STS is a Google Cloud service that allows users to quickly and securely transfer data between object and file storage in Google Cloud, Amazon, Azure, on-premises, and more.
Additionally, the service now includes the ability to preview automatic transfers of data that has been added or updated in the source location. This type of transfer is event-driven, as the service listens for notifications about them to initiate the data transfer. Currently, these event-driven transfers are supported from AWS S3 or Cloud Storage to Cloud Storage.

STS relies on Pubsub and SQS to perform event-driven transfers. Customers need to set up the event notification and provide STS with access to this queue. Using a new field – “Event Stream” – in the transfer task, clients can set an event stream name and control when STS starts and stops listening for events from that stream

Once the transfer job is created, STS begins consuming object change notifications from the source. Any change or upload of an object will now trigger a change notification on which the service acts in real time to copy the object to the destination.

With event-driven transfer, automatic, ongoing replication of data between buckets can be set up with just a few mouse clicks. It comes with a number of supporting features including filtering based on prefixes, retry handling, checksums, detailed transfer logs via Cloud Logging and progress tracking via Cloud Monitoring. In addition to being easy to set up and use, it is extremely scalable and flexible, allowing data to be replicated between buckets within the same project, between different projects, or even between different regions and continents of Cloud Storage.

Event-driven transfers can be created between Cloud Storage buckets in three steps:

• Create a pubsub subscription that listens to changes in the Cloud Storage bucket
• Giving STS permission to copy data between buckets and listen to that pubsub subscription
• Create a transfer job with an event stream configuration

Event-driven transfer is an extremely powerful solution that can help users automate data transfer and processing tasks, saving time and resources.

“For years, Google prioritized profit over user privacy. They were cunning and deceptive. Users thought they had turned off Google’s location tracking features, but the company continued to secretly record their movements and use that information for advertisers.”,

Oregon Attorney General Ellen Rosenblum said in a press release.

Along with these changes, Google will create a comprehensive information center that will highlight key location settings. In addition, the global company plans to provide users who create new accounts with a more detailed explanation of what Web & App Activity is and what information they include. The company said it will continue to delete location history data for some users. Google is currently facing a lawsuit from Washington, Texas and Indiana. Last month, the company agreed to pay the state of Arizona $85 million to settle a separate lawsuit.

The AirTag devices are expected to find lost items such as keys or a wallet. They can be found by using Apple’s network, called “Find My”. Those devices are kind of button items that have to be attached to your possessions.

If you are “concerned about or experiencing technology-enabled abuse, stalking, or harassment.”, you will be offered support and “step-by-step” instructions on how to protect yourself.

You will also be given some information on what you are expected to do after finding AirTag which is not yours. The guide shows you even an application that has to be downloaded in order to alert users for crook AirTags.

However, you will also learn how to remove someone’s access to your location data, which was previously shared with them, and how to let a friend know your location and when you have arrived home safely.

In a BBC video, a woman said she had found an AirTag attached to her bag.

“Google falsely led consumers to believe that changing their account and device settings would allow customers to protect their privacy and control what personal data the company could access.”

The statement added that Google  “continues to systematically survey customers and profit from customer data,” and it also calls the practice  “a clear violation of consumers’ privacy”.

Jose Castaneda, the Google spokesperson said that:

 “Attorneys general are bringing a case based on inaccurate claims and outdated assertions about our settings. We have always built privacy features into our products and provided robust controls for location data. We will vigorously defend ourselves and set the record straight.”

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton alleged Google misled consumers by continuing to track their location even when users sought to prevent it, according to Reuters.

Google has a “Location History” setting and informs users if they turn it off “the places you go are no longer stored,” and Google “continues to track users’ location through other settings and methods that it fails to adequately disclose.” Texas added.

Washington state Attorney General Bob Ferguson said in 2020, Google made nearly $150 billion from advertising.

It turns out that location data is the key to Google’s advertising business. That’s the reason why the company has a financial incentive to dissuade users from withholding access to that data, said the Ferguson’s office in a statement Monday.

Yet, that is quite unacceptable.

Most of you probably know that electron microscopes are pretty good at imaging materials and detailing their properties, possessing resolution which is 1,000 times greater than a light microscope. However, it has some disadvantages which need to be overcome or fixed.

Often, when working on an upgrade, scientists focus their efforts on the hardware, which is always really costly. Yet, researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory are giving us the opportunity to see how advanced software developments are able to push their performance even further.

Recently, a way to improve the resolution and sensitivity of an electron microscope by using an AI framework was introduced by some Argonne researchers. Their approach, which was published in npj Computational Materials, gives scientists a chance to get even more detailed information about materials and the microscope itself.  Tao Zhou, who is an Argonne assistant scientist and lead author, said:

“Our method is helping improve the resolution of existing instruments so people don’t need to upgrade to new expensive hardware so often.”

