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Complete Claim Investigations Faster with New Guidewire Marketplace App from Allied Universal Compliance and Investigations – Business Wire

April 12, 2022 | Author: admin

SAN MATEO, Calif. & SANTA ANA, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Guidewire (NYSE: GWRE) and Allied Universal Compliance and Investigations announced that Allied Universals new Ready for Guidewire add-on for Guidewire ClaimCenter is now available in the Guidewire Marketplace.

Insurance fraud results in monetary losses of billions of dollars every year, according to the Coalition Against Insurance Fraud. To combat insurance fraud, Allied Universal Compliance and Investigations partners with insurers and third-party administrators to shorten the cycle time for claim investigations, enabling them to better serve customers and more quickly bring claims to closure. Allied Universal Compliance and Investigations PartnerLink app for ClaimCenter streamlines the investigation process, allowing claim handlers to easily generate referrals and access information and files within ClaimCenter.

Allied Universal Compliance and Investigations customizes services to meet insurer needs across P&C, automobile, workers' compensation, and other coverage areas. The organizations approximately 10,000 professionals adhere to strict information management and operation security protocols, procedures, and compliance standards. PartnerLink integrates encrypted information within ClaimCenter, enabling adjusters to securely assemble, analyze and act on investigation data to build claim information, create real-time dashboards, and view business intelligence, optimizing efficiency and saving time.

With the Allied Universal Compliance and Investigations app for claim investigations, claim handlers can:

Our integration with Guidewire saves time and optimizes efficiency, said Michael J. Malone, president, Allied Universal Compliance and Investigations. In a secure environment, PartnerLink transforms investigations, providing access with a single click.

We congratulate Allied Universal Compliance and Investigations on the release of its PartnerLink app for investigative services for ClaimCenter, said Becky Mattick, vice president, Global Solution Alliances, Guidewire. Fraud continues to be prevalent, and this empowers insurers to quickly and effectively manage investigations and resolve claims.

About Allied Universal Compliance and Investigations

Allied Universal Compliance and Investigations is the global leader in insurance claims investigations. For 33 years, the Allied Universal name has been synonymous with the highest standards of integrity and service while offering fully integrated investigative solutions to the property and casualty markets. Allied Universal Compliance and Investigations provides unparalleled industry knowledge, superior data privacy, benchmarking, data mining and integrated technology backed by extensive global resources, expertise and proven return on investment. For more information, visit http://www.aus.com/cni.

About Allied Universal

Allied Universal, a leading security and facility services company, provides proactive security services and cutting-edge smart technology to deliver tailored, integrated security solutions that allow clients to focus on their core business. Through our vast global network of more than 800,000 employees, we leverage best practices in communities all over the world. With revenues of $20 billion, we are supported by efficient processes and systems that can only come with scale to help deliver our promise locally: keeping people safe so our communities can thrive. We believe there is no greater purpose than serving and safeguarding customers, communities, and people in todays world. Allied Universal is There for you. For more information, please visit http://www.aus.com.

About Guidewire PartnerConnect ecosystem and Ready for Guidewire

Guidewire PartnerConnect Solution partners provide software, technology, and data solutions as well as insurance support services. Our Solution partners help drive business value and innovation for insurers by developing and delivering integrations, extensions, apps, and other complementary solutions for Guidewire products. All of our Ready for Guidewire partner solutions are validated for security, quality, and compatibility with Guidewire, and can be found on the Guidewire Marketplace.

For more information about Guidewire PartnerConnect, please visit http://www.guidewire.com/partners.

About Guidewire Software

Guidewire is the platform P&C insurers trust to engage, innovate, and grow efficiently. We combine digital, core, analytics, and AI to deliver our platform as a cloud service. More than 450 insurers, from new ventures to the largest and most complex in the world, run on Guidewire.

As a partner to our customers, we continually evolve to enable their success. We are proud of our unparalleled implementation track record, with 1,000+ successful projects, supported by the largest R&D team and partner ecosystem in the industry. Our marketplace provides hundreds of applications that accelerate integration, localization, and innovation.

For more information, please visit http://www.guidewire.com and follow us on Twitter: @Guidewire_PandC.

NOTE: For information about Guidewires trademarks, visit https://www.guidewire.com/legal-notices.

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Complete Claim Investigations Faster with New Guidewire Marketplace App from Allied Universal Compliance and Investigations - Business Wire

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Is The Legal Function Fiddling While The Rule Of Law Is Burning? The Case For An Integrated Response – Forbes

April 12, 2022 | Author: admin

CHARLOTTE, NC - SEPTEMBER 21: A police officer attempts to extinguish a fire on the I-85 (Interstate ... [+] 85) during protests in the early hours of September 21, 2016 in Charlotte, North Carolina. The protests began last night, following the fatal shooting of 43-year-old Keith Lamont Scott by a police officer at an apartment complex near UNC Charlotte. (Photo by Sean Rayford/Getty Images)

A categorical imperative would be one which represented an action as objectively necessary in itself, without reference to any other purpose. Immanuel Kant

At a time of profound change, upheaval, and uncertainty, individuals and society seek stability, accessibility, and wisdom from their institutions. How is the legal industry responding? Spoiler alert: neither adequately nor holistically.

The legal industry has not coalesced to address the erosion of public trust in lawyers and legal institutions, lack of access to legal services for most individuals and small/mid-sized businesses, and other systemic deficiencies. That undermines laws efficacy and erodes its societal impact at a time when both are badly needed.

Nor has the industry collectively explored why its demographic makeup, socio-economic homogeneityeven its vocabulary bear little resemblance to society-at-large. Examining why law has become so detached from the public is the first step towards rectification. The short answer to the why question is culture; the industry has failed to adapt to the ever-widening scope and accelerating pace of individual, business, and social change. It has largely ignored its role to protect and advance the rule of law and common good. Instead, most in the legal industry are focused on preserving the internal status quo

The legal establishment has also sidestepped other internal challengesits law schools antiquated, doctrinally-steeped pedagogy and one-size-fits-all approach; failure to recruit a diverse cohort with a learning-for-life mindset and invest in their upskilling that includes affordable self-help tools and experiential learning opportunities; lack of diversity, inequality, gender pay gap, usual suspect talent pool and emphasis on pedigree; and lack of collaboration/ team building. The legal industry devalues soft skillsempathy, resilience, inquisitiveness, and passion, among others. These are core attributes that not only contribute to professional success but also to human fulfillment.

