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ConSol & Mellanox Partnership is Symbolic- Adeoye

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Abiodun Adeoye is the Managing Director of Contact Solutions Ltd “ConSol”. He has consulted for various telecom operators around the globe (KPN-Orange Belgium, Vodafone Netherland, SBC Technologies, Vodacom SA, Vodafone Australia, Vodafone NZ, Vodafone Hungry, Telsim Turkey, Turkcell, etc.) also held intermediate and Senior Engineering positions at One2One (now T-Mobile) in the UK.
He briefly spoke to peter ugwu on how a new partnership between ConSol and Mellanox will benefit the enterprises in the Nigerian market.

ConSol and Mellanox Symbolic Partnership
One of the synergies with our business is that we also run data centres. Our contact centre services are datacentric.
The whole operation is powered from the data centre. So, we have that as an advantage. Now, the founders of ConSol were the same people that built the MTN network.
We understand technology and what BIG DATA is all about. Having operated in this environment, pre-ConSol, we understand some of the challenges that organizations have. It is not actually so much as in infrastructure deployment, rather throughput.
So, a customer wants a service not excuses. For example, you go to an ATM, slot in your card and expect to withdraw cash; there is a failure along the line.
A lot of the time, it is because the pipe tries to carry a lot of transactions at the same time and there is a jam along the line.
The typical example is traffic gridlock we witness on the road daily. With that understanding, we came across Mellanox Technologies.

Why InfiniBand, Ethernet and Other Mellanox Products
They have solutions that can triple the capacity and upgrade the network, so that you can increase the pipe and allow much traffic go through.
So, they are interested on how you manage the BIG DATA. The ICT industry in Nigeria is getting that.
Fortunately, we had a Government that set the pace and we are keenly interested in seeing continuity of the ICT blueprint by the present Government.
In fact, we are at a par with the world in terms of technology. We have the infrastructural challenges that have held us back. But in terms of technology deployment, we are not lagging behind as such; LTE is there in USA, it is here in Nigeria.
However, the biggest challenge is how we are deploying the technology, and we need to prepare for BIG DATA. There is a lot of activities revolving around the concept such as the National Identity Number (NIN); Bank Verification Number (BVN); data capture by the Police, FRSC, and national population census is around the corner.
There is a lot of data. It used to be in the oil sector that we harvest data, presently; every sector is feeling the impact of the concept.
Thus, for quality of service, we should start looking at Mellanox technologies that can help us manage data and throughput in a more efficient manner.

Opportunities for SMEs
If you look at their range of products, it is very wide. The reason for that is that there is a solution that can be tailored for each level or size of organization; whether you are SME, medium or large size organization.
The complexity of your data increases as you get better. From that point of view, they have low-cost solutions for SMEs, where you have solutions like CloudX that allows and SME to plug in without necessary spending the capex to deploying a data centre large infrastructure to benefit from the same services.

Critical Challenges to Be Tackled
Power, network optimization and, of course, bandwidth are challenges many enterprises face. What is critical at the end of the day is how that data centre should be able to deliver services.
If you look at the financial services, when one demands for a service and there is a downtime while people are doing transactions online, it could cost the company millions of naira.
 In other words, half a second downtime can cost a company millions of naira lost…

…In Other Words, The Solutions Guarantee Optimal Time?
They offer zero downtime, faster throughput, low latency, which are the important factors to keep organization’s network up and running.
If you are allowed to know the numbers, you will be amazed how inefficient data centres are, especially, how much it costs organizations.
So, Mellanox is one of the organizations we partner with because of the range of products. We have others with great deed of products and load-balancing applications that allow you move traffic across your network, while optimizing the bandwidth.
So, we are specifically targeting this kind of technology to deliver value added capability within a data centre or cloud-based environment to unleash better quality service delivery.

Data Security & Trust: Mellanox’s Promise
You only need to look at their existing clients’ list such as e-Bay, Facebook, Twitter, Alibaba. The volumes of traffic on those e-commerce spaces are phenomenal.
Security is critical to them. Therefore, if this is their product of choice, we don’t need to say more.
Out other partner’s product is used by the FBI in US; Cisco has now adopted and integrated it into their platform. So, we did our homework.

Value Proportion for Nigerian Enterprises
Obviously, we need to create awareness for the development of domestic companies that can compete globally.
However, we already have multi-national players investing in organizations in the country. The likes of Konga, Jumia, Yudala, PayPorte, Kaymu, OLX, etc; they are offering seamless services like e-Bay, Amazon. So, the products will be critical to them too.
Apart from the back end of logistics and delivery, when the customers go on their websites to buy products, they would want to ensure there is throughput, no cyber security lapses.
The oil industry will embrace the products too, due to the nature of the industry that requires protection and seamless operations.

Bandwidth
While we are hoping for improved broadband penetration, we can optimize what we have now for better throughput. I think that should be the approach in every industry.

