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Google Maps Offensive Continues as Apple Begins Mapping New Regions

While Apple Maps is said to be a solid alternative to Google Maps, it’s not necessarily a secret that Apple’s app isn’t quite here yet. Especially outside of the United States, as Apple has often been extremely slow when it comes to rolling out new features for users who don’t live in the company’s home market.

Apple Maps, for example, has already received massive updates in the United States, including better maps and new features like traffic information with road signs and traffic light warnings, but this new experience continues to be available in limited markets.

But on the other hand, the iPhone maker is working tirelessly to expand Apple Maps to more markets, as the company itself knows it’s pretty much the only way to compete with Google Maps.

And more recently, Apple sent its fleet of Subaru Impreza used for data collection to Austria, with the mapping process due to start today. The company hasn’t shared any information on how long the entire process will take, but according to local media, Apple just wants to focus on vehicle-based data for now, so foot mapping wouldn’t take place. as part of this first step in the process.

This is probably a sign that Apple wants to improve the navigation component of its app, although time will tell how quickly the new data will be available to users in Austria.

The good news is that Apple is indeed making very good progress when it comes to expanding Apple Maps to more regions. Right now, this is one of the biggest shortcomings of using Apple Maps compared to alternatives like Google Maps, as the preloaded app on iPhones still lacks map data. updated and new features in many major markets.

Apple has yet to confirm Apple Maps’ expansion in Austria, but expect to see the company’s Subaru Imprezas on the streets of the country for several months.

After Apple hinted it was parting ways with Google Maps for its own proprietary system and application, Google is firing back, announcing it has new mapping technology ahead of Apple’s World Wide Developer Conference. In an invite sent to press last week, Google promised to “show off some of the newest technology and give a sneak peak at upcoming features,” according to CNET.

No word yet on whether the mapping technology will be for Google’s Chrome browser or for android phones or both, but mobile support seems likely. Will Google’s new application include something similar to Apple’s powerful new 3-D mode, which, according to 9-to-5 Mac, boasts “beautiful, realistic graphics”? Stay tuned as Map Wars 2012 continues.

Source: Google Maps offensive continues as Apple begins mapping new regions – OLTNEWS

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Critics:

The Google Maps apps for iOS and Android have many of the same features, including turn-by-turn navigation, street view, and public transit information.Turn-by-turn navigation was originally announced by Google as a separate beta testing app exclusive to Android 2.0 devices in October 2009. The original standalone iOS version did not support the iPad, but tablet support was added with version 2.0 in July 2013. An update in June 2012 for Android devices added support for offline access to downloaded maps of certain regions, a feature that was eventually released for iOS devices, and made more robust on Android, in May 2014.

At the end of 2015 Google Maps announced its new offline functionality, but with various limitations – downloaded area cannot exceed 120,000 square kilometres and require a considerable amount of storage space. In January 2017, Google added a feature exclusively to Android that will, in some U.S. cities, indicate the level of difficulty in finding available parking spots, and on both Android and iOS, the app can, as of an April 2017 update, remember where users parked. In August 2017, Google Maps for Android was updated with new functionality to actively help the user in finding parking lots and garages close to a destination.

In December 2017, Google added a new two-wheeler mode to its Android app, designed for users in India, allowing for more accessibility in traffic conditions. In 2019 the android version introduced the new feature called live view that allows to view directions directly on the road thanks to augmented reality Google Maps won the 2020 Webby Award for Best User Interface in the category Apps, Mobile & Voice. In March 2021, Google added a feature in which user can draw missing roads.

In 2005 the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation (ANSTO) complained about the potential for terrorists to use the satellite images in planning attacks, with specific reference to the Lucas Heights nuclear reactor; however, the Australian Federal government did not support the organization’s concern. At the time of the ANSTO complaint, Google had colored over some areas for security (mostly in the US), such as the rooftop of the White House and several other Washington, D.C., US buildings.

In October 2010, Nicaraguan military commander Edén Pastora stationed Nicaraguan troops on the Isla Calero (in the delta of the San Juan River), justifying his action on the border delineation given by Google Maps. Google has since updated its data which it found to be incorrect.

On January 27, 2014, documents leaked by Edward Snowden revealed that the NSA and the GCHQ intercepted Google Maps queries made on smartphones, and used them to locate the users making these queries. One leaked document, dating to 2008, stated that “[i]t effectively means that anyone using Google Maps on a smartphone is working in support of a GCHQ system.

References

Important Google Photos Change Will Impact Millions Of Users

Google Photos users often struggle with Google’s frequent unexpected interface changes, but a new tweak is now rolling out that’s sure to make image sharing much easier for everyone.