An Industry That Has Lost Its Purpose

The legal industry lacks a central purpose. It is a fragmented, insular industry in search of meaning. Laws key internal stakeholders education, service providers, regulators, and the judiciary operate as guilds. Each has its own norms, pace, metrics, and structures. There is little collaboration, cohesion, or urgency among them to synchronize and advance collective objectives. Law has become a rudderless ship.

An asynchronous insular, siloed, precedent-bound, risk-averse, self-regulated, homogeneous, data-deficient industry lacking a reason for being cannot produce the bold, outcome-oriented, purpose-driven approach required to solve wicked problems. A full-throated, all-hands-on-deck defense of the rule of law is tops among them.

What is the purpose of the legal system and what role should each of its component parts play to achieve it? These are existential questions the legal industry must address, coalesce behind, and act upon.

A good place to start is the preamble of the American Bar Association Model Rules of Legal Ethics. It provides: [1] A lawyer, as a member of the legal profession, is a representative of clients, an officer of the legal system and a public citizen having special responsibility for the quality of justice. The legal profession has a special relationship with its customers (clients) as well as a strong social compact to set a high moral standard for the rest of society. If the legal profession serves only a small segment of those in need of its services, how can it act as steward of the quality of justice?

Ralph S. Tyler Jr., a Harvard constitutional law professor, considered the state of the legal profession in a recent New York Times Op Ed. His assessment is stark and unsettling: Something has gone badly wrong: It is unclear, in America in 2022, what the point of law is, what higher ends it should strive to attain. We have forgotten what law is for.

Tyler contends laws lack of purpose and pursuit of the common good pervades the profession/industry and imperils the rule of law. In his view, laws lost purpose extends all the way to the Supreme Court. He concludes that, The great promise of our legal systemthat law can create a framework to reconcile plural interests in a diverse society has manifestly failed. In his view laws abdication of the collective good and breach of its social compact indicate it has been infected by the same cancer that has metastasized in the body politic.

The witching hour for the legal industry to take concerted, meaningful action is fast approaching.

For Law, Its The Same Old Same Old

Key legal stakeholders continue to plod along, seemingly impervious to the convergent, convulsive changes transforming our lives, business, society, geopolitics, and environment. That t dilutes the legal functions societal impact, erodes public trust in the rule of law, and weakens an already flawed democracy. Worse still, there is no apparent urgency to take concerted action.

Students enroll in law schools, and 95% take out loans while the average grad is saddled with a $165,000 debt, not including interest. They lack practice-ready skills upon entry into the marketplace. Law schools continue to teach students how to think like a lawyer even as the legal role is being reconfigured not by lawyers but by business. Most full-time law school faculty have little or no practice or industry experience, understanding of the marketplace, or awareness of new career paths open to agile, inquisitive, team-oriented, and passionate grads.

Large corporate law firms continue to prosper even as their associate turnover rates and partner defections continue to rise. Meanwhile, their corporate (in-house) counterparts confront decreasing budgets, cost-takeout quotas, expanding portfolios, new risks, and an expectation that they not only defend the enterprise but also generate enterprise value and help enhance customer experience. Somethings got to give.

Courts are backlogged, opaque, and widely regarded as for the wealthy. Their laggard pace is out-of-synch with the speed of a digital world. The court of public opinion is increasingly challenging the hegemony of judicial resolution. Things do not have to be this way. As my good friend Richard Susskind has thoughtfully observed, courts can become a process, not a place. Whats lacking is the willingness of the judiciaryand the broader industryto challenge the status quo and to utilize available tools, resources, data, and new delivery models. These resourcesand a result-oriented approach to their utilizationwould improve access, efficiency, predictability, affordability, user-experience and scalability of dispute resolution, commercial transactions, regulatory compliance, and other functions.

Regulators routinely reject or nibble around the edges of legal modernization efforts. The remarkable rise of pro se litigants and default judgments in U.S. courts is the smoking gun in the case for re-regulation. Notwithstanding remarkable advances in technology, there is a dearth of self-help tools and affordable representation available to those that cannot afford a lawyer. As well, in many instances a licensed attorney is neither required nor the best equipped to respond to the challenge. Worse still, it is the legal profession that routinely opposes regulatory reform intended to better serve the public.

The legal profession is unhealthyliterally and figuratively. It suffers from high rates of suicide, chemical and alcohol dependency, divorce, and depression. A recent Atlantic article asserts that the legal profession has also become rife with partisanship, cancel culture, and ideological orthodoxy. The Constitution once united a diverse country under a banner of ideas. But partisanship has turned Americans against one anotherand against the principles enshrined in our founding document. Many lawyers have morphed from officers of the court to acolytes of orthodox ideologies.

The Takeover of Americas Legal System, another provocative indictment of the legal industry, contends law is infected by the same social forces that are fueling intolerance, doubt, and violence across society. The piece provides several examples of cancel culture and tribalism at U.S. law schools. It quotes a well-respected law professor who laments that: the imperatives of race, gender, and identity are more important to more and more students than due process, the presumption of innocence, and all the norms and values at the foundation of what we think of as the rule of law. Censorshipin the form of shutting down and/or ostracizing unpopular views or voiceshas become common at law schools and is increasingly evident at law firms and in the judiciary.

What To Do About It?

There are no quick or easy solutions to the aforementioned issues, but stasis is not a viable option. Here are some recommendations.

1. The legal industry, via leaders of its key stakeholder groups, must convene to establish its purpose.

2. Each stakeholder group plays a role in advancing the industry purpose. Collaboration, team-building, and integration between/among stakeholder groups is essential. It must become part of laws cultural fabric.

3. The legal industry must see itself as a function; it is part of a larger societal whole. Its purpose is not to serve lawyers but to serve justice and act as its steward.

4. The legal system should promote:

Humanity

Proactivity

Problem solving

Data mining, analytics, cross-functional sharing, and security

Data-backed recommendations

Transparency

Diversity

Multi-disciplinary collaboration

Industry benchmarks

Standardized terms

Self-help tools/solutions

Simple language

Business knowledge

Client-centricity (those that engage it and society-at-large)

Career-long learning centers

Up-skilling investment

Cultural awareness

Empathy

Speed

Accountability

Teamwork

Social responsibility

Diversity, equity, and inclusiveness

Synergy (internal and with other industries and society)

Agility

Accountability

Cost-effective solutions

Data-backed performance metrics available to the pubic

Competition (re-regulation)

Allied legal professionals (multidisciplinary workforce)

Diversified legal education programs tailored to different career paths

Impact on business and society

Global approach/collaboration to improve legal delivery

5. The legal industry should have fewer:

Unrepresented/under-represented individuals and businesses

Disputes that result in court proceedings

Lengthy contracts

Buzzwords and tech-hype

Innovation awards, self-proclaimed visionaries and disruptors, (and more thoughtful experimentation)

Law schools

Industry wide collaboration

Barriers to competition

Lawyers handling administrative matters and tasks that do not require legal licensure and/or can be done by machines

Examples of lawyers impeding commerce, not facilitating

Conclusion

The legal systems must serve the needs not only of clients that engage it but also society-at-large. Failure to do both is kryptonite to the rule of law and democracy. At a time when, for many, the rule of law is synonymous with political, ideological, and economic identification, the legal industry must adhere to a higher standard. It cannot look the other waymuch less participate in partisan conduct that violates its duty as an officer of the court and surrogate of the rule of law.