ConSol’s Unique Services
What differentiate us from others are the quality and efficient service deliveries. Our customers remain with u s for year, because they trust our processes.
So, the better value added service implies we are not just there to make money from them, rather to deliver cost-saving services.  

          


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Our 2023 Ads Safety Report

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By Duncan Lennox, VP & GM of Ads Privacy and Safety

Billions of people around the world rely on Google products to provide relevant and trustworthy information, including ads. That’s why we have thousands of people working around the clock to safeguard the digital advertising ecosystem. Today, we are releasing our annual Ads Safety Report to share the progress we’ve made in enforcing our advertiser and publisher policies and to hold ourselves accountable in our work of maintaining a healthy ad-supported internet.

The key trend in 2023 was the impact of generative AI. This new technology introduced significant and exciting changes to the digital advertising industry, from performance optimization to image editing. Of course, generative AI also presents new challenges. We take these challenges seriously and will outline the work we are doing to address them head-on.

Just as importantly, generative AI presents a unique opportunity to improve our enforcement efforts significantly. Our teams are embracing this transformative technology, specifically Large Language Models (LLMs), so that we can better keep people safe online.

Gen AI Bolsters Enforcement 

Our safety teams have long used AI-driven machine learning systems to enforce our policies at scale. It’s how, for years, we’ve been able to detect and block billions of bad ads before a person ever sees them. But, while still highly sophisticated, these machine learning models have historically needed to be trained extensively – they often rely on hundreds of thousands, if not millions of examples of violative content.

LLMs, on the other hand, are able to rapidly review and interpret content at a high volume, while also capturing important nuances within that content. These advanced reasoning capabilities have already resulted in larger-scale and more precise enforcement decisions on some of our more complex policies. Take, for example, our policy against Unreliable Financial Claims which includes ads promoting get-rich-quick schemes. The bad actors behind these types of ads have grown more sophisticated. They  adjust their tactics and tailor ads around new financial services or products, such as investment advice or digital currencies, to scam users.

To be sure, traditional machine learning models are trained to detect these policy violations. Yet, the fast-paced and ever-changing nature of financial trends make it, at times, harder to differentiate between legitimate and fake services and quickly scale our automated enforcement systems to combat scams. LLMs are more capable of quickly recognizing new trends in financial services, identifying the patterns of bad actors who are abusing those trends and distinguishing a legitimate business from a get-rich-quick scam. This has helped our teams become even more nimble in confronting emerging threats of all kinds.

We’ve only just begun to leverage the power of LLMs for ads safety. Gemini, launched publicly last year, is Google’s most capable AI modeI. We’re excited to have started bringing its sophisticated reasoning capabilities into our ads safety and enforcement efforts.

Our Work to Prevent Fraud and Scams

In 2023, scams and fraud across all online platforms were on the rise. Bad actors are constantly evolving their tactics to manipulate digital advertising in order to scam people and legitimate businesses alike. To counter these ever-shifting threats, we quickly updated policies, deployed rapid-response enforcement teams and sharpened our detection techniques.

  • In November, we launched our Limited Ads Serving policy, which is designed to protect users by limiting the reach of advertisers with whom we are less familiar. Under this policy, we’ve implemented a “get-to-know-you” period for advertisers who don’t yet have an established track record of good behavior, during which impressions for their ads might be limited in certain circumstances–for example, when there is an unclear relationship between the advertiser and a brand they are referencing. Ultimately, Limited Ads Serving, which is still in its early stages, will help ensure well-intentioned advertisers are able to build up trust with users, while limiting the reach of bad actors and reducing the risk of scams and misleading ads.

  • A critical part of protecting people from online harm hinges on our ability to respond to new abuse trends quickly. Toward the end of 2023 and into 2024, we faced a targeted campaign of ads featuring the likeness of public figures to scam users, often through the use of deepfakes. When we detected this threat, we created a dedicated team to respond immediately. We pinpointed patterns in the bad actors’ behavior, trained our automated enforcement models to detect similar ads and began removing them at scale. We also updated our misrepresentation policy to better enable us to rapidly suspend the accounts of bad actors.

Overall, we blocked or removed 206.5 million advertisements for violating our misrepresentation policy, which includes many scam tactics and 273.4 million advertisements for violating our financial services policy. We also blocked or removed over 1 billion advertisements for violating our policy against abusing the ad network, which includes promoting malware.

The fight against scam ads is an ongoing effort, as we see bad actors operating with more sophistication, at a greater scale, using new tactics such as deepfakes to deceive people. We’ll continue to dedicate extensive resources, making significant investments in detection technology and partnering with organizations like the Global Anti-Scam Alliance and Stop Scams UK to facilitate information sharing and protect consumers worldwide.

Investing in Election Integrity

Political ads are an important part of democratic elections. Candidates and parties use ads to raise awareness, share information and engage potential voters. In a year with several major elections around the world, we want to make sure voters continue to trust the election ads they may see on our platforms. That’s why we have long-standing identity verification and transparency requirements for election advertisers, as well as restrictions on how these advertisers can target their election ads. All election ads must also include a “paid for by” disclosure and are compiled in our publicly available transparency report. In 2023, we verified more than 5,000 new election advertisers and removed more than 7.3M election ads that came from advertisers who did not complete verification.

