SourceCast: Episode 113: Unclear Motivations
Supplier Report: 3/9/2018
Amazon had an outage this week taking down popular sites like Slack and Atlassian. This outage happened as AWS is in talks with the Pentagon on another cloud contract (in which they are the front-runners). As AWS gets bigger, should companies look at other options so they don’t go down with the Titanic?
Apple found their supply chain had more human rights violations that originally reported via an internal audit conducted by an independent 3rd party. The company is in the process of rolling out a formal process to manage these types of ongoing violations.
IBM has over 400 active blockchain projects with customers at the moment. As IBM shifts to newer business models and services, some of their older customers like the Canadian government, are having major implementation issues on traditional services.
Acquisitions
- WeWork acquires SEO and marketing company Conductor
There’s a lot that make WeWork and Conductor a natural fit. Seth and his team built Conductor to provide the insights, education, and resources their customers need to succeed — in other words, Conductor helps their customers do what they love, and do it better. Conductor has made it easier for us to reach potential WeWork members who are looking for workspace. It’s also helped us get the word out about the services and amenities that we offer to companies of all sizes.
https://beta.techcrunch.com/2018/03/06/wework-acquires-conductor/
- WTF is CFIUS?
The U.S. is a technology leader, and it has a robust set of economic warfare tools to protect its competitive advantages. One of those tools is CFIUS, or the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States. You might have heard it in the news recently because of its potential impact on Broadcom’s mega offer to buy Qualcomm, or because Congress is considering strengthening its provisions to potentially regulate startup investments from foreign firms.
CFIUS is becoming a lot more important these days due to a single country: China. There are few economic stories more fundamental than the continued rise of China as a world superpower. From humble experiments with capitalism in the early 1980s to the behemoth it is today, China’s economic growth has been nothing short of extraordinary. Underpinning that growth has been a deep appetite for technology and scientific research, first learned through overseas universities, and now through indigenous development.
As China’s wealth has grown, so has its desire to own the most distinguished technology companies in the world, and that’s where CFIUS comes in. The United States’s latest National Security Strategy labels China a “strategic competitor.” As tensions flare, CFIUS will be at the heart of the battle for who will ultimately own the technology industry.
- Google is selling off Zagat
Seven years after picking up Zagat for $151 million, Google is selling off the perennial restaurant recommendation service. The New York Times is reporting this morning that the technology giant is selling off the company to The Infatuation, a review site founded nine years back by former music execs.
The company had been rumored to be courting a buyer since early this year. As Reuters noted at the time, Zagat has increasingly become less of a focus for Google, as the company began growing its database of restaurant recommendations organically. Zagat, meanwhile, has lost much of the shine it had when Google purchased it nearly a decade ago.
https://techcrunch.com/2018/03/05/google-is-selling-off-zagat/?ncid=rss
Cloud
- AWS outage: Datacentre power cut knocks ‘hundreds’ of internet services offline
The cloud services giant confirmed that its US-East-1 region suffered two separate power loss incidents over the course of two hours in one of the site’s network peering facilities, each one lasting about 10 minutes.
As a result, organisations that rely on that region to host their applications and workloads “may have experienced internet connectivity issues”, said AWS in a statement on its services status page.
“Our network is designed to be fully redundant with multiple independent peering facilities in every region,” the statement continued. “Some customers experienced elevated latency and packet loss while the network rerouted affected traffic to these unaffected network peering facilities.
“Some packet loss was also observed as we restored traffic to the affected network peering facility.”
http://www.computerweekly.com/news/252436193/AWS-outage-Datacentre-power-cut-knocks-out-hundreds-of-internet-services
And this is why corporate customers should at least think about alternatives to AWS, 67% of all cloud is on AWS. When a hacker or a outage occurs, there are much bigger impacts. - Cloud-Based Disaster Recovery: How To Avoid the ‘Gotchas’
Sync-and-share solutions are a great opportunity to examine one of the key problems of cloud computing: Namely, that expectations rarely match reality. IT practitioners have a pretty good idea of how sync-and-share solutions work. As a result, it rarely occurs to us to sit users down and have the talk with them about the cloud not being magic. Unfortunately, many users encounter cloud-based solutions with erroneous preconceptions, and this “knowledge” leads to errors.
