milner said.

While the average time to fix a vulnerability has gone down, that could be a bit misleading based on the companies involved. On the other hand, trends like this often have a trickle-down effect that is making a positive impact across the tech industry at large.

"When a large tech company (e.g., Facebook) is forced to fix a security issue in 90 days, this puts the company in a position to innovate with in-house organizational structure, engineering culture, and even new technology solutions," said Milner.

The engineering community at large often mimics big tech innovators, moving forward the way the entire community handles security issue fixing.

While the tech industry is getting better at remediating vulnerabilities in a more timely manner, the need to fix problems is not trickling down to the organizations using the software. If a customer lacks urgency in deploying a patch, a flaw can linger.

Even though members of the security community evangelize the importance of defined security patching processes and procedures as part of an overall security policy, there is still a knowledge gap, according to Matt Carpenter, senior principal security researcher with GRIMM.

"One of the core components of a good security policy is knowing what technologies/assets your organization maintains, and having regular patching intervals, processes and written procedures," Carpenter said.

Although companies realize the value of automated updates and regular automated checks and reports for out-of-date machines, less-security mature companies fall behind.

No matter how good tech companies have become at assessing vulnerabilities, there is always room for improvement. Adding automated application security solutions is key for diving deeper into vulnerability assessment and remediation.

"It's impossible for software consumers and vendors to handle a large amount of security risk in large codebases without an automated process for detection, remediation and prevention," said Milner.

The next step is to teach organizations to partner with trusted security companies in a long-term strategy, which helps reduce both risk and cost in the long term.

"For example, each organization should have a Security Architecture Review or similarly Threat And Risk Assessment (TARA) from a trusted and knowledgeable external security company," said Carpenter.

While informative, for assessments to add the most value, organizations should put together an internal security team with a top executive onboard, such as a CSO, CIO or CTO, to act as a liaison with the external assessment group.

This ensures assessment findings are communicated throughout the company and the necessary remediation steps can happen.

It's important to have clear strategies for both addressing general asset management, according to Daniel Trauner, senior director of security with Axonius.

"Without an asset management strategy, you might not even be aware that there's a patch to apply," Trauner said.

And if patches aren't applied in a timely manner, the quick remediation time of vulnerability remediation by tech companies won't do much good to prevent attacks

More:

Big tech is fixing bugs faster. Will that influence trickle down? - CIO Dive

OPINION:

The last few weeks have not been good for the corporate media or anyone who values the principle of free speech on social media. From Hunter Bidens laptop to the bogus Russian dossier, to COVID-19 vaccines and transgender issues, glaring errors of journalism and stringent thought control have been proven, once again, to always flow in one direction.

The Washington Post became the latest media outlet to belatedly confirm the authenticity of Hunters laptop, nearly a year and a half after his emails and texts surfaced late in the 2020 presidential election. These materials had been derided by most media as Russian disinformation for 17 months.

The Post story followed The New York Times, which two weeks earlier inserted its own confirmation of the laptop into the 24th paragraph of a report about the ongoing federal investigation into Hunters lucrative, habitual selling of access to his powerful father, now-President Joe Biden.

But still unexamined by the media are the emails that link Mr. Biden to Hunters international business schemes.

Even so, the burst of reporting birthed a segment on CNN, previously unthinkable there, in which senior legal analyst Elie Honig intoned that the case building against Hunter represents a very real, very substantial investigation of potentially serious federal crimes, creating a realistic chance this could result in federal charges.

In the wake of this grudging journalism came news from the Federal Election Commission that Hillary Clintons 2016 campaign and the Democratic National Committee were fined a total of $113,000 for improperly disclosing how they paid for the infamous Steele Dossier. The fabricated opposition research document was central to the now-discredited Russian collusion hoax that most media and Democrats in Congress used to undermine the first two years of former President Donald Trumps administration.

Silicon Valley also got in on the action, and as a consultant to GETTR, a new free speech platform, I pay close attention to what happens on social media.

Twitter reminded us that it still wields unchecked power to stifle free speech by suspending journalist John Solomons account for linking to his own story about a peer-reviewed COVID-19 vaccine study.

Mr. Solomon reported on research from Swedens Lund University, which has worked closely with the National Institutes of Health and the World Health Organization, examining how the Pfizer vaccine interacts with liver cells.

Despite the studys appearance in Current Issues in Molecular Biology, a respected medical journal, Twitter ruled that Mr. Solomon had violated its policy on spreading misleading and potentially harmful information related to COVID-19.

Apparently, Twitter is now staffed by expert molecular scientists who feel empowered to invalidate complex medical research.

To this point, defenders of the social media oligarchs have claimed that they run private companies, and so can enforce whatever rules they want. But what about when the government is the entity which instigates the censorship?

White House press secretary Jen Psaki has already admitted that the Biden administration flags selected social media posts and certain accounts for Facebook, identifying them as spreaders of COVID-19 misinformation. Its unknown if Mr. Solomons tweet was singled out by the White House, but at the very least, the executive branchs engagement in censorial activity emboldens tech companies and is precisely the sort of overreach the First Amendment is intended to prohibit.

And Twitter has been on a suspension rampage of late, targeting conservative accounts over the alleged misgendering of transgender people.

The satirical website Babylon Bee, commentator Charlie Kirk and Fox News host Tucker Carlson were all locked out of their Twitter accounts for various offenses involving tweets about Rachel Levine, an official in the Biden administration who is transgender.

Rep. Vicky Hartzler, a congresswoman from Missouri who is running for the U.S. Senate in that state, was suspended for tweeting her television ad about University of Pennsylvania swimmer Lia Thomas, a biological male who has been dominating womens collegiate swimming.

At the end of this troubling period of overdue reporting and crackdowns on free expression all of which displayed bias against conservatives there was at least the chance for reporters to ask the White House about the revelations contained in the presidents sons computer.

Biden communications director Kate Bedingfield handled the White House press briefing on Tuesday and Wednesday this week, which was good timing since she had dismissed the laptop as Russian misinformation during the closing days of the 2020 presidential race.

Only, not a single reporter asked her about it.

But why would they? Most of them agreed with her back then and dont want to admit their error now.

But is a tiny bit of objectivity really too much to ask?

Tim Murtaugh is a Washington Times columnist and the founder and principal of Line Drive Public Affairs, a communication consulting firm.

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Media and Big Tech censorship is alive and well - Washington Times