Last year, we were the first tech company to launch a new disclosure requirement for election ads containing synthetic content. As more advertisers leverage the power and opportunity of AI, we want to make sure we continue to provide people with the greater transparency and the information they need to make informed decisions.

Additionally, we’ve continued to enforce our policies against ads that promote demonstrably false election claims that could undermine trust or participation in democratic processes.

Overall 2023 Numbers

Our goal is to catch bad ads and suspend fraudulent accounts before they make it onto our platforms or remove them immediately once detected. AI is improving our enforcement on all these fronts. In 2023, we blocked or removed over 5.5 billion ads, slightly up from the prior year, and 12.7 million advertiser accounts, nearly double from the previous year. Similarly, we work to protect advertisers and people by removing our ads from publisher pages and sites that violate our policies, such as sexually explicit content or dangerous products. In 2023, we blocked or restricted ads from serving on more than 2.1 billion publisher pages, up slightly from 2022. We are also getting better at tackling pervasive or egregious violations. We took broader site-level enforcement action on more than 395,000 publisher sites, up markedly from 2022.

To put the impact of AI on this work into perspective: last year more than 90% of our publisher page level enforcement started with the use of machine learning models, including our latest LLMs. Of course, any advertiser or publisher can still appeal an enforcement action if they think we got it wrong. Our teams will review it and, in the cases where we find errors, use it to improve our systems.

Staying Nimble and Looking Ahead

When it comes to ads safety, a lot can change over the course of a year: the introduction of new technology such as generative AI to novel abuse trends and global conflicts. And the digital advertising space has to be nimble and ready to react. That’s why we are continuously developing new policies, strengthening our enforcement systems, deepening cross-industry collaboration and offering more control to people, publishers and advertisers.

In 2023, for example, we launched the Ads Transparency Center, a searchable hub of all ads from verified advertisers, which helps people quickly and easily learn more about the ads they see on Search, YouTube and Display. We also updated our suitability controls to make it simpler and quicker for advertisers to exclude topics that they wish to avoid across YouTube and Display inventory. Overall, we made 31 updates to our Ads and Publisher policies.

Though we don’t yet know what the rest of 2024 has in store for us, we are confident that our investments in policy, detection and enforcement will prepare us for any challenges ahead.


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InDrive Upgrades App, Announces New Safety Details

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InDrive, an e-hailing firm, announced app upgrades as well as new safety details for riders and drivers.

InDrive’s updated Safety Centre now allows its support team to contact a user’s trusted contacts in emergencies and the number of trusted contacts has been increased from one to five. InDrive says that it is also easier for its support team to share information with emergency services, among other things.

Also, the company said by clicking on the app’s SOS-button, users can see all the information needed when requesting help or reporting an incident – along with a button to call police or ambulance services.

InDrive’s app design has also been updated to improve user experience, making the Safety Centre more visible, it said.

Further, the company said: “inDrive is also testing photo sharing and automatic translation of chat messages, which have been added to the in-app chat function. These make it easier for the driver and rider to clarify the pickup point, and communicate in the same language while traveling.

“Passengers and drivers stay within the application when using these features, so there’s no need to use across other platforms, thereby protecting personal information. For now the feature is currently being tested by a limited number of users to improve its functionality before it is rolled out to everyone.”

The announcement today comes after the company recently revealed it had expanded its financing arrangement with General Catalyst to $146 million, allowing the company to engage in product upgrades, extend its service offerings, and enter new markets in Africa.


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NIN-SIM Linkage: Telcos to Bar More Phones Lines from March 29

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Telecommunications operators in the country are gearing up for another round of disconnections of phone lines for subscribers who have failed to link their National Identification Numbers (NIN) with their SIM cards.

NIN-SIM Linkage: Telcos to Bar More Phones Lines from March 29

The disconnection which will happen Friday, March 29, following a directive from the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) requiring all registered SIMs lacking proper NIN linkage to be either corrected or completely disconnected from networks.

The ongoing process, which commenced on February 28, 2024, is part of the government’s efforts to curb criminal activities like banditry and kidnapping, contributing to enhancing national security.

There are indications of a potential third phase in April 2024.

Operators have reportedly cooperated with the NCC in executing the directive, affirming their commitment to national security objectives and assuring full compliance by the specified deadlines.

The second phase will target subscribers with five or more SIMs from a single operator lacking verified NIN-SIM linkages.

The third phase, set to commence on April 15, will focus on subscribers with four SIMs or fewer and unverified NINs.

While telecom companies seek a review and extension of the April deadline for the third phase, indications from the NCC suggest a steadfast adherence to the established timelines.

The first phase saw the barring of 40 million lines, comprising around 17 million active SIMs without NIN submissions and 23 million inactive SIMs lacking NINs over the past year.

 

 

 

 


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