Facebook tweaks News Feed to bury ‘low-quality’ webpages

It sucks when you click on some interesting link on Facebook, only to find it takes you to some sucky, ad-filled spam website. Now Facebook says it’s leveraging AI to bury those types of links on the News Feed.

Facebook has been punishing spammy websites that advertise on the platform since last year, but the company says it’s now doubling down on the punishment, as well as downranking spammy link posts on the News Feed itself.

Facebook says it’s used AI to analyze “hundreds of thousands” of links to identify low-quality pages with “a large number of disruptive, shocking or malicious ads.” 

If a post links to such a page, it will show up lower on the News Feed, and may not be eligible for ads. It’s a small change, but anything to show less spam on FB is a worthwhile move.

It sucks when you click on some interesting link on Facebook, only to find it takes you to some sucky, ad-filled spam website. Now Facebook...

Azure Cosmos DB is Microsoft’s new database for globally-distributed applications

Today at Microsoft’s Build Conference in Seattle, the company launched Azure Cosmos DB – a brand new schemaless database system designed for large, globally-distributed, data-intensive applications.

Azure Cosmos DB is a superset of the existing DocumentDB service, and Microsoft is transitioning all existing DocumentDB customers to Azure Cosmos DB, free of charge.

The system is designed to scale horizontally, whilst maintaining impressive performance and reliability. This is backed by a confident and generous service-level agreement.

Microsoft says that it can deliver single-digit millisecond latency at the 99th percentile, which is huge. It also says that 99.99 percent of all requests will “complete successfully,” and is also promising a 99.99 percent uptime availability.

This new effort from Redmond is extremely versatile, and can handle pretty much every type of data you’re likely to throw at it, including key-value, document, columnar, and graph types, in a variety of environments, including AI and IoT.

Azure Cosmos DB also plays nice with several NoSQL APIs including MongoDB, Table Storage, DocumentDB SQL, Gremlin, and Azure Tables. The Gremlin and Table Storage are currently in preview mode.

Another strength of Azure Cosmos DB is the ease and speed upon which data can be replicated in different Azure regions, allowing developers to quickly respond to regional surges of traffic. This elasticity doesn’t come at the expense of application downtime.

Today at Microsoft’s Build Conference in Seattle, the company launched Azure Cosmos DB – a brand new schemaless database system designed f...

Microsoft announces new Azure mobile applications for Android and iOS

Today, on stage at Microsoft’s Build Conference in Seattle, Principal Program Manager Scott Hanselman, announced a couple of major updates for Microsoft’s cloud computing platform.

The biggest is a brand new management application for Android and iOS, which promises to allow sysadmins to manage their systems from their mobile devices. I can’t imagine doing much legwork from the cramped real-estate of an iPhone, but it’s pretty cool to have the option to view real-time analytics, and restart and provision virtual machines your phone.

The other big change was the Azure Cloud Shell, which allows developers to quickly log into their provisioned systems from the Azure portal, as well as the two new mobile applications. This is a full BASH shell, with PowerShell soon to follow.

This is pretty amazing, as it lets you access the Azure CLI from anywhere, with your credentials already authenticated. So, you can just log-in and go to work.

Today, on stage at Microsoft’s Build Conference in Seattle, Principal Program Manager Scott Hanselman, announced a couple of major updates...