This is laws biggest case, and the stakes could not be higher.

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Is The Legal Function Fiddling While The Rule Of Law Is Burning? The Case For An Integrated Response - Forbes

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Ann Coulter Urges the Times to ‘Stop Obsessing’ Over Trump

April 12, 2022 | Author: admin

Conservative firebrand Ann Coulter has said she is officially done with former President Donald Trump and wants for the left-leaning media to be done with him too.

Trump is done, Coulter wrote in an email to The New York Times. You guys should stop obsessing over him.

Coulters comment was the latest in a long line of Trump-bashing from the one-time Trump loyalist. Coulter was such a die-hard Trump supporter she even wrote a 2016 book titled: In Trump We Trust.

Coulters comments were published Sunday in a New York Times article chronicling the recent media spat between Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) and Trump amid the possibility of both seeking the 2024 Republican presidential nomination.

Coulter weighed in on the battle last week, which at the time was focused around Trump calling out leaders who hadnt yet publicly revealed their Covid-19 booster shot status DeSantis included.

Coulter tweeted:

EXCLUSIVE: Trump is demanding to know Ron DeSantiss booster status, and I can now reveal it. He was a loyal booster when Trump ran in 2016, but then he learned our president was a liar and con man whose grift was permanent. I hope that clears things up.

Coulters main gripe with Trump has been over immigration, she savaged the former president over the issue on a podcast in November. Speaking with Andrew Sullivan, Coulter accused Trump of betraying his base by not following through on promises to crack down on immigration and finish the wall on the southern border.

Coulter and Trump have been trading barbs since the Spring of 2020 when she called him a disloyal actual retard on Twitter for not following through on the wall and for attacking his own Attorney General at the time, Jeff Sessions, who she claimed was the ONE PERSON in the Trump administration who did anything about immigration.

Then-President Trump hit back, calling her a Wacky Nut Job.

Coulter shared more details about her break with Trump to Sullivan, saying its because he not only betrays them [the base], but he lies to them. She added that a lot of the people who attacked her during the years she went after Trump are totally on the same page with me now, they pretend they never denounced me.

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Opinion: Taking on the Lying Liars | Good Times – Good Times

April 12, 2022 | Author: admin

In the 90s, Al Franken was the antidote to Rush Limbaugh and Fox News. His 1996 Rush Limbaugh is a Big Fat Idiot and Other Observations was the first major mainstream pushback against the rising right-wing media that was already experimenting with how much they could get away with distorting the truth. He was then part of what Molly Ivins called the great liberal backlash of 2003 with his book Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right, taking on the neocons of the George W. Bush era and their extremist media apologists like Bill OReilly, Ann Coulter and Sean Hannity.

Two decades later, everything Franken predicted about the consequences of all those lies have come to bearin fact, its far worse than he could have imagined. But then, who could have imagined a supposed news organization like Fox would one day be able to smugly push false anti-vaccine information to its millions of viewers while actually requiring that all of its talking heads telling those lies be vaccinated? Its mind-boggling stuff that goes against any logic, but thats where we are.

Franken, meanwhile, found success as a politician before resigning from the U.S. Senate in 2018 after allegations of sexual impropriety. The circumstances around that resignation have been debated to death, so it will be interesting to see the reception Franken gets on his current standup tour, which comes to the Santa Cruz Civic on Friday. In this weeks cover story, Steve Kettmann talks to Franken about everything from the Russian invasion of Ukraine to Tucker Carlson to the Capitol riot. A quarter-century after Franken first brought up the subject, there are more lying liars to talk about than ever.

STEVE PALOPOLI | EDITOR-IN-CHIEF

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GOP Social Media Experiments Fail (In Part) Because They Break The Troll/Amplification Cycle – Techdirt

April 12, 2022 | Author: admin

from the don't-feed-the-trolls dept

Weve noted for a while that Trumps alternative social media platform, Truth Social, isnt doing particularly well. Being a Trump product, the platform (surprise!) began with a lot of money slushing around that wasnt spent in any coherent way. Its also just generally glitchy and terrible. And its not helped much by the fact that after all of his whining about social media censorship (read: minimal accountability for saying stupid and sometimes dangerous things), Trump doesnt even use the product.

Then theres been the slow realization by the company that it still has to deal with the headaches of reality and content moderation at scale, which weve also noted isnt going particularly well. If you want a platform that isnt just a pit of bile and illegal content, you have to have moderation standards, which is why Parler, Gab, and now Truth Social (which muzzled some racist drivel by right wing dirty ops shitlord Roger Stone last week) have barred obnoxious people from doing dumb and sometimes illegal things.

Truth failed to gain traction even with the National Republican Senatorial Committee spamming its support for the platform like a feverish street corner huckster:

Putting the corruption, grift, and technical incompetence aside (and theres a lot to put aside), when the political mainstream press discusses the struggles of Social and other GOP social media platforms, one of the top arguments explaining why they fail is because echo chambers are just no fun:

I think the challenge that a lot of these newer ones have is to not be an echo chamber for people who hold similar beliefs, said Alex Weber, a content creator who was embraced by conservatives online after posting videos criticizing mask mandates, vaccine mandates and the mainstream media. I think why Instagram and Facebook and all these are so impactful is because youve got all different types of people.

While thats true to a point, it misses a key part of the failure. The problem isnt just that such groups corral like-minded people into groups made specifically for them. Hell, huddling with like-minded people is 80 percent of the reason Reddit was created and a major reason for its success.

No, one of the major reasons such projects fail is because they break the GOPs troll and inadvertent amplification cycle. How many times does a right wing personality say something grotesque, racist, or otherwise terrible on Twitter only to have it hate retweeted countless times by numerous people, usually partisan opposites, who think theyre dunking on, correcting, or punishing the content?

