Tag: google
5 out-of-sight superpowers for Google Contacts on Android
Quick: What’s the most exciting app on your Android phone right now?
Just a hunch here, but I’m gonna go out on a limb and say Google Contacts probably wasn’t your answer. And why would it be? Your phone’s virtual Rolodex is about as exhilarating as a trip to the endodontist. Plus, our mobile devices have had systems for managing our contacts since way back in the prehistoric days, so it certainly doesn’t seem like something to celebrate.
Hold the phone, though — ’cause Android’s current contacts setup is much more than just a dusty ol’ place to dump names and numbers. The Google Contacts app has some genuinely useful advanced options that can make your life easier and make your phone more intelligent. And all you’ve gotta do is dig ’em up and start putting ’em to use.
How to back up your Google account
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Bad stuff happens — and occasionally, it happens to your Google account. One nightmare for those who depend on their Gmail, Google Photos, and other Google apps is to lose access to all that data. This is what happened to a father who sent photos of his child to a doctor using his Android phone and found himself suddenly without access to the years of personal data — contacts, family photos, you name it — that were in his Google accounts.
There are other good reasons to have a local backup of your Google info. You may be switching jobs, or maybe you’ve decided to stop using a specific email account, or you just want a copy of all your emails just in case. Whatever your reasons, it’s not a bad idea to back up and export your Gmail and…
Singapore looks to drive AI research, capabilities with Google Cloud pact
Dev creates app that alerts you whenever you send data to Google
Google TV is getting improved performance and app management
Since the launch of Google TV almost two years ago, Google has been busy adding new features to the platform – including, most recently, iOS support. So if you feel the company has neglected the product from a performance and stability standpoint, the latest Google TV update is for you.
To start, Google says new CPU and cache management optimizations will reduce the time it takes for the “For you” tab to load on startup. Similarly, navigating within a tab and switching between multiple ones should feel more responsive after installing the latest update. A faster Live tab should also result in you seeing less of Google TV’s loading animation. Google says switching to kids profiles will take less time as well. But best of all, the software will now use less RAM, leading to a smoother viewing experience.
If you’ve been using Google TV for a while, you’ll also appreciate the storage enhancements included in this latest update. Google has added a “Free up storage” option to the Setting menu to make it easier to clear the program’s cache and uninstall apps you’re not using. The feature is already available on Chromecast with Google TV and coming to smart TVs soon. The company has also made under-the-hood tweaks that should reduce the number of errors users see when attempting to install new apps. Lastly, there’s a new automated process that will free up space on your device so that you can install more apps.
Google has begun rolling out the above enhancements to users. If you don’t see them immediately, it may take them a few days to reach your device.
Google AI flagged parents’ accounts for potential abuse over nude photos of their sick kids
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A concerned father says that after using his Android smartphone to take photos of an infection on his toddler’s groin, Google flagged the images as child sexual abuse material (CSAM), according to a report from The New York Times. The company closed his accounts and filed a report with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) and spurred a police investigation, highlighting the complications of trying to tell the difference between potential abuse and an innocent photo once it becomes part of a user’s digital library, whether on their personal device or in cloud storage.
Concerns about the consequences of blurring the lines for what should be considered private were aired last year when Apple announced its Child…
Dad Photographs Son for Doctor. Google Flags Him as Criminal, Notifies Police
Mark’s wife grabbed her husband’s phone and texted a few high-quality close-ups of their son’s groin area to her iPhone so she could upload them to the health care provider’s messaging system. In one, Mark’s hand was visible, helping to better display the swelling. Mark and his wife gave no thought to the tech giants that made this quick capture and exchange of digital data possible, or what those giants might think of the images. With help from the photos, the doctor diagnosed the issue and prescribed antibiotics, which quickly cleared it up….
Two days after taking the photos of his son, Mark’s phone made a blooping notification noise: His account had been disabled because of “harmful content” that was “a severe violation of Google’s policies and might be illegal.” A “learn more” link led to a list of possible reasons, including “child sexual abuse & exploitation….” He filled out a form requesting a review of Google’s decision, explaining his son’s infection. At the same time, he discovered the domino effect of Google’s rejection. Not only did he lose emails, contact information for friends and former colleagues, and documentation of his son’s first years of life, his Google Fi account shut down, meaning he had to get a new phone number with another carrier. Without access to his old phone number and email address, he couldn’t get the security codes he needed to sign in to other internet accounts, locking him out of much of his digital life….
A few days after Mark filed the appeal, Google responded that it would not reinstate the account, with no further explanation. Mark didn’t know it, but Google’s review team had also flagged a video he made and the San Francisco Police Department had already started to investigate him…. In December 2021, Mark received a manila envelope in the mail from the San Francisco Police Department. It contained a letter informing him that he had been investigated as well as copies of the search warrants served on Google and his internet service provider. An investigator, whose contact information was provided, had asked for everything in Mark’s Google account: his internet searches, his location history, his messages and any document, photo and video he’d stored with the company. The search, related to “child exploitation videos,” had taken place in February, within a week of his taking the photos of his son.
Mark called the investigator, Nicholas Hillard, who said the case was closed. Mr. Hillard had tried to get in touch with Mark but his phone number and email address hadn’t worked….
Mark appealed his case to Google again, providing the police report, but to no avail…. A Google spokeswoman said the company stands by its decisions…
“The day after Mark’s troubles started, the same scenario was playing out in Texas,” the Times notes, quoting a technologist at the EFF who speculates other people experiencing the same thing may not want to publicize it. “There could be tens, hundreds, thousands more of these.”
Reached for a comment on the incident, Google told the newspaper that “Child sexual abuse material is abhorrent and we’re committed to preventing the spread of it on our platforms.”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
How Google Cloud Blocked the Largest Web DDOS Attack Ever
Recently an attacker tried to hit one of their customers with 46 million requests per second. The blog post describes it as the largest attack of its kind reported to date, “at least 76% larger than the previously reported record. To give a sense of the scale of the attack, that is like receiving all the daily requests to Wikipedia (one of the top 10 trafficked websites in the world) in just 10 seconds.”
Starting around 9:45 a.m. PT on June 1, 2022, an attack of more than 10,000 requests per second (rps) began targeting our customer’s HTTP/S Load Balancer. Eight minutes later, the attack grew to 100,000 requests per second. Cloud Armor Adaptive Protection detected the attack and generated an alert containing the attack signature by assessing the traffic across several dozen features and attributes. The alert included a recommended rule to block on the malicious signature….
Our customer’s network security team deployed the Cloud Armor-recommended rule into their security policy, and it immediately started blocking the attack traffic. In the two minutes that followed, the attack began to ramp up, growing from 100,000 rps to a peak of 46 million rps. Since Cloud Armor was already blocking the attack traffic, the target workload continued to operate normally. Over the next few minutes, the attack started to decrease in size, ultimately ending 69 minutes later at 10:54 a.m.
Presumably the attacker likely determined they were not having the desired impact while incurring significant expenses to execute the attack…. The attack leveraged encrypted requests (HTTPS) which would have taken added computing resources to generate. Although terminating the encryption was necessary to inspect the traffic and effectively mitigate the attack, the use of HTTP Pipelining required Google to complete relatively few TLS handshakes…. The attack was stopped at the edge of Google’s network, with the malicious requests blocked upstream from the customer’s application.
While 22% of the source IPs corresponded to Tor exit nodes, the actual traffic coming from Tor nodes represented just 3% of attack traffic, the blog post points out.
And ultimately despite the attack, “the customer’s service stayed online and continued serving their end-users.”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.