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Uber's Board Just Voted To Approve All Of Eric Holder's Recommendations To Change Its Company Culture

Justin Sullivan / Getty Images

Uber's board voted Sunday to adopt recommendations from an internal investigation into its workplace culture that was kicked off by allegations of systemic sexism and sexual harassment at the ride-hail giant. But what exactly those recommendations are remains to be seen.

The board met for more than six hours Sunday in Los Angeles, where former US Attorney General Eric Holder presented the findings of his firm's report. A representative for Uber's board said it voted unanimously in favor of adopting all of Holder's recommendations, which will be released to the company's employees on Tuesday.

Those recommendations could include the departure of Emil Michael, a top Uber executive who is close to CEO Travis Kalanick, Recode reported. In 2014, Michael embroiled the company in controversy when he suggested Uber could assemble a team of opposition researchers to dig up dirt on its critics, including journalists. He has since played a role in several other controversies.

Last week Uber said it had fired 20 people after investigating 215 reported claims of discrimination and harassment, among other issues. The company launched two investigations into such claims earlier this year after a viral blog post by ex-Uber engineer Susan Fowler laid out allegations of sexism and sexual harassment at the company.

Days after Fowler's blog post published, Kalanick met with more than 100 female engineers of Uber. They called the issues described in Fowler's blog post a “systemic problem,” according to leaked audio obtained by BuzzFeed News.

The company hired the law firm Perkins Coie to investigate Fowler's claims – resulting in the firings announced last week – and then brought on Holder's firm to conduct a separate investigation into Uber's overall culture.

Prior to the release of the findings, Uber's Chief Human Resources Officer Liane Hornsey and board member Arianna Huffington — two public faces who have been managing Uber's unrelenting PR crises — gave interviews to various media outlets playing down the idea that the issues described by Fowler were systemic. In a USA Today interview published May 25, Hornsey said that harassment “didn’t come up as an issue” when she spoke with employees at the company.

In March, Huffington told CNN that sexual harassment was not a “systemic problem” at Uber. BuzzFeed News reported at the time that some Uber employees were frustrated by Huffington's role overseeing the internal investigation, citing her close relationship with Kalanick and her comments to the media.

Uber has since become a poster child for Silicon Valley's bro culture. Last week, Recode published a letter Kalanick wrote to staff in 2013, advising employees on rules about having sex during a company party in Miami.

In February, Uber investors Mitch and Freada Kapor wrote an open letter to Uber’s board, saying that they were “frustrated and disappointed” in the company. “We feel we have hit a dead end in trying to influence the company quietly from the inside,” they wrote.

Last week, Uber announced that it had hired Frances Frei, a Harvard Business School professor, as senior vice president of leadership and strategy to “act as a partner” to Hornsey, the HR head. The company called her “one of the world’s most respected authorities on organizational transformation.”

Quelle: <a href="Uber's Board Just Voted To Approve All Of Eric Holder's Recommendations To Change Its Company Culture“>BuzzFeed

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93% Of Top Celebrity Instagram Ads Aren’t Properly Disclosed

Anyone who spends time on Instagram knows that celebrities are doing #ads, and also that there are lots of times a celebrity is clearly doing an ad but isn’t really admitting it, which is kind of shady.

But there’s never been an attempt to actually find out how much #spon is out there – and how much of it follows the FTC’s guidelines for disclosing sponsored content. Then in May the marketing firm Mediakix issued a report on how many advertisements each of the top 50 Instagram accounts post per month, and how many of those are FTC compliant. What they found is that 32 of the top 50 celebrities did some sort of sponsored post. And of those posts, 93% don’t meet the FTC’s guidelines.

How The Numbers Were Counted

Mediakix won’t publish the actual list of Instagram ads (they work with some of the brands), but the company did allow BuzzFeed News to view its list so we could verify their calculations.

