Google trainee puts up dummy advert by mistake
A Google training exercise that went wrong meant a dummy advert was placed on a "huge number" of webpages and apps, the Financial Times has reported. The mistake meant a blank yellow rectangle was active on the sites and apps for about 45 minutes on 4 December, it said. The ad was only visible to people in the US and Australia.
The mistake happened when trainees were being shown how to use Google's in-house ad placing system.
[...] The advert was placed at a far higher rate of return than any other ad and was routed through several third-party exchanges, so it reached a wide audience. [...] [Google] added that it would "honour" any payments to publishers which they incurred as a result of the mistake.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Saturday December 08 2018, @08:39PM
RISKS mediator Peter Neumann with a straight face informed me that a Divide By Zero Error that crashed a naval vessel, resulting in it being towed to port, was found to be the fault of the poor seaman who entered a zero in a data entry field.
Windows NT FTW. I Am Absolutely Serious.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 2) by SomeGuy on Saturday December 08 2018, @08:56PM (1 child)
I think some people are paying way too much for advertising.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Saturday December 08 2018, @11:10PM
And Google is thankful for that.
Still, Google can't be complacent. They could always have another Adpocalypse.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by jb on Sunday December 09 2018, @06:11AM (1 child)
Ideally, all advertisements should cost at least $10M each.
That way we wouldn't have to put up with so many of them.
And the few which remained might actually have a chance of working.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 09 2018, @10:07AM
Better even, remind people to use some simple math.
365.25 days/year * 1440 min/day * $10M/45 min = $11.680 Billion/year
Now, demand to calculate fines accordingly.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by looorg on Sunday December 09 2018, @12:15PM (2 children)
What kinda of muppets have training sessions in a live environment? I would blame the idiots in charge for that one and not the trainee for that mistake. No mention of if he/she was fired or not, or if the trainee period is just terminated afterwards ...
Better late then never ...
(Score: 2) by Common Joe on Monday December 10 2018, @07:36PM
I didn't come up with the quote, but I like to say it (when appropriate).
(Score: 2) by darkfeline on Tuesday December 11 2018, @09:58AM
It's pretty normal to train against prod. This isn't about developers, but (internal) users.
For example, when training new employees to use HR software, do they normally train against a test environment? I imagine they use the prod environment with some test accounts/flags set, to say nothing of the HR software provider probably doesn't provide the source code to host a private test instance.
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