One common belief is that sync-and-share solutions adequately protect users against ransomware. They don’t. Modern ransomware makes numerous changes to files over time, ultimately running out the number of versions of files kept by the sync-and-share solution. There’s even a little game of cat-and-mouse going on with some of them where the sync-and-share vendor tries to add some level of ransomware detection based on access patterns, and the ransomware evolves new access patterns.
https://virtualizationreview.com/articles/2018/03/06/cloud-dr-gotchas-to-avoid.aspx
- Microsoft to offer governments local version of Azure cloud service
The pairing of Azure Stack, Microsoft’s localized cloud product, and Azure Government, the government-tailored version of Microsoft’s cloud, comes as competition against Amazon.com Inc for major clients in the public sector ramps up.
The new offering, which will be made available in mid-2018, is designed to appeal to governments and agencies with needs for on-premise servers, such as in a military operation or in an embassy abroad, said Tom Keane, Microsoft Azure’s head of global infrastructure.
“Quite literally we’ve designed Azure Stack with the scenario of a submarine in mind,” Keane told Reuters.
- Amazon, Oracle, Microsoft jockey for Pentagon’s cloud business
Catz’s meeting with Deputy Secretary of Defense Patrick Shanahan, which was confirmed by a department spokesman, came as technology companies are raising concerns that the Pentagon is leaning toward choosing Amazon.com Inc’s cloud division as a single provider for a multi-year contract to modernise its technology infrastructure.
Having already won two other government cloud contacts, Amazon Web Services is widely perceived as the front-runner for the Defense Department’s cloud award, while companies including Oracle, Microsoft Corp, and International Business Machines Corp fight for a piece of that business.
Oracle has a vested interest in how the contract is awarded because it has long-term contracts with multiple government agencies that use its flagship database to store information on their own systems. As the agencies look to switch to cloud computing and eye market leader Amazon, these moves threaten Oracle’s traditional revenue sources. Oracle has tried to protect its database business by offering cloud services of its own, but has come late to that market.
Software/SaaS
- IBM told investors that it has over 400 blockchain clients — including Walmart, Visa, and Nestlé
At least 400 IBM customers are now running blockchain-based projects, according to the briefing. Among those customers are 63 that work together with certain themes: 25 companies in global trade, 14 companies in food tracking, and 14 companies in global payments. Some of IBM’s most recognizable blockchain clients include Nestlé, Visa, Walmart, and HSBC.
While blockchains continue to be widely associated with startups and crypto-millionaires, IBM’s client list shows that large enterprises are truly embracing the technology.
IBM and Walmart actually launched a joint food safety blockchain project globally last year, which enables the grocery chain to figure out where specific produce originated in a matter of seconds.
http://www.businessinsider.com/ibm-blockchain-enterprise-customers-walmart-visa-nestl-2018-3
Datacenter/Hardware
- Amazon will stop selling Nest smart home devices, escalating its war with Google
The stakes are huge. Both Amazon and Google are building out a new voice-powered operating system that can control everything in your life — from your lights to your garage door to the music and video you stream. Amazon’s acquisition of Ring will give it a nice boost on the hardware side as it continues to build out Alexa’s AI. Ring was already one of Nest’s biggest competitors. Now it has the nearly-limitless funding needed from Amazon to go after its Google-backed rival.
The rivalry between Amazon and Google extends beyond the smart home, though.
http://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-wont-sell-nest-products-from-google-2018-3
- Google’s new Bristlecone processor brings it one step closer to quantum supremacy
Today, Google said that it believes that Bristlecone, its latest quantum processor, will put it on a path to reach quantum supremacy in the future. The purpose of Bristlecone, Google says, it to provide its researchers with a testbed “for research into system error rates and scalability of our qubit technology, as well as applications in quantum simulation, optimization, and machine learning.”