First, they took the top 50 celebrities on Instagram. That list isn’t exactly a secret; you can see it on Wikipedia (just take out anything that’s not a person, like @instagram or @natgeo) It’s mostly entertainers like Selena Gomez, Justin Bieber, Nicki Minaj, Gigi Hadid, Katy Perry, a few international soccer players, and of course, the Kardashians. There are some celebrities who did NOT post any ads, like Beyoncé, Taylor Swift, Adele, Lebron James, and Emma Watson.

Next, they looked at all their posts (no Stories) over a four-week period in April 2017. They counted how many of those posts were ads – 152 total ads. Then, they counted how many of those ads followed proper FTC guidelines for advertisements. Only 9 out of 152 were FTC compliant.

Here’s how confusing to a normal person it can get. Notice here how Gigi Hadid uses #ad for her Reebok sponsorship (FTC compliant)

Instagram: @gigihadid

But in this very similar post, she just tags @reebok (not FTC compliant):

Instagram: @gigihadid

What FTC Compliant Means

In a very general sense, it should be clear and apparent to the average person that a celebrity has a “material connection” – is either getting paid cash or was given free swag – to the brand.

Last month, the FTC sent letters to over 90 brands and celebrities who post spon-con to remind them of the guidelines. This was a big-deal move for the FTC, which hadn’t ever sent these types of preemptive “educational” letters before. In these letters, they cracked down on certain types of half-assed disclosures, like #sp instead of #sponsored.

Here’s what they want to see:

  • Clear disclosure like #ad or #sponsored (#sp instead of #sponsored is NOT OK)

  • No hiding the disclosure at the end of a long caption, which gets cut off after 3 lines in Instagram, or in a #forest #of #hashtags #where #no #one #will #notice #ad

  • No using #partner – most people don’t know what that means.

  • No simply tagging the sponsor

So, only 7% of the ads it reviewed followed these rules, according to Mediakix.

What Counts As An “Ad”?

First of all, they excluded any posts that were movie promotions – for example, The Rock posting a still from his new movie Baywatch. Instagram ads sort of exist on a spectrum. From most to least sketchy:

  • Straightforward pay-to-post ads. Think diet teas or tooth whiteners – often these are one time ads.

  • A longterm spokesperson partnership, like a pro athlete and Nike, or a model being the face of CoverGirl. This includes making their own products for a brand, like Rihanna’s new collection with Puma shoes.

  • Small freebies like a few lipsticks or a pair of sneakers.

  • Expensive freebies like Lady Gaga getting a $10,000+ Airbnb rental, a free private airplane ride, or a fancy designer dress worth thousands of dollars.

Mediakix collected 152 Instagram posts from the top 50 celebrities that appear to be ads. BuzzFeed went through these 152 and categorized them by what flavor of #sponsored they seem to be.

Of the handful of FTC-compliant posts where the celeb used the hashtag #ad or #sponsored, all but one of these were for those “pay to post” ads – the most straightforward types. For the long term partnerships, all but ONE of the ads (Gigi Hadid & Reebok) were breaking FTC guidelines.

These broader, long term partnerships that celebrities have with brands – especially fashion or athletic wear – are the most frequent violators of the FTC policy.

Small freebies are also often not FTC compliant – it’s a blurring of the line between “advertising” and “publicity”. It’s very common in the PR world, particularly fashion, to send free stuff to celebrities in hopes that they’ll wear or use it. For a celebrity who gets paid $100,000 for an Instagram ad, thanking a company for a small brand for a free lip gloss might not feel like an “ad”, even though the FTC sees it that way.

The report shows what we all knew intuitively: that celebrities, even the super popular ones with managers and lawyers who know better, are doing ads and not disclosing it.

Quelle: <a href="93% Of Top Celebrity Instagram Ads Aren’t Properly Disclosed“>BuzzFeed

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Event Hubs Auto-Inflate, take control of your scale

Azure Event Hubs is a hyper-scalable telemetry ingestion service that can ingest millions of events per second. It gives a distributed streaming platform with low latency and configurable time retention, which enables you to ingress massive amounts of telemetry into cloud and read data from multiple applications using publish-subscribe semantics.