The change, as spotted by Reddit users last week, brings in an improved sharing menu that makes it easier to find and select the apps and contacts you want to use to share your photos.

The improvement makes a small, but significant change to how sharing destinations are selected. Thankfully, it’s so intuitive that you may have already been using the new interface without even realizing.

If you have the new interface, sharing an image now presents you with two rows of icons much like before. The top row is for sharing directly to groups or individual contacts and the bottom row is for sharing via any other appropriate apps you have installed. The key change is that selecting an app for sharing no-longer requires scrolling through a potentially very long list of apps to find the one you’re looking for.

Instead, you are presented with a selection of just three recently-used options followed by a new button marked ‘more’. Tapping on ‘more’ then brings up an app drawer which you can swipe upwards to expand it into a vertically-scrolling full screen format.

Google Photos now uses a new app sharing menu

Here you’ll find some favorite sharing destinations at the top, followed by a complete list of compatible apps. Furthermore, the apps are presented here in alphabetically rather than the seemingly random order found in the previous horizontal app selector.

Many users have the new interface already, so if you don’t have it yet you should expect to receive it soon. If you want a reminder of the old sharing interface, try sharing from the Google Maps app which still uses the old horizontal scroller.

Follow @paul_monckton on Instagram

Paul Monckton

Paul Monckton

I’ve been working as a technology journalist since the early nineties. My passion is photography and the ever-changing hardware and software that we use to create it, be it traditional cameras and Photoshop or smartphones and tablets with their numerous apps. I have also worked extensively on computing titles such as PC Magazine and Personal Computer World and managed the PCW hardware testing labs. This has seen me testing and reviewing all manner of technologies in print and on line. I take on both written and photographic assignments and you can get in touch with questions, tips or pitches via email. Find me on Instagram @paul_monckton.

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Google Photos users often struggle with Google’s frequent unexpected interface changes, but a new tweak is now rolling out that’s sure to make image sharing much easier for everyone. The change, as spotted by Reddit users last week, brings in an improved sharing menu that makes it easier to find and select the apps and contacts you want to use to share your photos. The improvement makes a small, but significant change to how sharing destinations are selected. Thankfully, it’s so intuitive that you may have already been using the new interface without even realising.

If you have the new interface, sharing an image now presents you with two rows of icons much like before. The top row is for sharing directly to groups or individual contacts and the bottom row is for sharing via any other appropriate apps you have installed. The key change is that selecting an app for sharing no-longer requires scrolling through a potentially very long list of apps to find the one you’re looking for.

Instead, you are presented with a selection of just three recently-used options followed by a new button marked ‘more’. Tapping on ‘more’ then brings up an app drawer which you can swipe upwards to expand it into a vertically-scrolling full screen format. Here you’ll find some favorite sharing destinations at the top, followed by a complete list of compatible apps. Furthermore, the apps are presented here in alphabetically rather than the seemingly random order found in the previous horizontal app selector.

Many users have the new interface already, so if you don’t have it yet you should expect to receive it soon. If you want a reminder of the old sharing interface, try sharing from the Google Maps app which still uses the old horizontal scroller. Follow @paul_monckton on Instagram All data is taken from the source: http://forbes.com Article Link: https://www.forbes.com/sites/paulmonc…#sharing#newsdaily#newsworldabc#bbcnewstoday#newstodaydonaldtrump#newstodayworld #

Is Google Profiting From COVID-19 Conspiracies

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Google, along with many of the web and social media platforms, have taken great efforts to stamp out wild – and even potentially dangerous – conspiracy theories surrounding COVID-19. This has included pulling down videos including on Google-owned YouTube, but despite these efforts just as misinformation continues to spread, so too do the videos.

This has even been described as an “infodemic” – a worrisome side effect of the ongoing novel coronavirus pandemic.

Even as YouTube cracked down on COVID-19 conspiracy theorists, their videos were still getting millions of views. In many cases it was because such content can often go viral long before YouTube or other platforms can react.

What is just as disconcerting is the fact that Google has continued to place advertisements on websites and on YouTube that are publishing those theories. Bloomberg reported that this allows the site’s owners to generate revenue and thus continue to operate. And in at least one case, Google even ran ads featuring a promoter of the very conspiracies it had banned.

Bloomberg cited a number of examples that seem downright concerning, such as an ad for telecommunications provider 02 showing up on an article linking the virus to 5G networks, which happens to be a largely debunked yet still common theory. An example of ad adjacency involved Microsoft 365 backup service, when the ad ran on a site that suggested that Microsoft founder Bill Gates was involved in charitable efforts as part of a world domination plot.