When a material is being exposed to a beam of electron waves this is the moment when Images are being formed. Because electrons act like waves when they travel, these waves interact with the material. As a result, this interaction is captured by a detector and is measured. Finally, these measurements are used to construct a magnified image.

Also, electron microscopes are able to capture information about material properties, such as magnetization and electrostatic potential. All of this information is stored in a property of the electron wave which is also known as a phase. The phrase describes the location or the timing of a point within a wave cycle.

Soon after all the measurements are taken, information about the phase is seemingly lost. That’s why scientists cannot access information about magnetization or electrostatic potential from the images they acquire. Charudatta Phatak, who is Argonne material scientist and group leader, as well as a co-author of the paper, said:

“Knowing these characteristics is critical to controlling and engineering desired properties in materials for batteries, electronics, and other devices. That’s why retrieving phase information is important.”

One of the most decades-old problems is retrieving phase information.  Eventually, it all started with X-ray imaging and now it is spread by other fields, including microscopy. With the aim of solving this problem, Mathew Cherukara, who is Phatak, Zhou, and Argonne computational scientist and group leader propose leveraging tools built to train deep neural networks, a form of AI.

What are neural networks and how do they work?

They are a series of algorithms that are designed to mimic the human brain and nervous system. When receiving a series of inputs and output, it seems that these algorithms seek to map out the relationship between the two. Cherukara said:

“Tech companies like Google and Facebook have developed packages of software that are designed to train neural networks. What we’ve essentially done is taken those and applied them to the scientific challenge of phase retrieval.”

Zhou pointed out:

“Normally when you’re trying to retrieve the phase, you presume you know your microscope parameters perfectly. However, that knowledge might not be accurate. With our method, you don’t have to rely on this assumption. Instead, you actually get the conditions of your microscope — that’s something other phase retrieval methods can’t do.”

The method they are using also improves the resolution and sensitivity of existing equipment. What does it mean? That means that researchers will be able to recover tiny shifts in phase, and in turn, get information about small changes in magnetization and electrostatic potential, all without requiring costly hardware upgrades. Zhou added:

“Just doing a software upgrade we were able to improve the spatial resolution, accuracy, and sensitivity of our microscopy,”

In his words, the fact that they didn’t need to add any new equipment to leverage these benefits is a huge advantage from an experimentalist’s point of view.

‘Is it necessary to create an Apple account in order to use the application? No. It can detect Find My-compatible trackers like the Chipolo One Spot. An Apple spokesperson said:

“AirTag provides industry-leading privacy and security features and today we are extending new capabilities to Android devices. Tracker Detect gives Android users the ability to scan for an AirTag or supported Find My enabled item trackers that might be traveling with them without their knowledge. We are raising the bar on privacy for our users and the industry, and hope others will follow.”

The main reason for the release of this new app are multiple incidents of bad actors abusing AirTags to stalk people. In June, the company updated its trackers to play a sound between eight and 24 hours after they’re separated from their owner, instead of after three days as was the case at launch.

In the past year, Mindspace launched new branches in London, Tel Aviv, Philadelphia and a new hub and spoke location outside Tel Aviv, at Yakum. Mindspace serves a wide variety of companies; about 41% are large enterprises and corporations and 38% are small and medium-sized companies. The leading industry types of its customer base are technology companies, financial companies and service providers. Past and present customers include Microsoft, Samsung, Playtika, Taboola, Yahoo!, Expedia, GoPro, and more.

While most of the commercial real estate industry took a hit as a result of COVID, the flex market continued to grow. All forecasts predict the accelerated growth of the flex industry to reach a market share of more than 30% by 2030; the current market share of flex as part of commercial real estate is 5%. According to a recent study by CBRE, in two years 43% of occupiers will have 10-50% of their portfolio dedicated to flex. In addition, 17% of occupiers will have more than 50% of their portfolio dedicated to flex. Zakai said:

“Mindspace is experiencing an impressive growth momentum and high demand in all its locations,” says Dan Zakai, CEO and Co-founder of Mindspace. “We successfully faced the many challenges of COVID. Today, our locations are almost at full occupancy and the current investment led by Harel Insurance and More Provident Funds is intended to fulfill the rising demand in the market and to launch new locations in partnership with landlords worldwide. Mindspace isn’t just another real estate company that rents out offices, but rather offers a strong, strategic partnership to its customers and to landlords. When choosing their office environment, we found that our customers put a great emphasis on their experience: central location, unique design and service of the highest standard. We expect a continued accelerated growth in 2022, while creating a great added value for our many customers.”

Mindspace provides well designed offices, fully equipped kitchens and meeting rooms. Mindspace allows for flexibility, shorter term commitments and lower financial risk, which is a suitable solution in times of economic slowdown.

