Category Archives: solutions

Solution to the "Google Arts and Culture" app "tap to refresh" issue

Google has done more for the world, than any other company I can think of. It is easy to blame “big tech” companies for all that is wrong – and as I write, there is a very visible protest against Facebook – but the truth is that “humans are only humans”. We will always find ways to misuse contents and technology in general, refuse to take the blame, and then ask others for solutions.

This constantly happens, at very different scales. Parents, religious groups, organizations of different shapes and forms, blame what they think is “wrong” with their kids, affiliates, members, etc., on the music they listen, the movies they watch, the books they read, the apps they use; the people they communicate with, the news they (do not) read, etc.
The opportunity to, alternatively, take a good introspective look at the mirror, is rarely taken. It is easier to find scapegoats.

These companies and ad agencies that, today, are taking the hypocritical path against Facebook, will do it to Google, to your company, or to yourself (!) tomorrow. They are oversimplifying extremely complex social questions and, with that, doing more harm than good. Our world is not trivial. Isolated hashtag reactions are some of what is wrong in human behavior. It is required to go beyond the hashtag.

This post is about one of the many wonderful products and services that Google offers. It is not about “search”, “Gmail”, “Classroom”, “Maps”, “Earth”, “Android”, etc., but about something less known, yet equally relevant and loveable: the “Google Arts and Culture” app.
Of course, with the current trends, it is only a matter of time before one of these wonderful offerings to become under negative scrutiny, either because someone will find horrible things when searching, have sensitive data compromised, or encounter “indecent art”.

So, enjoy the “Arts” app while you can, if you can. I could NOT, until understanding and fixing the “tap to refresh” issue. This issue consists in a blank screen telling you to “tap to refresh”, to no avail.

The “Google Arts and Culture” app, is a wonderful effort, to help people learn about, and connect with arts and culture. In many countries, it will be localized enough, to be based on the local arts/culture. Unfortunately, in my case, the app did not work at all: it would launch, display a “tap to refresh” message, and systematically fail on every attempt to continue.

I investigated enough of the app behavior, to understand that the failure was because of the unavailability of certain network resources:
(1)
I had my filtering proxy configured to ignore http(s) requests matching the pattern

*.ggpht.com

, which in the past served me well, to block certain image-based ads. If I want to use the app, as it is, I must unblock that pattern.
(2)
A second network resource that must be unblocked, for the app to work, is the domain

google-analytics.com

. In my case, I had configured my private DNS to translate requests matching

*.google-analytics.*

to 0.0.0.0, not to the real IP address. Again, that served me well, for many years, not only against ads, but mostly against a plethora of user-behavior tracking techniques. In this case, I am disappointed of having to unblock google-analytics. In the future, I will research for a different solution.

Doing (1) and (2) enables the app “Google Arts and Culture” to function.



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https://arturmarques.com/wp/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/google_arts_and_culture_00_permissions_768.jpg (image/jpeg)

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https://arturmarques.com/wp/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/google_arts_and_culture_app_03_running_768.jpg (image/jpeg)

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https://arturmarques.com/wp/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/google_arts_and_culture_app_02_tap_to_refresh_768.jpg (image/jpeg)

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Technical Details
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        SOLVED: Windows cannot access its own shares

        After an update, one of the “Windows 10” PCs in my network could no longer successfully share its properly configured folders, which were working before the update.

        When trying to access paths such as

        \\computerName\shareName

        the access would fail because of “no permission”.

        NET use

        commands would cause “System error 1219”.

        All machines, including the source machine, were able to list the shared resources at

        \\computerName

        But no machine, including the source machine (!), were able to browse inside any resource.

        Searching for the expression “windows 10 cannot access its own shared folders”, regardless of search engine, gives useless top results. A bad job from all search engines, also seen when one tries to find unbiased product reviews. The results from microsoft.com, spiceworks.com, tenforums.com, etc., are spectacularly bad and incredibly frustrating, with long threads of diagnosing rubbish, all for nothing, with the support effort typically ending in a “did not work” reaction to the scripted suggestions.

        In the end, I found that the error was because of “UAC” (“User Access Control”). That feature had been re-enabled by the Windows update. Disabling UAC – a functionality that I find annoying and of doubtful merit – fixed the issue.

        Such was the annoyance and the break in productivity, due to an undocumented side effect of a feature causing what it should not cause, that I researched and wrote a PowerShell script to “run everything as administrator”. This solution might require a system restart, but I left the line that does so commented. Just remove the sharp (#) from the line

        #shutdown -r -t 0

        , if you want the script to restart the computer, instead of doing it yourself, on your own time.

        #EnableLUA: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff715520.aspx
        Set-ItemProperty -Path "HKLM:\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\System" -Name "EnableLUA" -Value "0" #Default value is 1
        
        #The following is equal to the Security Policy "User Account Control: Behavior of the elevation prompt for administrators in Admin Approval Mode" = "Elevate without prompting"
        #http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc232761.aspx
        Set-ItemProperty -Path "HKLM:\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\System" -Name "ConsentPromptBehaviorAdmin" -Value "0" #Default value is 2
        
        #The following is equal to the Security Policy "User Account Control: Allow UIAccess applications to prompt for elevation without using the secure dekstop" = "Enabled"
        #http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd835564(v=ws.10).aspx
        Set-ItemProperty -Path "HKLM:\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\System" -Name "EnableUIADesktopToggle" -Value "1" #Default value is 0
        
        #Reboot server
        #shutdown -r -t 0