The entire success of modern GOP discourse is based on trolling. On any given day on Twitter and Facebook, theres a ceaseless array of left wing and centrist accounts hate retweeting every idiotic and racist thing Fox personality Tucker Carlson says, expanding distribution of his viewpoints exponentially.

Right wing celebrities like Ann Coulter have paid their mortgage for 30 years by intentionally saying stupid and controversial things, then soaking up free advertising as the outraged amplify said stupid and controversial thing to a significantly larger audience that might have never seen it otherwise.

Twitter dunks work to amplify dodgy and shitty trolls in much the same way. Theres just a countless array of folks who think theyre helping by dunking on terrible takes, when theyre only really amplifying those terrible takes to a much broader audience. Its utterly counterintuitive, and in some cases punished by engagement and ad engines (across both online and traditional cable media), to do anything else. Controversy sells. Nuance does not.

So while platforms like Truth Social are stumbling because theyre badly made by incompetent people who arent magically immune from the challenges of content moderation, theyre also stumbling because they break a cornerstone of online right wing discourse: trolling to amplify propaganda. A room full of terrible trolling propagandists has nobody to troll but themselves. And what fun is that?

Most of the Section 230 and conservatives are being silenced discourse is falsely framed as a conversation about free speech in punditry and the press. In reality, what the modern Trump GOP wants is the mandated carriage of propaganda. The dominant U.S. press simply cant help but frame Trump GOP concerns of censorship as legitimate, which speaks to the propagandas effectiveness.

Its why the GOP freaked out when DirecTV made the ordinary business decision to kick the conspiracy and fantasy channel off of its lineup. Its why the GOP despises big techs belated and often sloppy attempt to clean up race-baiting GOP propaganda on their platforms. Its why the party adores media consolidation at the hands of Sinclair, and the steady destruction of genuine local news reporting.

The modern Trump GOP cant just come out and admit their goal is mandated carriage of bigoted propaganda designed to rile up low-information Americans, so they have to dress it all up as something grander, including the Trump GOPs performative support of antitrust reform (read: an attempt to gain leverage over tech giants to mandate the carriage of, you guessed it, propaganda).

Shifting demographics and a fading (and dying) electoral base arent great news for the modern GOP, which increasingly alienates a big chunk of independent voters with unhinged behavior and positions. As a result, like many global authoritarian movements, theyve been forced to embrace online propaganda, fabricated culture war, and victimization porn to agitate and befuddle the public.

The idea that doing absolutely anything to rein in race-baiting propaganda in online or traditional media is censorship or the silencing of conservatives is itself propaganda, and it would be lovely if the broader discourse and press would wake up to this fact before were all drowning in many of the even uglier aspects of rank authoritarianism.

Filed Under: big tech, big tech censorship, censorship, conservative censorship, propaganda, section 230, silenced conservatives, social media, trolling, trollsCompanies: truth social

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What is QAnon doing in my mailbox? – The Boston Globe

April 12, 2022 | Author: admin

This kind of foolishness, which arrived on April Fools Day no less, deserves nothing more than an eye roll and a trip to the recycling bin. But the invocation of QAnon makes this something beyond another sketchy promotion. The senders address is given as a post office box in Portsmouth, N.H., but no one seems to know whos behind this mailing, whos footing whats probably a sizable tab, or the motive behind it.

Get Weekend Reads from IdeasA weekly newsletter from the Boston Globe Ideas section, forged at the intersection of 'what if' and 'why not.'

Perhaps Id find clues if I scanned the cards QR codes or visited its email address, but my mother cured me of that sort of thing. Years ago, an envelope arrived from what appeared to be the Unification Church, led for decades by Rev. Sun Myung Moon, who conducted mass weddings for church-arranged marriages, claimed he was the messiah, and bought full-page newspaper ads defending Richard Nixon during the Watergate scandal.

That letter disturbed my mother so much, she made me throw it away but not in the house. I tore it up, balled up the remains, and tossed it in a public trash container a few blocks away.

Without question, Moon was a cult leader. But unlike QAnon followers, Moons devotees never participated in a deadly insurrection to overturn the results of a presidential election.

Unlike other cults, QAnon has no designated leader. According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks hate groups, the Q name is the umbrella term for a sprawling spider web of right-wing Internet conspiracy theories with antisemitic and anti-LGBTQ elements that falsely claim the world is run by a secret cabal of pedophiles who worship Satan and are plotting against former president Donald Trump.

Somehow theyve overlooked the fact that Trump was a longtime friend of convicted sex offender and accused pedophile Jeffrey Epstein.

Trump isnt mentioned in the postcards text, but his photo is featured alongside those of Big Tech megalomaniacs (Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, Facebooks Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk); politicians (former president Barack Obama, Senator Mitt Romney of Utah, former New York governor Andrew Cuomo); performers (Mel Gibson, Kanye West, Jay-Z, Taylor Swift); and far-right provocateurs (Alex Jones, Ann Coulter); among others.

While the postcard is certainly controversial, Steve Doherty, a United States Postal Service spokesman, told NBC 10 Bostons Alison King, there doesnt appear to be anything in the mailing that would make it illegal to send through the mail.

If these postcards violate no law, this could mean we should expect more of this propaganda from an unhinged lot the FBI labeled a domestic terrorism threat and that was before the Jan. 6 insurrection. Prominent among the throngs with Trump banners and Confederate flags were people wearing QAnon garb and holding up handmade Q signs. Some of them breached the US Capitol, pummeled police officers, and went hunting for lawmakers barricaded in their offices.

Instead of shunning QAnon, Republican lawmakers adopted its mendacious talking points on nonexistent voter fraud, the efficacy of COVID protocols, and purported pedophilia rings among Democrats. This was glaringly obvious in some GOP senators disgraceful performances during last months Supreme Court confirmation hearing for Ketanji Brown Jackson. Unable to attack Jacksons qualifications, they drilled down on a manufactured theme that she gave lenient sentences to those convicted of possessing child pornography. That it was untrue didnt matter; Republicans followed through on a scurrilous lie Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri tweeted before the hearings.

It was perhaps the most significant Republican nod yet to the QAnon faithful, a boost to normalizing the conspiratorial claptrap doused in hate, racism, and attempts to shred democracy. About 16 percent of Americans now say they adhere to QAnon theories that government, media and financial worlds are controlled by Satan-worshipping pedophiles, an even larger percentage than when Trump was president.

Under normal circumstances, one could laugh at the ridiculousness of it all. But this perilous moment is anything but normal. With little daylight between many Republicans and QAnon, American right-wing politics is mainlining extremism. Now after spilling from the bowels of the Internet to the halls of Congress, these dangerous beliefs are literally landing on our doorsteps.