One of the major issues that all quantum computers have to contend with is error rates. Quantum computers typically run at extremely low temperatures (we’re talking millikelvins here) and are shielded from the environment because today’s quantum bits are still highly unstable and any noise can lead to errors.
Because of this, the qubits in modern quantum processors (the quantum computing versions of traditional bits) aren’t really single qubits but often a combination of numerous bits to help account for potential errors. Another limited factor right now is that most of these systems can only preserve their state for under 100 microseconds.
Other
- Apple finds more serious supplier problems as its audits expand
Apple said in the report that the proportion of “low performers,” or suppliers scoring less than 59 points on its 100-point scale, fell to 1 percent in 2017 from 3 percent in 2016 and 14 percent in 2014. “High performers” with scores of more than 90 rose to a record high of 59 percent from 47 percent the year before.
Apple found 44 “core violations” of its labor rules in 2017, double the previous year. Those included three instances of employees forced to pay excessive fees for a job, a practice Apple banned in 2015.
In one case, over 700 foreign contract workers recruited from the Philippines were charged a total of $1 million to work for a supplier. Apple said it forced the supplier to repay the money.
- Why Amazon Is Immune To Almost Any Boycott
Amazon, however, is in a different position–one that’s great for Jeff Bezos and annoying for activists. “For all its problems,” says King, “[Amazon] has a pretty robust reputation.” He goes on, “a boycott against Amazon doesn’t really change in people’s minds what kind of company Amazon is.” Which is to say, Bezos’s behemoth website has remained a relative constant for all these years, strategically staying out of the public eye while amassing hundreds of millions of loyal users. People know what the company is, what it has been doing, and the services its offers.
What’s more, the boycotts levied against the retail giant aren’t about some deep-seated collusion with the forces of evil, but rather passive business dealings. The activist organization Sleeping Giants, for instance, has been lobbying for Amazon to stop advertising on Breitbart. Though the group has had success with other campaigns–it got over a thousand advertisers to pull advertising from both Breitbart and the Fox News’ The O’Reilly Factor–Amazon has yet to change its ways. Though it may ruffle some people’s feathers that the company advertises on a far-right website or allows a gun rights organization to distribute its TV content, that doesn’t reveal an internal clash of values. Amazon is just doing business–the same business it’s been doing for years. And since people are very unlikely to stop using Amazon, the company probably sees no reason to acquiesce.
https://www.fastcompany.com/40538592/how-amazon-is-immune-to-almost-any-boycott
- Canada’s IBM Payroll Plans Go Bust — Costing $1 Billion
“They should have known better,” Daviau told the publication, adding that IBM holds some of the blame because it also went forward with the payroll system’s launch.
“IBM got into a contract with the government that was very beneficial to IBM, which meant that the contract — despite non-delivery — could continue to be extended and IBM could continue to come back to the pot for money,” she said.
In a statement, IBM said it is “fulfilling its obligations on the Phoenix contract, and the software is functioning as intended.” It added that it “continues to work in partnership with the government’s efforts to resolve the project’s issues and remains committed to the project’s overall success.”
https://www.pymnts.com/news/b2b-payments/2018/ibm-canada-payroll/
- More ‘boomerang’ employees return to Microsoft as corporate culture shifts
Microsoft has always had “boomerang” employees, as have other tech companies in the highly competitive industry. During the few years before Nadella stepped into the role, about 12 percent of the company’s new hires in the U.S. each year had previous job stints at the company. But that number ticked up to 16 percent, or 621 boomerangs, between July 2014 and July 2015, starting a few months after Nadella took over as CEO.
For the recent Microsoft boomerangs, returning to Redmond feels like stepping into a company that has changed — albeit one where that still occurs slowly.
