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Its the weekend! You made it through yet another wild week. Lets take a moment andnotmention COVID-19. Sound good? Sounds good! Lets cover other things going on in tech, from Googles nifty new art app to the automation of cybersecurity.

Googles Arts & Culture app attracted a lot of buzz two years ago, thanks to its neat-o trick ofpairing users selfies with famous portraits. Now its back with a new feature: Rendering your photos in one of many famous art styles.

After taking or uploading a photo, choose from dozens of masterpieces to transfer that style onto your image,reads the explanatory note on Googles blog. (And while you wait, well share a fun fact about the artwork, in case youre curious to know a bit more about its history.) For more customization, you can use the scissors icon to select which part of the image you want the style applied to.

This feature, dubbed Art Transfer, relies on machine learning to transform that decent shot of todays grilled-cheese sandwich into a Frida Kahlo masterwork. Art Transfer doesnt just blend the two things or simply overlay your image, the blog continued. Instead, it kicks off a unique algorithmic recreation of your photo inspired by the specific art style you have chosen. If you cant go to a museum this weekend, in other words, you can give yourself an art-y experience at home.

For those concerned about their privacy, this processing is apparently done on-device, without your image reaching Googles cloud. Nonetheless, keep in mind that Google is probably using data from the process to improve its A.I. and machine-learning efforts in some way.

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Cybersecuritytakes a lot of skill and effort, even at the best of times. Amazons new generally-available tool, Amazon Detective, is designed to automate the scanning of customers cloud resources. Previewed last year, its supposed to sniff out vulnerabilities and possible cyber-attacks.

The caveat, of course, is that Amazon Detective is designed expressly to scan AWS logs. Amazon Detectiveworks across your AWS accounts, it is a multi-account solution that aggregates data and findings from up to 1000 AWS accounts into a single security-owned master account making it easy to view behavioral patterns and connections across your entire AWS environment,reads the companys blog postingon the matter, which also includes a handy tactical breakdown of how it works (including slides).

In many ways, Amazon Detective is a potential preview of a future in which automation is used increasingly to scan systems for weaknesses. That wont put flesh-and-blood cybersecurity professionals out of a job, but it could radically change their workflow; for example, if software can handle many of the low level security tasks that confront a company on a weekly basis, technologists can spend more time on high-level tasks such as long-term security strategy.

For a couple months in there, it looked as if WeWork founder Adam Neumann had one heck of a golden parachute ready to deploy, despite the implosion of his Uber, but for office space startup: roughly a billion dollars. In exchange for stepping away, Neumann would earn $975 million in stock buybacks from SoftBank, which invested quite a bit of money in WeWork.

But according to CNN, WeWork failed to meet certain conditions, and now Neumann is out all of that sweet, sweet cash (and probably having a bad weekend as a result). Hopefully things go a little better for theWeWork engineers and other employeeswho are still trying to figure out how to navigate the company through multiple problems.

Have a good weekend, everyone! And keep washing those hands!

See more here:
Weekend Roundup: Anything-Other-Than-COVID-19 Edition (Seriously!) - Dice Insights