Rene Graham can be reached at renee.graham@globe.com. Follow her on Twitter @reneeygraham.

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What is QAnon doing in my mailbox? - The Boston Globe

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Google Cloud Storage Options: Object, Block, and File Storage

April 12, 2022 | Author: admin

Alongside compute and network, storage is one of the fundamental resources required in todays technological systems and software development. Regardless if your systems are on-premises, in the cloud, or both, you always rely on storage components to persist your data. However, if you are used to the world of data centers, like Google Cloud Storage with SAN, NAS, and local hard drivesand are starting to venture into public cloud, the concept of cloud-based storage and the different services available for it might prove tricky.

In this article, we are going to provide some clarity about the different storage options in the Google Cloud Platform.

Google Cloud provides three main services for different types of storage: Persistent Disks for block storage, Filestore for network file storage, and Cloud Storage for object storage. These services are at the core of the platform and act as building blocks for the majority of the Google Cloud services and, by extension, to the systems you build on top of it.

Since NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP is now available in the Google Cloud, NetApp users can easily take advantage of this growing cloud platform. Lets take a closer look at each of these Google Cloud storage services, what they were designed for, and what use cases they are each best suited to handle.

Block storage is the traditional storage type, both in the cloud and in on-premises systems. A Google Cloud Persistent Disk provides block storage and it is used by all virtual machines in Google Cloud (Google Cloud Compute Engine). The easiest way to understand it is by imagining those Persistent Disks as mere USB drives. They can be attached or detached from virtual machines and enable you to build, as the name suggests, data persistence for your services whenever virtual machines are started, stopped, or terminated.

In addition to Google Cloud Compute Engine virtual machines, these Persistent Disks are also used to power the Google Kubernetes Engine service.

Very much like a virtual disk in your local machine, a Google Cloud Persistent Disk can either be HDD or SSD, the latter for high I/O performance. In addition, there is also the ability to choose where they are located and what type of availability is needed: they can be Regional, Zonal, or Local. While local disks are not, in theory, part of the Google Cloud Persistent Disk service, it is important to mention them. These local disks are only available in the hardware where the virtual machine is running and, while providing the best I/O performance, they are not often recommended due to the low availability and redundancy. On the other hand, if you require high availability, Regional disks will offer you that out-of-the-box, with your disks being replicated behind the scenes in different zones within a region. A more moderate (and less-expensive) approach are Zonal disks, which are storage disks that are also highly available, but only within a single zone.

Other lesser known, yet great features of Google Cloud Persistent Disks are automatic encryption, flexibility to resize while-in-use, and a snapshot capability which can be used for both backup and virtual machine image creation.

Filestore is the fully managed Google Cloud service that provides network file storage. Network file storage is not a new cloud concept and very much like block storage it also exists in your typical on-premises data center. If youre used to working with NAS (Network Attached Storage) the concept should be familiar to you.

While you could argue that network file storage is technically block storage (it is!), there is a very clear distinction here. A network file storage, as the name suggests, provides a disk storage over the network. This enables the development of systems with multiple parallel services that has the ability to read and write files from the same disk storage mounted over the network.

However, the advantages this gives require some caution in its use. Compared with the usual block or object storage, the performance of file storage is, as you might expect, substantially inferior. This might lead to issues with concurrency and file permissions. Therefore, while designing cloud-native systems, you should only use this solution after careful evaluation to solve these challenges.

You can read more about Google Cloud Filestore here.

Google Cloud Storage is the object storage service offered by Google Cloud. It provides some very interesting out-of-the-box features such as object versioning or fine-grain permissions (per object or bucket), that can make development easy and help reduce operational overheads. Google Cloud Storage serves as the foundation of several different services.

What kind of benefits does this storage type have? The concept of object storage is not that easy to grasp. In typical on-premises systems where capacity is more limited and connectivity fast and exclusive, having this type of storage is not at all common. The way that object storage works, however, is beautifully simple to the end user. In simple terms, its value-proposition is such that you can get and put any file you want via a REST APIand this can expand indefinitely with each object growing up to the terabyte scale. Interesting, right? In Cloud Storage, different objects are grouped in unique namespaces called buckets. A bucket can hold multiple objects yet, a single object will belong to only one bucket.

This model for storage is widely popular in cloud-native systems due to its low cost (cents per GB) combined with the serverless approach and simplicity. The heavy work of data replication, availability, integrity, capacity planning, etc. is then left to the cloud provider. The drawback of object storage is that there is no other way to access the data besides the REST API; therefore, the typical approach for designing systems, managing data, and structuring a filesystem-type of access doesnt work.

Perhaps some of the most underrated functionalities of Google Cloud Storage are the different storage classes and putting Lifecycle Management Rules into use for the data buckets. Using these features can make a huge difference in terms of cost and the running operational expenses.

In Google Cloud Storage, you are required to select one storage class for your buckets: Standard (which can be either Regional or Multi-Regional), Nearline, or Coldline. The usual approach is to select Standard, where you can opt to have your bucket in a specific single Google Cloud Region or stored across multiple Regions. This works really well in different scenarios since you get a highly performant and highly available storage.

However, there are several cases where the data is not meant to be accessed frequently and having reduced availability is perfectly ok. In these cases, the Nearline and Coldline storage classes are options that can and should be explored. They can easily reduce the cost in >50% compared with the standard storage class.

The Nearline storage class is designed for data that is accessed less than once per month. One example use case is data that will only be used to produce an aggregate monthly report. Coldline storage, on the other hand, is designed for data that is accessed even less frequentlythink, once per year or less. This storage class is therefore particularly useful for archival storage. One use case is to use the Coldline storage class to keep a copy of data that the business requires to be retained for a long period of time (e.g. 10 years) due to compliance with different regulatory requirements.

One of the challenges of properly leveraging storage classes (and other Cloud Storage features) is that the same type of data (i.e., data in the same bucket) might require different treatment over the course of its lifetime. For example, if you use Google Cloud Storage buckets to store your application logs, you might require high availability for the data during the first month (including versioning each object as a safeguard for data tampering), and perhaps less availability (without versioning) for the next six months, and eventually retain a copy of those logs for the following five plus years due to compliance obligations.

For these types of scenarios, you can enable Google Cloud Storage Lifecycle Management rules. This is a really great built-in feature of Google Cloud Storage that enables you to define business logic rules per bucket without much effort. With these rules you can define actions such as automatically transitioning objects between different storage classes, disable versioning, or even delete objects after certain defined periods of time. Leveraging these features and having lifecycle rules in place can translate into real and tangible cost savings at the end of the month.