- Marriott Employee Roy Jones Hit ‘Like.’ Then China Got Mad
Craig Smith, head of Asia-Pacific for Marriott, said in a separate statement, “We made a few mistakes in China earlier this year that suggested some associates did not understand or take seriously enough the sovereignty and territorial integrity of China. Those incidents were mistakes and in no way representative of our views as a company.”
“Not only can’t you speak freely inside of China, but you can’t even speak freely outside of China—and that’s really bad,” said Xiao Qiang, a Chinese internet expert at the University of California at Berkeley.
Marriott was within its legal rights to fire Mr. Jones, legal experts say. But some say the severity of the penalty—termination, rather than a reprimand or suspension—highlights the increasingly unforgiving environment for those who offend Chinese sensibilities.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/marriott-employee-roy-jones-hit-like-then-china-got-mad-1520094910
Photo: Kirstyn Paynter
Supplier Report: 3/2/2018
Facebook and Twitter are fighting for the hearts and minds of social media users. As Facebook struggles with “fake news” and changes their algorithms (hurting some legitimate sites in the process), Twitter is using this moment to embrace the press… but will anything improve?
Amazon has purchased another home camera company. It was announced they purchased Ring (a video doorbell maker) after purchasing Blink in December. Amazon really wants to find away to make customers comfortable with letting them into their homes…
On the Amazon topic, they are in a race with Apple to become the first company to be worth a trillion dollars…
Acquisitions
- Amazon Acquires Ring, Maker of Video Doorbells
Amazon.com Inc. acquired Ring, maker of video doorbells, in a deal valued at more than $1 billion, a person familiar with the transaction said, giving the online giant a bigger foothold in the burgeoning internet business of home security.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/amazon-acquires-ring-maker-of-video-doorbells-1519768639
- Nokia acquires Unium, a mesh WiFi startup that works with Google Fiber, as part of big home WiFi push
While Nokia’s former handset business forges ahead with its new device strategy under licensee HMD, Nokia itself has taken one more step to build out its business with carriers in a new wave of services. To coincide with MWC in Barcelona and a bigger step into the WiFi business, the company today announced that it has acquired Unium, a startup out of Seattle that builds technology for mesh WiFi for home networking services.
Unium’s tech is used to address one of the biggest pain-points in home WiFi today: it helps fill in dead spots in home WiFi arrangements, where you may not get signal or interference from other networks, and the accompanying security issues that might come alongside those.
Artificial Intelligence
- The Future of Policing Is Being Hashed Out in Secret (thanks JD)
It should go without saying that experimenting with predictive AI in real-world law enforcement demands public oversight and awareness. The debate that is now beginning should have been had before the technology was used to build indictments, not afterward. Nevertheless, it would also be a mistake if the only outrage is over the failure to make public disclosures. The more important conversation must address the deeper issues this case raises.
Law enforcement — and criminal justice more broadly — must be evaluated on two separate criteria: pragmatic effectiveness and legal justice. On the first criterion, it’s important to note that there isn’t yet any clear evidence that the Palantir-New Orleans partnership works. Palantir would like to take credit for a New Orleans crime dip, but the data and the timing don’t necessarily support that. For now, the efficacy of machine-based crime prediction and protection must be treated as unproven at best.
- Amazon vs. Google vs. Microsoft: Big tech firms gird for AI talent battle
As Quartz points points out, top AI talent is scarce “and companies are willing to pay millions to obtain new talent.” A case-in-point, Google paid more than $500 million in 2014 for UK-based AI startup DeepMind. And we’ll see millions more paid for AI startups, scientists and engineers as the talent war heats up.
Separately, Microsoft’s Cortana has a new boss. Javier Soltero, who formerly worked on Office will now be in charge of Cortana. He’ll report to Harry Shum, who’s the head of AI for the company.
https://martechtoday.com/amazon-vs-google-vs-microsoft-big-tech-firms-gird-ai-talent-battle-211894
They went with “gird” in the headline, I wonder if AI wrote it.