The ads were placed through Google’s automatic system for matching marketers with websites, but it doesn’t take a conspiracy theory to suggest that there is clearly a problem with the algorithms mismatching ads simply based metadata and keywords.

“It’s difficult to say exactly what is leading to the disparity between Google’s stated policies and these problematic results,” said technology industry analyst Charles King of Pund-IT.

“However, I suspect a couple of issues are probably involved,” King explained. “First is the complexity of online advertising, which many people think of as a definable, manageable entity. Instead, the online marketplace is vastly complicated, involves thousands of markets and regions and hundreds of thousands of companies and interested parties, more than a few of which are actively working to circumvent or subvert Google’s and other advertising platforms’ policies.”

Google’s ad platform works with a plethora of sites – and as King noted, each has their own specific rules. Moreover, Google places ads for large brands that do routinely publish conspiracy theories. But while such information could cross the line into “misinformation” or even “disinformation,” in most cases it is generally harmless and this makes it hard for a platform such as Google’s to distinguish.

A site that suggests that the Titanic purposely hit the iceberg or President Kennedy was assassinated by a sinister cabal isn’t exactly “misinformation.” In some cases conspiracy theories are actually entertaining.

That’s why a lot of people view and read these theories, not to be informed but to simply see a different side of the story, no matter how unbelievable it may be presented.

“In addition, it’s worth noting that while the hundreds of thousands and millions dollars that the Global Disinformation Index says are being paid out to these sites are substantial in sum, they are generated by billions of page views across innumerable web sites,” said King.

“In other words, despite the best will and efforts of Google or any other online advertising platform things are going to fall or knowingly escape through the cracks,” he added. “Which leads to what the company intends to do now that it’s aware of the problem. That’s a question well worth asking and deserving of an answer.”

Peter Suciu

gen1

Google Cloud BrandVoice: Building IT Security Requires Improving Teams

But when technology improves, enterprises aren’t the only ones to experience innovation increases. Hackers and other bad actors can be pretty innovative too. This is one reason it’s hard to go more than a few weeks without seeing some new data breach, malware risk, or cybercrime in the headlines.

Successful digital transformation boils down to leveraging technology to produce business outcomes, which is a simple idea. But deploying, connecting, protecting, and maintaining those technologies can be enormously complex, making it easy to accidentally expose security vulnerabilities or to react too slowly to a sudden advance in attackers’ capabilities.

As much as conversations about digital transformation can focus on finding the right kinds of programmers or the right kinds of data scientists, it’s equally important to emphasize that digital transformation requires the right kind of security professionals.

The right people can be hard to find

The need for security professionals is not new. In fact, security is one of the fastest growing job fields, and not just in IT. According to the 2019 (ISC)² Cybersecurity Workforce Study, going forward, there will be 10,000 cybersecurity professionals for every 100,000 U.S.-based establishments.

And yet, for all of this need, this CSIS survey showed that 82% of employers report a shortage of cybersecurity skills, with 314,000 additional cybersecurity professionals needed as of January 2019, despite the 716,000 such professionals already in the field.

Think about that: It’s as if every single person in Denver were already working in IT security, but because the job is so big, we need everyone in St. Louis to pitch in as well. That is a huge need and a huge shortage.

So what’s causing this shortfall? A large part of it is that the professionals in these roles are bogged down by manual work. Between patching servers, maintaining security infrastructure, updating security configurations, and collecting and analyzing data, there’s hardly any time left to design proactive cybersecurity.

Free your cybersecurity professionals with the cloud

As with so many issues in the modern workplace, improvements to this “people problem” lie in the cloud. Most notably, cloud providers maintain and secure the underlying infrastructure, relieving you of some of the more time-consuming manual tasks of infrastructure management.

The cloud provides security by default with systems that simplify IT resource configuration, deployment, and operation throughout the organization. This frees security professionals to concentrate on tasks that are a better use of their time and skills, like designing and modifying security policies, auditing access to critical systems, classifying business-critical content, and investigating anomalous activity through a business lens.

But the cloud offers more than just time. Many cloud providers offer tools and guidance to help users secure their apps and data by letting security teams determine which data is sensitive, who should have access to what, and how to translate the organization’s security and regulatory policy to controls. And since the cloud is exposed to users as software and APIs, automation becomes much simpler, resulting in more consistency at scale with fewer opportunities for human errors.