In this article, we explored the different storage building blocks in the cloud and provided a good overview of the different storage services available in Google Cloud. They are quite straightforward to grasp and provide a huge amount of flexibility to develop different types of systems in the Cloud.

While designing and architecting your system is then important to understand the pros and cons of each storage type and the costs associated with them. What will likely appeal to current NetApp users trying to find out how to use Google Cloud storage is that Cloud Volumes ONTAP is now available for use with Google Cloud. NetApps groundbreaking cloud data management platform that has been a huge success for enterprises in AWS and Azure, can finally start to leverage the benefits of Google Cloud.

Google Cloud & Microservices: How to Use Google Cloud Storage with Microservices

With microservices, organizations are able to break out of the monolithic IT architectures, allowing for smaller, more flexible service options. When using microservices on Google Cloud, there is an important role that Google Cloud Storage can play.

This blog will go into more detail about how microservices work and provide a working step-by-step guide on how to implement one with a same architecture using Google Cloud Storage.

Read more in Google Cloud & Microservices: How to Use Google Cloud Storage with Microservices.

Cloud File Sharing Services: Google Cloud FilestoreWhen it comes to using a cloud file service, cloud admins have a lot of challenges on their plate. These include ensuring data is accessible to all clients no matter the type of operating systems they use, managing backup and archive data, and making sure costs dont go through the roof even when storing large volumes of data. Google Filestore is the newest file service on the market. How does this new offering stack up to some of the more mature options out there?

This post takes a deep dive into Cloud Filestore, Google Clouds fully managed file share service, and examines whether it has all the required features youll need in a cloud file share service, such as multi-zone availability, point-in-time snapshots and data protection. The article also takes a look at NetApps Cloud Volumes ONTAP, now available on Google Cloud file storage.

Read more: Cloud File Sharing Services: Google Cloud Filestore

How to Add and Manage Lifecycle Rules in Google Cloud Storage BucketsManaging your data lifecycle can be very challenging when dealing with unpredictable amounts of data. Luckily, Google Cloud Storage comes with a built-in Object Lifecycle Management feature which makes things much easier. Although the pricing for this feature is low, if improperly configured, expenses can rise significantly when using big data volumes or multiple API operations.

This post introduces Google Clouds lifecycle management feature and shows you how to create automated lifecycle rules, taking full advantage of Google Clouds out-of-the-box capabilities. The article also gives you a step-by-step walkthrough on how to create a Google Cloud Storage bucket and set up lifecycle rules to automatically delete data as well as change your storage class.

Read more: How to Add and Manage Lifecycle Rules in Google Cloud Storage Buckets

Google Cloud Website Hosting with Google Cloud StorageThere are many benefits to hosting a static website on Google Cloud Storage that often go overlooked. Hosting a website on Google Cloud is actually incredibly simple and offers multiple advanced capabilities and services, for those who know how to take advantage of them.

In this post we explain from A to Z how to host your website on Google Cloud Storage. This will include instructions on hosting the website files in Google Storage buckets, enabling and configuring the Google Cloud Storage static website as well as validation in the browser and advanced settings.

Read more: Google Cloud Website Hosting with Google Cloud Storage

Cloud Storage Encryption: Key Management in Google CloudClient-side encryption, in which clients locally encrypt data with their own keys, provides users with more control over encryption but also necessitates careful key management, auditing, and frequent rotations. One way to bypass these challenges is to use one of Google Clouds SSE options. Each option has its unique set of advantages and disadvantages.

This post introduces the different SSE options - GMEK, CSEK and CMEK, discussing which is the easiest to use, which is designed for sensitive data, and other considerations such as auditing, rotation and storage. It then provides a step-by-step guide on how to use CSEK on Google Cloud Platform storage.

Read more: Cloud Storage Encryption: Key Management in Google Cloud

How To Resize Google Cloud Persistent Disk Attached to a Linux InstanceGoogle Cloud Persistent Disks function as reliable and high-performance block storage for your Google Compute Virtual Machine instances. Getting to know their functionality, as well as learning to perform online resizing, will provide you with a greater degree of flexibility over your deployment and ensure business continuity.

In this post we introduce Google Cloud Persistent Disks, take a look at some of its built-in features and explain how to resize them. Well also show you how NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP can offer you even more capabilities for maximum flexibility.

Read more: How To Resize Google Cloud Persistent Disk Attached to a Linux Instance

How to Switch Between Classes in Google Storage ServiceGoogle Cloud Storage comes with several distinct storage classes and availability types, each tailored to fit your datas usage patterns. Leveraging these options properly can have a huge impact on cost and performance.

This post gives an overview of Google Storage Service, focusing on the various storage classes and their respective availability types. It also provides a step by step guide to create a Google Cloud Storage bucket, add and remove data, and switching between storage classes.

Read more: How to Switch Between Classes in Google Storage Service

How to Use the gsutil Command-Line Tool for Google Cloud StorageObject storage is very easy to use, operates in a pay-as-you-go pricing model, and has low operational overhead, all of which make it the popular choice in cloud computing. To get started with this type of storage, its important to get to know your options for interacting with Google Cloud Storage. This will also be helpful for anyone setting up NetApps Cloud Volumes ONTAP for Google Cloud.

This post explains different ways to communicate with Google Cloud Storage: Google Cloud Console, SDKs and the Command-line tool. The article explains, step by step, how to use the gsutil command-line to install and authenticate Google Cloud using your machine terminal, how to create or destroy a bucket, and how to add and remove objects from that bucket. The gsutil tool is especially handy when transferring large volumes of data and for automating tasks without recurring to the UI.

Read more: How to Use the gsutil Command-Line Tool for Google Cloud Storage

Google Cloud Persistent Disk: How to Create a Google Cloud Virtual ImageKnowing how to create a custom virtual image is a significant step in making the most of what the public cloud has to offer. If you are using Google Cloud Compute Engine Instances, this feature is a definite must-have to leverage when designing your system.

This post provides an explanation of virtual images and details how to create them from Google Cloud Persistent Disks. This will accelerate the bootstrap process in applications running in Google Cloud Engine and can significantly augment your deployment of Cloud Volumes ONTAP on Google Cloud.

Read more: Google Cloud Persistent Disk: How to Create a Google Cloud Virtual Image

Google Cloud Containers: Top 3 Options for Containers on GCPGoogle provides several technologies you can use to run containers in Google Cloud environments. Learn about the top three services that can help you run containerized applications on the Google Cloud Platform - Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), Google Anthos, and Google Cloud Run.

