Mai 2017 - Seite 131 von 189 - Cloud Computing Köln

BuzzFeed / Getty Images

Facebook’s quest to rid the News Feed of misinformation and misleading content has a new target: websites that are littered with “disruptive, shocking or malicious ads,” and that offer little actual content.

Beginning today, the social network will use artificial intelligence to determine if links shared on the social network direct people to websites that offer a “low quality web page experience” due to the nature of the ads and content being offered. Links that meet the criteria will show up lower in the News Feed, and will not be eligible to to be turned into an ad on Facebook.

The type of ads being targeted by Facebook most frequently appear in the form of content-recommendation ad units. These boxes placed adjacent to articles offer a headline and striking thumbnail image meant to entice people to click. The low-end variety of these ads use sexualized and sometimes shocking images, as well as celebrities, and misleading headlines to capture attention.

Here, for example, is a set of ads served by Content.ad on a fake news article:

Content.ad / Via archive.is

A recent report from BuzzFeed News found content-recommendation ads are the primary way fake news sites are making money from their articles. A study from ChangeAdversising.org also found these types of ads, though not necessarily the lowest quality versions of them, are present on more than 80% of the top 50 news websites in the US.

“We’re looking at the content of the ads themselves — are the ads these gross toenail fungus ads, are these sexually suggestive ads,” Greg Marra, a Facebook product manager who works on News Feed integrity, told BuzzFeed News. “We also look at ads in relation to the content on the page. Is it a page that has basically no substantive content and is full of these ads?”

BuzzFeed News recently profiled exactly the kind of site Facebook is now targeting. TrueTrumpers.com is a pro-Trump website run from Eastern Europe that often publishes completely false headlines meant to grab attention on Facebook. But once a person clicks through they are brought to a webpage that is littered in content ad units and that often contains no article text other than the false or misleading headline. The site also triggers a pop-up ad when a visitor clicks anywhere on the page.

A hoax from the site about actor Uma Thurman dying in a plane crash contains at least four different Content.ad units, three of which are displayed to the user before they see the text of the (fake) article:

True Trumpers / Via archive.is

Marra said he was familiar with True Trumpers as a result of the BuzzFeed News story, but declined to comment on the site specifically. However, the large Facebook page that was used to promote True Trumpers content was recently shut down by the company. A Facebook spokesperson said this was as a result of “fake account and spam violations.”

Marra said Facebook’s intention isn’t to single out content-recommendation ads as a whole — just the lowest quality offerings that are draped all over a webpage by publishers in order to increase their revenue.

“This isn’t [targeting] every webpage that has a content ad network on it,” Marra said. “…. We’re focused on the worst of the worst of this segment.”

He described bad faith players as “a group of people who not trying to create news websites that are trying to establish a long-term relationship with you the reader. They are really just trying to get the click and monetize the click.”

Marc Goldberg, the CEO of Trust Metrics, a company that evaluates online publishers and apps for quality, told BuzzFeed News that Facebook’s decision to down rank links from sites with low-quality ads could help choke off revenue for fake sites and fraudulent publishers.

“Fake publishing, fake news — there is a tremendous underbelly there that continues to siphon off ad dollars,” he said. “Cutting it off from parts of the ecosystem will be very, very helpful.”

He also said Facebook’s effort could be positive for the higher-end content-recommendation ad companies, and punish bad players that trick users with misleading ads.

“Recommendation engines that have stricter policies will be rewarded because now they’re not playing against competition that doesn’t care about the end user or the advertisers,” Goldberg said. “Ultimately this potentially the improves the user trust downstream, where now you’re going to see a lot less of these ads designed to produce curiosity clicks. That can help earn back the trust of advertisers and users.”

Facebook’s Marra said the product team used data collected from “hundreds of thousands links with disruptive, shocking, or sexual ads and not a lot of content” to come up with criteria that will be used to scan links being shared on the platform.

“People will hopefully see less of this kind of junk that can clog up their feed,” he said.