Event Hubs lets you scale with Throughput Units (TUs). TUs are variable reserved capacities and the component that you would purchase. A single TU entitles you to 1MB/second or 1000 events/second ingress and 2MB/second or 2000 events/second egress. This capacity has to be reserved/purchased when you create an Event Hubs namespace.

This reservation is good when you have a steady and predictable usage that is not bound to change. Many Event Hubs customers commonly increase their usage of Event Hubs after onboarding to the service. For greater data transfer, you had to increase your predetermined TUs manually. Well, not anymore!

Event Hubs is launching the new Auto-Inflate feature, which enables you to scale-up your TUs automatically to meet your usage needs. This simple opt-in feature gives you the control to prevent throttling when, data ingress rates exceed your pre-determined TUs and when your egress rates exceed your set TUs.

By enabling the Auto-Inflate on your namespace, you can limit the number of TUs you want to scale-up to on your namespace. This simple configuration lets you start small on your TUs and scales-up as you grow your data in Event Hubs. With no changes to your existing setup, this cost-effective value add feature gives you more control based on your usage needs.

This feature is now available in all Azure regions and you can enable on your existing Event Hubs. The article Enable auto-inflate on your namespace, describes the auto-inflate (or scale-up) feature in detail.

Next Steps?

Learn how you can enable this feature on your namespace – Enable auto-inflate on your namespace

Use ARM to enable the scale-up feature

Onboard to Azure Event Hubs

Start enjoying this feature, available today.

If you have any questions or suggestions, leave us a comment below.
Quelle: Azure

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The Uber Executive Who Suggested Digging Up Dirt On Critics Has Resigned

To the left, Emil Michael.

Ilya S. Savenok / Getty Images

Emil Michael, the Uber executive who once suggested the ride-hail giant should dig up dirt on its critics, has left the company, Uber confirmed.

The New York Times first reported his departure. Michael, Uber's chief business officer and a close confidant of CEO Travis Kalanick, joined Uber in 2013. The company has since reached a nearly $70 billion valuation. His departure is one of more than a dozen executive exits this year alone from Uber.

The Wall Street Journal reported Sunday that Michael would resign on Monday. His departure comes as the company is grappling with the results of internal investigations into its workplace culture, launched after an ex-engineer wrote a viral blog post alleging she faced sexual harassment and sexism at the company. Uber said it fired 20 people as a result of the probe.

Michael has had a hand in several of Uber's controversies. Most recently, Recode reported that another Uber executive obtained the medical records of a woman who was sexually assaulted by her Uber driver in 2014 and circulated them within the company. Michael reportedly suggested that Ola, Uber's competitor in India, had framed Uber.

At a dinner party in 2014, he floated the idea that Uber should consider hiring a team of opposition researchers to dig up information on the personal lives of critics and reporters. Uber could spend a million dollars to hire researchers and journalists, he said, to help the company fight back against the press by looking into “your personal lives, your families,” BuzzFeed reported.

Michael later said those comments “do not reflect my actual views and have no relation to the company's views or approach.” Kalanick also distanced himself and the company from Michael's comments in several tweets.

Quelle: <a href="The Uber Executive Who Suggested Digging Up Dirt On Critics Has Resigned“>BuzzFeed

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Add log statements to your application on the fly with Stackdriver Debugger Logpoints

By Morgan McLean, Product Manager, Stackdriver Trace and Debugger

In 2014 we launched Snapshots for Stackdriver Debugger, which gave developers the ability to examine their application’s call stack and variables in production with no impact to users. In the past year, developers have taken over three hundred thousand production snapshots across their services running on Google App Engine and on VMs and containers hosted anywhere.

Today we’re showing off Stackdriver Debugger Logpoints. With Logpoints, you can instantly add log statements to your production application without rebuilding or redeploying it. Like Snapshots, this is immensely useful when diagnosing tricky production issues that lack an obvious root cause. Even better, Logpoints fits into existing logs-based workflows.