We have authored in-depth guides on several other topics that can also be useful as you explore the world of cloud storage.

S3 Storage

Learn the basics of storing data in Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3), Amazons first cloud service and still one of its most popular.

Learn about storage solutions in the Microsoft Azure cloud, including object storage, block storage, and file storage solutions.

Multicloud strategies are becoming more popular as organizations seek to optimize their cloud services and deployments. These strategies can help you prevent vendor lock-in, increase your flexibility, and help you optimize costs.

This guide explains what multicloud storage is, how it works, what its used for, the core requirements for this storage, and how Cloud Volumes ONTAP supports it.

See top articles in our multicloud storage guide:

AWS offers a range of database services and support to try and meet all its clients needs. Many of these services are fully managed to help reduce your IT workload and enable you to store and use data as simply as possible.

This guide explains what AWS database support is available, what database services are available, and how you can migrate your databases to AWS.

See top articles in our AWS database services guide:

Snapshots are a common method for natively backing up cloud data and services. This method enables you to save point in time backups which can be restored when needed.

This guide explains what types of storage snapshots are available, what AWS snapshots are, and how to use AWS snapshots.

See top articles in our AWS snapshots guide:

Storing file data in Azure is simple through Azure File Storage service. This service enables you to store files across cloud and on-premises resources, enabling you to flexibly and securely share data and workflows.

This guide explains what Azure File Storage is, common use cases for Files, management concepts and components of the service, how data is accessed and the architecture of the service, and some best practices for securing your data.

See top articles in our Azure file storage guide:

Google Cloud offers a variety of storage options for you to choose from. These services form the base of many other services in the cloud and understanding what your options are can help you manage your cloud more efficiently.

This guide explains what Google Cloud Storage options exist and their common uses.

See top articles in our Google Cloud storage guide:

Google Clouds specialty is flexibility and integration of services and this extends to its database services. In Google Cloud you have a wide variety of database deployments, models, and support to choose from.

This guide explains your options for deploying databases in the cloud, what Google Cloud database services are available, and how to choose the right service for you.

See top articles in our Google Cloud database guide:

Software developers and DevOps engineers are packaging applications into lightweight units called containers. Kubernetes helps manage and scale containers across clusters of physical machines.

In this environment, Kubernetes storage becomes a significant challenge. By default, containers are ephemeral, meaning that any transient data on the container is lost when it shuts down. However, Kubernetes provides several options for persistent storage.

See top articles in our Kubernetes guide:

Learn the basics of storing data in Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3), Amazons first cloud service and still one of its most popular.

File shares support some of the most important workloads that enterprise businesses rely on, and the resources of the public cloud have created interesting new possibilities. Every major public cloud provider now offers its own cloud file sharing service, each with its own target workloads and considerations. But not every enterprise will find what theyre looking for in a fully managed, all-cloud service.

See top articles in our cloud file sharing guide:

Snapshots are a common method for natively backing up cloud data and services. This method enables you to save point in time backups which can be restored when needed.

This guide explains what types of storage snapshots are available, what AWS snapshots are, and how to use AWS snapshots.

See top articles in our AWS snapshots guide:

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Google Cloud Storage Options: Object, Block, and File Storage

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Adobe brings its Frame.io acquisition to its Creative Cloud – TechCrunch

April 12, 2022 | Author: admin

Last August, Adobe acquired Frame.io, an online video review and collaboration platform for creative professionals, for $1.275 billion in cash. At the time Adobe signaled that it would build out deeper integrations between its existing Premiere Pro and After Effects video tools and Frame.io, so its maybe no surprise that today, shortly before the annual NAB show, it is announcing what this integration is going to look like. Starting today, as part of the existing Creative Cloud package, Adobes customers using the latest versions of Premiere Pro and After Effects will get access to the Frame.io extension as part of their existing subscription. They will also be able to log into Frame.io with their Adobe ID.

Its our first step in building an end-to-end cloud-based video platform thats seamlessly integrated with Premiere Pro and the rest of the tools our customers use, Paul Saccone, Adobes VP of Marketing for Frame.io, explained in a press briefing ahead of todays announcement. With more video content being created than ever before and remote work becoming the new norm, Frame.io for Creative Cloud will enable editors and key stakeholders like producers, agencies and clients to seamlessly collaborate and get to that final approval faster.

Image Credits: Adobe

Frame.io for Creative Cloud will include free sharing, with an unlimited number of external reviewers, accelerated file transfers and 100 GB of dedicated Frame.io storage, which will be separate from the existing Creative Cloud storage plan. Creatives will have the ability to work on five different projects concurrently and the plan will support up to two users who can collaborate on a project in real time.

For the most part, Frame.io for Creative Cloud sits somewhere between Frame.ios free plan and its most affordable $15/month/user paid plan (which features camera to cloud support, up to 10 users, 250 GB of active storage and 4K playback).

The service will also include Frame.ios camera-to-cloud feature, which allows remote editors to start editing their videos while the rest of the crew is still shooting. Its an automated workflow that uploads files from cameras to the cloud, making them available to editors in Premiere Pro just a few moments later, Saccone explained. It takes that traditionally linear process of production and post-production and makes them parallel so that everybody can work together at the same time.

Adobes new AI-powered color correction tool for Premiere Pro. Image Credits: Adobe

Adobes Premiere Pro is also getting a number of updates; most importantly it now features an AI-powered first-pass color correction tool that will hopefully make one of the more tedious parts of the video editing process a bit easier. The tool will automatically apply color corrections to video clips and then leave it to the video editor to work on details like skin tone or the color of the sky. The idea here isnt to do away with LUTs but to help creatives with the next step after they apply their favorite LUTs.

There is also a new header bar that aims to make navigating Premiere Pro a bit easier and a new export mode that will give users a more streamlined experience for when they want to post their videos to YouTube, Twitter and Facebook.

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Adobe brings its Frame.io acquisition to its Creative Cloud - TechCrunch

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The Five Easiest Ways to Take a Complete Backup of Your Mac – Lifehacker

April 12, 2022 | Author: admin

Photo: Kaspars Grinvalds (Shutterstock)

No one wants to be the person who accidentally spills coffee on their MacBook and ends up losing all their data. The laptop can be easily replaced, but if you dont have a backup, you face the uninviting prospect of permanent data loss. Luckily, backing up your Mac right now is effortless and cheap, and there are multiple ways to get it done.