Cloud
- The Best Thing for Dropbox Was Breaking Up With the Cloud
Those paragraphs in the public offering document (page 67) summarize the difficult and nerdy work to shift a vast volume of Dropbox users’ digital files from Amazon’s computer networks to Dropbox’s own and to close dormant accounts to free up storage capacity. This yearslong shift to wean Dropbox off Amazon Web Services wasn’t glamorous work, but it improved Dropbox’s finances substantially. Without exaggeration, the shift away from cloud computing is one of the biggest reasons Dropbox is able to go public now.
- Nasty, new security threats are scaring .govs to the cloud
“I believe that the leadership within the government is ready for this change,” Wood said. AWS’ Commercial Cloud Services, or C2S, and Secret Commercial Cloud Service, or SC2S, are the “secret” and “top secret” clouds, respectively, Wood explained. The intelligence community — including its military components — have been working together to assess the security features of these clouds. The group of 38 assessors clearly see the benefits and are gaining confidence that the data is protected and are now closer to reciprocity than ever before.
A common vernacular for cybersecurity pros has hurt attempts to build expertise and strong security standards and systems in the past. The signing of the president’s executive order on cybersecurity is now mandating the adoption of the NIST Cybersecurity Framework.
- Apple may no longer be using Microsoft’s Azure
The updated Apple security guide now lists Amazon’s S3 and the Google Cloud Platform as where some encrypted “chunks” of files are stored. Apple’s iCloud stores users’ contacts, calendars, photos and documents, among other types of information. iCloud also is used by some third-party apps to store and sync documents and key values for app data, Apple’s security guide notes.
CRN reported in March 2016 that Google signed on Apple as a customer for the Google Cloud platform, citing “multiple sources with knowledge of the matter.” At that time, CRN also reported that Apple had “significantly reduced its reliance on Amazon Web Services,” though had not abandoned AWS entirely.
http://www.zdnet.com/article/apple-may-no-longer-be-using-microsofts-azure/
Interesting timing to reduce reliance on AWS as both companies race to be the first one trillion dollar company.
Security
- Equifax finds another 2.4 million people affected by its data breach
“This is not about newly discovered stolen data,” Paulino do Rego Barros, Jr., Equifax’s Interim CEO, said in a statement. “It’s about sifting through the previously identified stolen data, analyzing other information in our databases that was not taken by the attackers and making connections that enabled us to identify additional individuals.” Equifax said that because the attackers appeared to be focused on obtaining social security numbers, that’s what their investigation centered on during its initial phases. These additional 2.4 million individuals didn’t have their social security numbers stolen and were therefore not spotted earlier in the investigation.
https://www.engadget.com/2018/03/01/equifax-2-4-million-more-people-affected-data-breach/
- Apple to Start Putting Sensitive Encryption Keys in China
The keys are complex strings of random characters that can unlock the photos, notes and messages that users store in iCloud. Until now, Apple has stored the codes only in the U.S. for all global users, the company said, in keeping with its emphasis on customer privacy and security.
While Apple says it will ensure that the keys are protected in China, some privacy experts and former Apple security employees worry that moving the keys to China makes them more vulnerable to seizure by a government with a record of censorship and political suppression.
“Once the keys are there, they can’t necessarily pull out and take those keys because the server could be seized by the Chinese government,” said Matthew Green, a professor of cryptography at Johns Hopkins University. Ultimately, he says, “It means that Apple can’t say no.”
https://www.wsj.com/articles/apple-to-start-putting-sensitive-encryption-keys-in-china-1519497574
- GitHub survives massive DDoS attack relatively unscathed
GitHub, a web-based code distribution and version control service, survived a massive denial of service attack on Wednesday. According to a report at Wired, a staggering 1.35 terabits per second (Tbps) of traffic hit the site at once. Within 10 minutes the company called for help from a DDoS mitigation service similar to Google’s Project Shield, Akamai’s Prolexic, which took over to filter and weed out malicious traffic packets. The attack, says Wired, ended after eight minutes. This may have been the largest DDoS attack ever; Wired notes the attack on domain name server Dyn in late 2016 reached 1.2 Tbps of traffic.
https://www.engadget.com/2018/03/01/github-survives-massive-ddos-attack-relatively-unscathed/
Software/SaaS
- LittleThings blames its shutdown on Facebook algorithm change
Then Facebook made another big change to its algorithm, one that was supposed to prioritize content from friends and family over news publishers. Speiser said this cut LittleThings’ influencer and organic traffic (which was its most valuable traffic) by 75 percent.