Quelle: <a href="Facebook Is Going To Punish Websites With Junky, Sexy Ads And Little Content“>BuzzFeed

10. Mai 2017

da Agency

Using OpenStack: Leveraging Managed Service Providers

Since 2011, when OpenStack was first released to the community, the following and momentum behind it has been amazing. In fact, it quickly became one of the fastest growing open source projects in the history of open source. Now, with nearly 700 community sponsors, over 600 different modules, and over 50,000 lines of code contributed, OpenStack has become the default platform of choice for much of the private and public cloud infrastructure.
This kind of growth doesn’t happen by chance. It’s because businesses and organizations alike have quickly experienced *real* benefits OpenStack has delivered, whether it be creating greater efficiency, faster time to market, automated infrastructure management, or simply saving them money, just to name a few.
However, as OpenStack technology and the cloud market matures, how OpenStack is delivered to customers by vendors, as well as how businesses choose to consume the technology, has introduced many new methodologies and options. These new options simply provide customers the flexibility to determine the best consumption method for their unique business that allows them to reap all the benefits of OpenStack, but with minimal disruption – all while adhering to their IT operational goals, policies, and staff capabilities.
There are many ways that users can consume OpenStack to help benefit their IT business, whether it’s built on premises or off. However, one option that has come from this maturity, is the option for a “managed” cloud, being delivered by a managed service provider (or MSP). This option allows customers to maintain a private cloud, either on premises or off, but leave the burden of deployment, configuration, and day-to-day management to a hired, experienced team of experts. And while this does cost you a monthly/annual subscription to retain their services, it relieves you from the complexities of having to do this yourself. Many businesses may find that their internal IT teams may be understaffed, unskilled, or simply better off utilizing their resources elsewhere.
In this case, businesses might want to consider an OpenStack managed service provider to help move their business into the digital age and create modern cloud services to offer their internal end users or external customers.
At Red Hat, we believe OpenStack is a key component to digital transformation and helping move organizations to a modern cloud solution stack. And we’ve worked hard to establish Red Hat OpenStack Platform as an industry standard for private and public cloud infrastructure. As a result, we have hundreds of customers including the likes of BBVA; Cambridge University; FICO; NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory; Paddy Power Betfair; Produban; Swisscom; UKCloud; and Verizon to name a few. In addition, we’ve spent years working with our partner ecosystem to establish deep, engineering-level partnerships with our partners to provide a robust, enterprise-level cloud that is capable of standing up to the rigors of production deployments.
In particular, we’ve been working to establish strong partnerships with our managed service providers, that include engineering and product-level integration, as a way for our customers to maintain a consistent and high level of quality, regardless of how they choose to consume OpenStack. However, we recognized that businesses around the globe operate at different levels and have their own unique preferences for specific and strategic technology partners. So rather than work with only one global provider, we wanted to stick to what Red Hat does best and provide choice to our large, global customers.
First, we started with the original creators of OpenStack themselves – Rackspace. If Rackspace recognized the quality and open source leadership Red Hat maintains, we knew we would be able to make OpenStack’s benefits more accessible to customers. And after years of collaboration, it made sense to come together on an OpenStack managed service offering. Then we continued our collaboration efforts, working more closely with Cisco to release Cisco Metacloud (formerly called Metapod) powered by Red Hat OpenStack Platform, as we know many companies rely on Cisco for their datacenter infrastructure and service needs. And more recently, we announced a joint offering with IBM and their BlueMix Private Cloud with Red Hat technology, which also includes Red Hat Ceph Storage to help customers meet their storage needs at scale.
And while some customers may choose a global service provider like the three I just mentioned, we also recognize that some customers prefer smaller, regional service providers; whether it be to adhere to security policies or maybe just to support local businesses. Regardless, we’ve established a large and growing ecosystem of regional managed service providers like UKCloud (UK), Detacon (Saudi Arabia), Swisscom (Switzerland), Epbi (Netherlands), Blackmesh (North America public sector), NEC America (public sector), and more. These regional providers can help you establish a foothold into the digital age by moving to a scalable and more secure private cloud to meet the demands of your customers and support the future growth of your business.
In addition to our expanding ecosystem of MSP partnerships, we’ve also empowered our existing customers with the flexibility of utilizing their existing Red Hat subscriptions with these certified managed service providers, should they choose to. Existing customers can utilize our Cloud Access program to help maintain business continuity with their current Red Hat Subscriptions.
Our goal is to help businesses like yours with their digital transformation journey to the cloud. Regardless of how you choose to consume the latest software technologies like Red Hat OpenStack Platform or Red Hat Ceph Storage, we work hard to ensure we’re always putting our customer needs first, providing long-term stability with minimal disruption to your business, and building everything on open standards and APIs to provide the flexibility and choice you need to meet the demands of your growing business. To learn more about Red Hat’s cloud technologies or find a certified managed service provider near you, reach out to us anytime. We look forward to helping you achieve your digital transformation goals!
Quelle: RedHat Stack