Before you start, a few things to keep in mind: While one backup is better than none, its a good idea to store at least two copies of your computers data in different locations. This could be as simple as backing up your entire computer to an external hard drive and saving all your photos on a cloud storage service. That way, the data thats most important to you is saved in two locations, so if one of the backups gets corrupted or lost, you have a second copy to fall back on.

Secondly, there is a difference between cloud sync services and true backup services. A sync service, such as iCloud or Google Drive, isnt always the best choiceif you accidentally delete a file from your computer, it gets deleted from the servers of sync services too, putting you at risk of losing it forever. The better choice is a dedicated online backup service provider.

Here are five of the easiestbackup solutions for your Mac, with the best options listed first.

Time Machine ships with macOS, and its the most convenient backup solution for most people. You can get started by going to System Preferences > Time Machine and selecting a backup disk. This can be a second hard drive on your computer, an external hard disk, or even an SD card or a pen drive. Or choose a more expensive, robust solution like NAS (network-attached storage).

Time Machine takes an hourly backup of your computer every day and retains a daily backup for each day of the month. If your computer crashes, you should be able to pick the most recent backup, or an older version if you wish to. This feature works best when the backup disk is permanently connected to your computer, so you should buy a good external drive to store Time Machine backups.

For most people, an external hard disk is good enough, but it gets inconvenient to permanently block off a USB port, especially on MacBooks that might only have two open slots, so consider a network-connected hard drive such as the WD My Cloud Home. It costs around $160 for 2TB but provides a huge advantage for the money: As long as its plugged in and connected to the same wifi network as your computer, itll keep storing your Time Machine backups automatically.

If youre looking for a more advanced solution, a dedicated network-attached storage device is an option. These devices can be paired with a dedicated hard disk to back up all the devices in your house, and often can run apps allowing you to stream stored media or act as a web server. Many people use a NAS with double-digit terabytes of hard drive space as a home server to access all their data. If you only need to back up one computer, an NAS is obviously overkill.

Time Machine is great for most people, but its biggest problem is that its slow. If you want a faster backup solution, consider using a dedicated backup app such as SuperDuper! ($30) or Carbon Copy Cloner ($40). Both apps offer a free trial to let you check out features without committing.

With these apps, creating your backups take much less time, and youll also be able to create bootable copies of your computer. That ways if your machine crashes and you cant even boot into the system, you can plug in your backup hard disk to your computer and use it to boot the computer, making the recovery process a lot faster.

Your next option is an online backup service such as Backblaze or Carbonite. Both cost less than $10 a month and offer a complete online backup of your computer. If your computer dies, you can download files off their servers or request your data be copied to a hard disk and shipped to you. This courier service is available on both Backblaze and Carbonite, but with different terms and conditions, so be sure to check out the fine print before signing up.

Online backup services are ideally offsite backup solutions, as in case of a disastrous event such as a hurricane or a forest fire, keeping your backups inside your house could be catastrophic. If your data is valuable to you, a secondary offsite backup is essential.

If you try to download all your data from one of these services, it could take a lot of time, depending on your internet speeds and the server loads at the backup services data center. Thats why its not ideal to use an online backup service as your primary backup option. However, its still a better choice than no backup at all.

You can back up most of the files stored on your Mac to iCloud. This feature, like Time Machine, is built into macOS. You can turn it on by going to System Preferences > Apple ID > iCloud and checking all the options in the right pane.

This setting will start syncing your Macs files to your iCloud account, but dont consider it a substitute for a true backup service. If you delete files on your Mac, theyre also deleted on iCloud, which isnt always what you want from a backup service. iCloud can also be frustratingly slow at times, even if your internet speed is fast. You may be able to recover large files quickly, but smaller ones may take forever to download. This unreliability, coupled with iClouds measly 5GB of free storage space, makes it hard to recommend as a primary backup solution.

You can also use the computer backup features provided by cloud storage services such as OneDrive and Google Drive. This works best if youre already paying for cloud storage and want an online copy of your data. OneDrive and Google Drive are also sync services, so you should be doubly sure about deleting anything synced to these services.

The backup apps designed by these cloud storage providers often clunky and slow. If thats getting to you, Arq Backup ($50) is a faster alternative. It can back up your data to multiple cloud storage services and even external hard disks or your NAS. To address privacy concerns, the app encrypts your data before uploading it to cloud storage services.

The only negative of using Arq Backup is that youll need to use the app to restore your backups. If the app isnt installed on the computer youre trying to restore (or it wont boot, so you cant open the app), you wont be able to restore your data.

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The Five Easiest Ways to Take a Complete Backup of Your Mac - Lifehacker

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Windows 11 is getting an upgrade that will save you a ton of time – Tom’s Guide

April 12, 2022 | Author: admin

Microsoft is taking steps to better integrate its OneDrive cloud storage with the File Explorer in Windows 11.

As spotted by Windows Latest, Windows Insider Build 22593 lets you set OneDrive as the default File Explorer folder, which will give you easy access to files stored in the cloud. This means youll no longer need to add a OneDrive folder to the Windows sidebar to access the cloud.

TechRadar notes that File Explorer has always opened into a homepage that allowed quick access to items stored on the local drive. Instead, you can now have the homepage launch OneDrive.

Theres also a new OneDrive icon located in the top right-hand corner of the File Explorer window. Clicking it opens a dropdown menu that shows information like your file syncing progress and storage capacity. You can use this menu to launch OneDrive in the web browser to adjust settings.

Last week, Microsoft announced a slew of upcoming Windows 11 updates, with a redesigned File Explorer being among them. The new Home page option from this latest Windows 11 preview build is tied with the recent File Explorer update. As we now know, there will be multiple pages you can set as the default Home page, including OneDrive.

Integrating File Explorer and OneDrive is a smart move. While accessing OneDrive wasnt particularly difficult in the past, being able to launch right into it will further streamline your work routine. This is especially true if you're a hybrid worker, as youll no longer have to worry about which files are stored on your work or home computer. You'll have peace of mind knowing all your files reside in OneDrive.

This feature is currently rolling out to members of the Windows Insider program. As such, we cant say when or if it will release as a standard Windows 11 feature for the public.

Still, it's clear that Microsoft is continuing its efforts to integrate Windows 11 with the cloud. Just last week, the Redmond-based tech giant announced it would integrate Windows 365 into Windows 11 using the operating systems virtual desktop feature. Though said feature is aimed at businesses and office workers, being able to access ones work via the cloud is something everyone can benefit from.

Today's best Microsoft Surface Pro 8 deals

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Windows 11 is getting an upgrade that will save you a ton of time - Tom's Guide

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