But the cloud offers more than just time. Many cloud providers offer tools and guidance to help users secure their apps and data by letting security teams determine which data is sensitive and who should have access to what. Moreover, since the cloud is exposed to users as software and APIs, automation becomes much simpler, resulting in more consistency at scale with fewer opportunities for human errors.

Overcoming the skills gap

In addition to the “people problem,” modern security workforces also find themselves facing a “skills problem.” Security threats are always evolving, as are the solutions and tools, which means that many established security professionals can’t keep up with the skills they need to detect and address new types of attacks. The longer it takes to find solutions, the more productivity may suffer across the organization.

On a deeper level, knowledge of the latest skills is essential to strong DevSecOps. The basic concept of DevSecOps is to build apps with security in mind from the start, rather than the traditional tactic of designing security in toward the end of development or bolting it on after systems and apps are built. Executing this requires a deep knowledge of security skills and tools that grows throughout the development process.

The cloud helps overcome these issues by providing access to the latest technological advancements and giving professionals access to the latest tools without the constant need to acquire and retrain.

Security professionals can also use the cloud to drive DevSecOps by embracing the best practices embedded into cloud-based tools. For example, Google Cloud offers vulnerability scanning, deploy-time controls, and configuration management—tools that underpin Google’s own best practices for develop-and-deploy processes. With tools like these, security experts can set up strong security practices from the start that persist throughout the project’s life cycle.

Building better security professionals

IT security is only going to become more essential as businesses rely more on technology for innovation and competitive advantage, and the need for professionals who are equipped for the challenge is going to grow as well.

Fortunately, with cloud-based security tools and a healthy amount of security by default, not only can security professionals continue to do their jobs effectively even as the landscape changes, but the next generation of experts will likely already be trained on cloud-based tools. That leaves the major people and skills problems in the IT landscape to those who haven’t taken advantage of the cloud.

Discover how the highest performers scale DevOps to maximize success. Get the latest “Accelerate State of DevOps Report.”

Rob Sadowski

Rob Sadowski

Rob Sadowski is the Trust & Security Product Lead for Google Cloud at Google. He is responsible for creating and delivering Google Cloud’s security message, spanning platforms, applications, and connected devices. Prior to joining Google, he held multiple senior roles in strategy and marketing at RSA Security, a Dell / EMC Company and came to RSA as part of the team that drove the creation of EMC’s Security division. He is a former member of the PCI Security Standards Council Board of Advisors and has been an expert commentator on security issues to global media outlets including CNN, USA Today, the Financial Times, NPR, Fox Business, and CNBC.

Source: Google Cloud BrandVoice: Building IT Security Requires Improving Teams

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Google Issues Serious Warning For Google Photos Users

Google Photos Logo

Google has issued a serious warning to a number of Google Photos users, stating that their private videos have been accidentally sent to strangers.

The warning will come as a shock to users who have used the service to store videos they don’t wish to be made public, precisely because of Google’s promise to protect their data and keep unshared Photos private.

According to the warning, sent directly via email to all affected users, the blunder caused Google’s ‘Download your data’ service to incorrectly export some stored videos to the wrong user’s archive when bundling them up for download.

This resulted in some users downloading archives with missing videos and, more worryingly, videos that belong to other users.

You can read the text of the email in the tweet from @jonoberheide below:

View image on Twitter

Google hasn’t revealed the number of accounts affected, but it appears to be relatively small as it’s restricted to those who used ‘Download your data’ within a specific five-day time period of November 21 to November 25 2019. However, even only a small proportion of Google Photos’ over one billion users will likely result in a significant total number of people affected. The wording of the email suggests that Google is confident that it has identified all occurrences of the bug and warned all those affected.

What to do about it

Google’s preferred solution to this predicament is for users to create new data archives and download them again. While this will help anyone with missing videos to retrieve them, it offers no comfort to those who now have no way of knowing which, if any, of their videos have been downloaded and viewed by strangers. Furthermore, we can only hope that there are no other instances of the bug which remain undetected.

I have reached out to Google for comment.

OnePlus Confirms Massive Camera Upgrades

Forbes Paul Monckton

Paul Monckton

I’ve been working as a technology journalist since the early nineties. My passion is photography and the ever-changing hardware and software that creates it, be it traditional cameras and Photoshop or smartphones and tablets with their numerous apps. I have also worked extensively on computing titles such as PC Magazine and Personal Computer World and managed the PCW hardware testing labs. This has seen me testing and reviewing all manner of technologies in print and on line. I take on both written and photographic assignments and you can get in touch with questions, tips or pitches via email. Find me on Instagram @paul_monckton.

Source: Google Issues Serious Warning For Google Photos Users

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