How To Stop Annoying Interactive “Creepy” Ads

Have you noticed that when you search for something on Ebay, Amazon, Google, that the advertising on pages seem to know what you’ve been looking for?  For Example, look up “LED 3051 Strips” on Google and suddenly ads for lighting fixtures, Ebay auctions, LED suppliers and the like now appear on every page you look at.  It’s call “contextural advertising”.  Web sites are setting “cookies” in your browser that their advertising networks look at when you surf a page and then display advertising for the things you’ve looked for most recently.

Sometimes it’s okay.  You can find things that your looking for via an ad.  Sometimes it’s just creepy.  Don’t believe me?  Then google for “Hot Crossed Buns” and see what happens to the ads that are presented to you.  Yeah, creepy.  But, you can put a stop to sites that you don’t want tracking you (like Facebook) by using the Opt Out from Online Behavioral Advertising site.  A self-regulation effort that is honored by Ebay, Facebook, etc.  It’s not perfect.  But, it really helps.  Here’s how it works (from the page itself, which is located at http://www.aboutads.info/choices

• Find out which participating companies have currently enabled customized ads for your browser;
• See all the participating companies on this site and learn more about their advertising and privacy practices;
• Check whether you’ve already opted out from participating companies;
• Opt out of browser-enabled interest-based advertising by some or all participating companies, using opt-out cookies to store your preferences in your browser; or
• Use the “Choose All Companies” feature to opt out from all currently participating companies in one step. GO

Need even more powerful blocking?  Call, email, or simply CLICK HERE and OPENRSM can take care of it for your business.

Amazon’s Cloud Problem Shows Why Hybrid Systems are Best for Business

Amazon’s EC2 and AWS Cloud Computing and storage services have been down now for over 24 hours .  Peter Pachal writes in his PCMag article today, “Since so many businesses rely on Amazon Web Services, a host of sites, many major, were down for hours, possibly days. I haven’t seen any estimates on the amount of potential dollars lost because of the incident, but it’s no doubt in the millions.”.  Many major businesses are no doubt impacted (Reddit and Quora for example), but this isn’t all that’s on what I normally think of as a quality cloud platform.  No indeed.  For there are hundreds and thousands of EC2 and AWS customers that provide virtual services for small businesses…  like yours!

Lots of small businesses who have no clue that everything they use to run their businesses are all really at Amazon arn’t very happy today.  And are losing money hand over fist.  Think about it, could you afford to lose nearly two full business days (so far) with the Amazon “Cloud Problem”?  How much would simply losing two whole days cost?  No sales, plenty of employees to pay, electric, water, answering phones and racking up loads of catch up work for when you would get your systems back.  The costs in lost productivity alone are very high.  Let alone the loss of faith by your customers when they see how helpless you are and that you made a decision about your IT (most likely without really knowing) to put everything in a single location.

Which brings up a very good point.  Cloud Computing isn’t the answer to everything.  It’s just another “Arrow in the Quivver” for IT Professionals to use when appropriate.  You see, it isn’t the “shiny” new techno tools that should catch your attention.  Nor the pure cost savings.  Nor the productivity gains.   IT is a Process, Not a Project.  It isn’t good enough to just put everything in the Cloud.  Just as it isn’t good to use a single anything in the IT world.  Diversity is a good thing insofar as if any one thing breaks, everything else runs.

Which is why OPENRSM only utilizes the “Hybrid Cloud” for our Cloud Computing services.  The most essential data stays onsite.  Backups go offsite (and out of region).  Some tools are located in one cloud off in the East.  Others are in another cloud in the West.  With no one element so essential that losing it would hurt you much (or, it would be easily and quickly replicated).

Which is why if your a small business in the Kansas City area, you need to contact us here at OPENRSM so we can show you how you can take advantage of Cloud Computing without being taken advantage of by Cloud Computing.