“No previous algorithm update ever came close to this level of decimation,” he wrote. “The position it put us in was beyond dire. The businesses looking to acquire LittleThings got spooked and promptly exited the sale process, leaving us in jeopardy of our bank debt convenants and ultimately bringing an expedited end to our incredible story.”
https://techcrunch.com/2018/02/28/littlethings-shutdown/?ncid=rss
This is what happens when you base a business model completely on a platform you don’t own or control. - While Facebook spars with critics, Twitter goes for humility on social media
Twitter’s smaller size relative to Facebook also may help it repair its image because it’s not as dominant as Facebook. The media and marketing community is also eager for platform allies to counter Facebook and Google’s enormity, and Twitter has given the impression it wants to get out ahead of the trolls, bots and other abuses of its service. But as with Facebook, Twitter is vulnerable for having let the abuse problem continue as long as it has, and the PR goodwill will only last so long. It also has a chance to get out ahead of its role being spotlighted in probes of Russia’s meddling in the run-up to the U.S. presidential election in 2016.
To one publishing executive, Dorsey came off as “sincere, not defensive. But they have to actually do something. Talk is cheap. If they want to become a credible publishing entity, they need to take responsibility. And that means action.”
https://digiday.com/media/facebook-spars-critics-twitter-goes-humility-social-media/
Other
- Apple Is Going to Be the First Trillion-Dollar Company
Apple’s board of directors had most recently authorized a $210 billion share-repurchase program that is expected to be completed by March 2019, according to Apple investor relations. That was before the very corporate friendly 2017 tax reform bill was passed. I would expect that bill will encourage even more share repurchases. We should not be surprised to see a 10 or even 20 percent share count reduction over the next five years.
- IBM gives Services staff until 2019 to get agile
IBM has spent years telling the world that its Notes suite is as fine a collaboration environment as there is to be found anywhere, if only you’d give it a chance and appreciate its charms. But among the changes required to demonstrate agility is cessation of email use in favour of devops darling Slack. Staff are also expected to start using WebEx.
Come September 30, IBM wants its services staff to have hit level-three agility maturity, and to see “positive trending of agile metrics.” Come December 30, Big Blue wants “continuous improvement leading to client advocacy.”
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/02/26/ibm_gives_services_staff_until_2019_to_get_agile/
IBM report, “Who Says Elephants Can’t Dance?”“There’s been a feeling historically that the elephants can’t dance, the incumbents will find it hard to respond and that everyone will be Uber-ed or Airbnb-ed out of existence,” Mark Foster, senior vice president of IBM Global Business Services, told Reuters in an interview.
“But what we are seeing is, actually, there is a limit as to how far that can go.”
While some sectors had been hugely disrupted by new digital entrants and some intermediaries were pushed out, many of those changes were now being led by existing industry players, he said.
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2018/02/ibm-report-elephants-dance-180225153412288.html
- How SoftBank, World’s Biggest Tech Investor, Throws Around Its Cash
They describe a man who sometimes makes gut-instinct decisions in businesses he knows little about—such as the time he spent about 30 minutes deciding he wanted to invest $200 million in a startup that grows vegetables indoors. Other times, he compiles an elaborate analysis, inundating his directors with hundreds of pages of documents to help explain an investment target.
To strike quickly, he sometimes commits to investments before getting approval from his fund’s investment committee, some of these people say. And he often spars with his executives and board members over his proposals until they are convinced or acquiesce.