(click to enlarge)

Adding a logpoint is as simple as clicking a line in the Debugger source viewer and typing in your new log message (just make sure that you open the Logpoints tab in the right hand pane first). If you haven’t synced your source code, you can add Logpoints by specifying the target file and line number in the right-hand pane or via the gcloud command line tools. Variables can be referenced by {variableName}. You can review the full documentation here.

Because Logpoints writes its output through your app’s existing logging mechanism, it’s compatible with any logging aggregation and analysis system, including Splunk or Kibana, or you can read its output from locally stored logs. However, Stackdriver Logging customers benefit from being able to read their log output from within the Stackdriver Debugger UI.

Logpoints is already available for applications written in Java, Go, Node.js, Python and Ruby via the Stackdriver Debugger agents. As with Snapshots, this same set of languages is supported across VMs (including Google Compute Engine), containers (including Google Container Engine), and Google App Engine. Logpoints has been accessible through the gcloud command line interface for some time, and the process for using Logpoints in the CLI hasn’t changed.

Each logpoint lasts up to twenty-four hours or until it’s deleted or when the application is redeployed. Adding a logpoint incurs a performance cost on par with adding an additional log statement to your code directly. However, the Stackdriver Debugger agents automatically throttle any logpoints that negatively impact your application’s performance and any logpoints or snapshots with conditions that take too long to evaluate.

At Google, we use technology like Snapshots and Logpoints to solve production problems every day to make our services more performant and reliable. We’ve heard from our customers how snapshots are the bread and butter of their problem-solving processes, and we’re excited to see how you use Logpoints to make your cloud applications better.
Quelle: Google Cloud Platform

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Announcing IBM integration capabilities for blockchain

Everyone loves making year-end predictions, and this one was a popular pick from last year: blockchain would disrupt everything in 2017, including integration. Those making that claim are right on the money. Blockchain—a shared, immutable ledger for recording the history of transactions—needs the most secure integration right now. Here’s why.
Blockchain to serve customers quickly and securely
One example on how blockchain can improve the customer experience comes from InfoQ. In many European countries, when a customer’s flight is delayed or cancelled, the airline must give a specific amount of compensation. The crux is that airlines don’t have to automatically dole out the funds. Customers must claim it, often with an attorney’s help.
With blockchain, however, a smart contract could eliminate this time-consuming, lawyer-driven process. In fact, smart contracts have long been touted as a replacement for lawyers. As described on Blockgeeks, “smart contracts help you exchange money, property, shares, or anything of value in a transparent, conflict-free way, while avoiding the services of a middleman.” From a technical perspective, this works because blockchain enables automation of business processes that transcend organizational boundaries in a secure and decentralized manner.
Why blockchain needs integration
To make the blockchain revolution happen quickly, companies won’t be building their own blockchain infrastructure. They will leverage cloud services. When blockchain infrastructure is its own peer-to-peer network, every company must be a part of it, and integration is essential for service and governance requirements. Integration also ensures that blockchain will work with your applications on private or public clouds.
Another reason that integration is becoming so important to blockchain is because blockchain has no central database. Yet new events with technical and business information are created constantly. These events must be analyzed and acted upon quickly. Integration makes this possible. Furthermore, you’ll need to be able to visualize these events and even interact with data from other, non-blockchain systems. We’re even seeing the advent of blockchain IoT. But how do you connect to those other non-blockchain systems?
Unveiling new integration capabilities for blockchain
IBM Integration is a part of this movement of when integration meets blockchain. Most recently, IBM announced a blockchain connector for the MQ product. New blockchain connectivity provides the ability to perform a message-driven query into the IBM Blockchain for Bluemix service to gain insight into activity within the blockchain.
To see all the new integration capabilities, head here.
This is just a sample of things to come this year. When 2017 ends, no one will predict that 2018 will be the year blockchain meets integration because that unification is already here.
The post Announcing IBM integration capabilities for blockchain appeared first on Cloud computing news.
Quelle: Thoughts on Cloud