Google released the second Android 12 Beta earlier today, and the press release emphasizes the addition of new privacy features including a privacy dashboard as well as toggles and indicators for the microphone and camera. Among other changes, there’s also a revamped Wi-Fi experience.

• Privacy dashboard: This page shows what data has been accessed on your phone and how often that data has been accessed. It has a simple timeline view of all accesses to the device’s microphone, camera, and location within the past 24 hours. This page also helps users see why an app has accessed sensitive data and make adjustments to permissions more quickly. Developers can provide an explanation for why their app handles sensitive data by responding to the new system intent ACTION_VIEW_PERMISSION_USAGE_FOR_PERIOD. Developers are also advised to track accesses in their code and in third-party libraries by taking advantage of Android’s Data Auditing APIs.
• Microphone and camera toggles and indicators: You’ll see indicators in the status bar when the microphone or camera is being used on your device. You’ll also have access to Quick Settings tiles that disable camera or microphone access. Developers are advised to review their app’s uses of the microphone or camera and remove any unnecessary uses.
• Clipboard read notification: Android 12 Beta 2 will now show a toast message at the bottom whenever an app reads the clipboard using the getPrimaryClip() method. The toast message won’t be shown if the clipboard was copied from the same app, however. To avoid being shamed on social media, developers are advised to minimize their app’s reads from the clipboard.
• Updated Wi-Fi UX experience: The second Android 12 beta has added a “simpler and more intuitive connectivity experience across the Status Bar, Quick Settings, and Settings.” There’s a new Internet panel that pops up when you long-press on the Internet Quick Setting tile (this tile was previously named “Wi-Fi” in earlier releases). This panel helps you quickly switch between networks and troubleshoot issues without diving into settings.

With the release of Android 12 Beta 2, there are now two more Betas left until the stable release later this year. The Platform Stability release will roll out in August 2021 alongside what’s presumably Beta 4. When that happens, app-facing system behaviors, SDK/NDK APIs, and non-SDK lists will be finalized.

Android 12 Beta 2 is available starting today for supported Google Pixel phones, which includes the Pixel 3, Pixel 3 XL, Pixel 3a, Pixel 3a XL, Pixel 4, Pixel 4 XL, Pixel 4a, Pixel 4a 5G, and Pixel 5. Beta 1 was available for a handful of phones from other phone makers, but Google is leaving it up to the OEM to push an update to Beta 2. The non-Pixel devices that received Beta 1 are: ASUS ZenFone 8, iQOO 7 Legend, OnePlus 9, OnePlus 9 Pro, OPPO Find X3 Pro, Realme GT, TCL 20 Pro 5G, Tecno Camon 17, Xiaomi Mi 11, Xiaomi Mi 11 Ultra, Xiaomi Mi 11 Pro, Xiaomi Mi 11X Pro / Mi 11i / Redmi K40 Pro+, and ZTE Axon 30 Ultra 5G.

Of note, Beta 2 is also available for Android TV, so developers can fire up the emulator or flash the build onto an ADT-3.

The Android team believes that Android 12 is the biggest redesign since Android 5.0. It’s a complete redesign more or less from the ground up. The lockscreen is different, notifications and quick settings are different, and even the settings app is different. There’s also a new pattern and pin unlock screen too.

Animations are also a big part of Android 12, as new ones have been added throughout the UI. For example, tapping certain UI elements generates an animation that flows outwards, creating a sort of “ripple” effect. Scrolling to the bottom of lists (like in the settings app) will also create a bouncing effect. There’s a new volume control slider on the side as well, with a new animation for switching between do not disturb, vibrate, and ring. Finally, there’s even a new screen-on and screen-off animation.

Going through each of the menus, it’s clear that the system has some form of One UI influence behind the design changes, with a huge focus on one-handed usage. Dark mode is also no longer black on the Pixel 5, but a rather bright kind of gray. There is a new accessibility option though that allows you to dim the screen further than what your lowest brightness already is. Once opened, it adds a screen dimming option to the quick settings that you can enable from anywhere.

In terms of removed features, it seems that Google has removed the ability to view the screen on time in the battery settings, though it may resurface in a future update.

New features like the Privacy Dashboard and redesigned widgets aren’t present yet, though you can disable “use precise location” on apps that request the location permission. Google says that the new Privacy Dashboard and camera/microphone access blocking will make their way to Android 12 in the second beta update, which is expected to come in the next couple of months. A notification saying when an app reads your clipboard will also be coming in the second beta. Google also mentions that the quick settings will house controls for your home and for Google Pay, though that isn’t present yet either. Google says it has added app hibernation in beta 1, which will automatically remove temporary files from unused apps in order to save on storage space. They’ve also added the ability to hold down the power button to trigger the Google Assistant, and the same with a double-tap on the back.