Photo: Kevin Stoop
Supplier Report: 2/23/2018
Tesla and other battery-based companies are consuming so much cobalt that Apple is considering stockpiling it. The company wants to hedge against future price increases. Apple can use all that new Warren Buffett money to help pay for that stockpile (he shifted more money away from IBM and over to Apple).
Telsa also made news this week due to their AWS account being hacked and set up to mine for bitcoin (you can’t make this up).
Back in August, I dedicated a few podcasts on Google’s anti-competition loss in Europe. Bloomberg revisited the story to figure out who benefited from the ruling… as I mentioned in the podcast in August, it wasn’t small businesses.
Artificial Intelligence
- If you don’t like what IBM is pitching, blame Watson: It’s generating sales ‘solutions’ now
Internal documents seen by The Register reveal the tech goliath has developed something it calls “cognitive solutioning,” to be deployed when Big Blue is asked to do a job that can’t easily be scoped from its service catalogue.
“We’ve trained Watson on our standard solutions and offerings, plus all the prior solutions IBM has designed for large enterprises,” the corporate files state. “This means we can review a client’s RFP [request for proposal] and come up with a new proposed architecture and technical solution design for a state of the art system that can run enterprise businesses at scale.” Proposed solutions will be delivered “in minutes,” it is claimed.
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/02/16/ibm_watson_sales_pitches/
- IBM’s Watson Project Suffers Backlash from Overhype
The IBM Watson project is one example of an AI project that was over-hyped, a project that has tried to tackle too much too soon. IBM had early successes with AI. It’s Deep Blue and Watson technologies proved to be superior to humans in competitions like chess and the game show Jeopardy. IBM then announced that they were re-positioning Watson from a novelty to an AI project with the target of improving cancer care. Despite a big budget and significant positive press for the project, a recent analysis of the results from the Watson cancer project are underwhelming.
The investigation was made by STAT and found that “Perhaps the most stunning overreach is in the company’s claim that Watson for Oncology, through artificial intelligence, can sift through reams of data to generate new insights and identify, as an IBM sales rep put it, ‘even new approaches’ to cancer care… While Watson became a household name by winning the TV game show ‘Jeopardy!’, its programming is akin to a different game-playing machine: the Mechanical Turk, a chess-playing robot of the 1700s, which dazzled audiences but hid a secret — a human operator shielded inside. In the case of Watson for Oncology, those human operators are a couple dozen physicians at a single, though highly respected, U.S. hospital: Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York. Doctors there are empowered to input their own recommendations into Watson, even when the evidence supporting those recommendations is thin.”
http://formtek.com/blog/artificial-intelligence-ibms-watson-project-suffers-backlash-from-overhype/
Security
- Tesla’s Amazon cloud account was hacked and used to mine cryptocurrency
Tesla’s Amazon Web Services account was hacked to mine cryptocurrency, Fortune first reported. The hack, which was brought to Tesla’s attention by the cybersecurity startup RedLock, also reportedly exposed some of Tesla’s proprietary data related to mapping, telemetry, and vehicle servicing.
RedLock discovered the hack after it found an IT administrative console that didn’t have a password, but the company was unable to determine who initiated the hack or how much cryptocurrency was mined. According to Fortune, Tesla paid RedLock over $3,000 as part of its bug bounty program, which rewards people who find vulnerabilities in the company’s products or services that could be exploited by hackers.
http://www.businessinsider.com/hackers-teslas-amazon-cloud-to-mine-cryptocurrency-2018-2
Datacenter/Hardware
- Cisco Switches Back On
A major refresh of its switching products last summer helped lift the company’s overall revenue by nearly 3% year over year to $11.9 billion for the period ended Jan. 27. That was Cisco’s first quarter of growth after eight straight periods of declines. The applications and security segments each grew revenue by about 6% year over year.
Those results, along with a better-than-expected forecast, were good enough to boost Cisco’s share price by 6% in after-hours trading. Investors also are enthusiastic about the company’s cash hoard of $34 billion, net of debt, that could fuel future deals thanks to the recent tax overhaul. Cisco still has plenty of diversification ahead of it, but a revived core businesses should make the process less painful.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/cisco-switches-back-on-1518649676
- IBM vs Google vs Intel – The race to quantum computing
“Using… classical computers, it will take 3,000 years,” she says about a famous and burdensome encryption problem. To tackle the same problem, a quantum computer “could solve it in minutes.”
She lists the myriad of other applications quantum computers could optimise, such as complex physical modelling for climate, economics, and engineering fields, advanced chemical and material simulations, machine learning, and database searching.
“As a consequence,” she concludes, “there’s a massive international race to build a quantum computer.”
https://datacenternews.asia/story/ibm-vs-google-race-quantum-computing/
- Apple is trying to lock down battery components before electric carmakers get them
Apple is in talks to buy cobalt directly from miners to help shield it from any shortages sparked by the boom in electric cars, according to a report from Bloomberg. Cobalt is a key mineral used in lithium-ion batteries, and Bloomberg says that Apple is looking to secure contracts for several thousand metric tons of cobalt each year for five years or longer. Its first discussions for deals took place a year ago, but another source told Bloomberg that Apple might not even go ahead with the plans.
If Apple does end up buying cobalt directly, it will be in competition with car manufacturers and battery makers in locking up supplies of the raw material. Car giants like BMW and Volkswagen are also searching for multiyear deals to ensure they also have enough cobalt to meet targets in electric car production. Bloomberg reports that smartphone batteries use around eight grams of refined cobalt, but a battery for an electric car needs more than a thousand times that amount.
https://www.theverge.com/2018/2/21/17035264/apple-buy-direct-cobalt-miners-battery
Other
- Amazon’s Latest Ambition: To Be a Major Hospital Supplier
The market for medical supplies is one of a growing number of businesses the online retail giant has set in its sights, from groceries to clothing, often with market-moving results. Health-care distributor shares dropped Tuesday, in part from The Wall Street Journal’s report of Amazon’s intensified push into the industry, analysts said.
Amazon recently dispatched employees to a large Midwestern hospital system, where officials are testing whether they can use Amazon Business to order health supplies for the system’s roughly 150 outpatient facilities, according to a hospital official overseeing the efforts.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/amazons-latest-ambition-to-be-a-major-hospital-supplier-1518517802
- Warren Buffett doubles down on Apple, dumps nearly all of his IBM shares
Buffett’s investment firm, Berkshire Hathaway, ended the year with 165.33 million Apple shares, collectively worth some $27.6 billion based on yesterday’s closing price. Berkshire Hathaway is now Apple’s fourth-largest institutional investor. The firm began buying Apple stock in early 2016.
Meanwhile, Berkshire Hathaway sold off around 35 million shares of IBM in the fourth quarter, and entered 2018 with just 2.05 million shares. The firm began buying up IBM stock in 2011, and at one point held more than 80 million shares.
https://www.bizjournals.com/sanjose/news/2018/02/15/warren-buffett-aapl-ibm-teva.html
- Why Europe’s Google Rulings Don’t Benefit Consumers
Reporters for Politico have discovered that FairSearch, the non-profit group that filed the Android complaint in 2013, is under the full legal control of two giant companies: U.S.-based Oracle and South Africa-based Naspers, which owns shares in China’s Tencent and Russia’s Mail.ru. At the time the complaint was filed, Microsoft was also part of the effort, but it left FairSearch in 2015. Other companies that have been mentioned as FairSearch members are so-called adherent members without voting rights who “do not participate actively in the achievement of the association’s goals.”
This makes sense on a certain level: The small firms don’t have the deep pockets to hire expensive lawyers and PR consultants (FairSearch is working with elite firms Clifford Chance and Burson Marsteller). FairSearch has rejected Politico’s findings as immaterial, and some of its “adherent members” have backed this stance. But the implication is clear: If, at the end, it all comes down to Oracle’s and Naspers’s desire to keep Google in check, Google may end up punished but consumers and smaller companies won’t get much out of it.
Photo:Maria Badasian