 This 10th year of Daily Tech News show is made possible by you, the listener, thanks to all of you, including Chris Allen, Chris Smith, Mark Gibson, and Adam L. On this episode of DTNS, Amazon brings ads to Prime Video. How mad should you be? We'll tell you. A foldable phone with a circular cover screen is making an appearance and Shannon Morse helps us understand why Apple has so many vulnerabilities these days. This is the Daily Tech News for Friday, September 22, 2023 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt. And from Studio, who even knows anymore? I'm Sarah Lane. From Studio Colorado, I'm Shannon Morse. And I'm the show's producer, Roger Chang. Do you think you'll ever settle on the name of your studio? Well, I don't know. I kind of feel like, you know, being like a fluid studio is kind of fun. Superposition. You're all studios. Right. At once. Yeah, exactly. Indeed. Well, settle, collapse into some coherent position because it's time for the quick hits. Microsoft is closer than ever to finalizing its merger with Activision Blizzard. To catch you up, the deal has been approved or at least not blocked pretty much everywhere except in the UK. Friday, the UK competition and markets authority issued a statement saying that Microsoft's agreement to sell Activision's cloud gaming rights to Ubisoft for the next 15 years, quote, substantially addresses previous concerns and opens the door to the deal being cleared. End quote. This EMA will now take feedback from third parties until October 6, after which it will likely approve the deal before the October 18 deadline. So the merger will happen in time for them to toast each other with pumpkin spice latte. Still good to know. It's a beautiful life. Back in 2009, some of you may recall, I discussed on CNET's Buzz Out Loud podcast that the EU had fined Intel for violating antitrust rules. Intel said, or actually paid, PC manufacturers, if they agreed to delay, cancel or not sell products with AMD chips inside. Intel made these payments to HP, Acer and Lenovo, possibly others, but those are the ones named in the suit. Intel appealed that fine, and at the time, we noted it could take years to resolve. Well, 14 years, to be exact. After wending its way through the courts, the EU has reimposed a smaller fine than the one they assessed in 2009, 376.36 million euros. And this case isn't even fully done yet. There's another aspect of it regarding rebates rather than direct payments, which is still in the courts. Wednesday's Android 14 QPR one beta one beta update update includes an upcoming feature to use your phone as a webcam. If you might be saying, well, why would I want to do that? It doesn't rely on third party apps or software, but it does require physically connecting the phone to a laptop or a desktop computer using a USB cable. The feature was first spotted in the charging this device via USB option that appeared in the notification tray after the phone was first connected. The UK confirmed it will essentially adopt the EU's agreement with the US over how to handle data transfers between two areas. Data transfer agreements make it easy for a company to operate in two governmental areas while storing data in another. So you can, for instance, operate in the European Union, but keep all the data in a data center somewhere in the United States. Now those agreements between the EU and the US have been struck down by the EU Court of Justice twice for insufficiently protecting the privacy of EU users, thanks to lawsuits pursued largely by Max Schrems as well as a few others. And this latest version of the EU-US agreement also is going to face legal challenges in the European Union. However, the UK is not subject to the decisions of European courts, so it's possible that if the current EU agreement got struck down, the UK version with the US could continue. The social network X, formerly known as Twitter, some people use them interchangeably, we'll figure that out at some point, announced its sunsetting its circles feature on October 31st. Ooh, very spooky. Circles launched in August of 2022. It was initially designed to sit somewhere between a public and a private account, where as a user, you could designate certain tweets to be viewable only by Tom and Shannon and Roger and Joe type thing instead of everybody without being private. You had 150 followers maximum at the time. Now users won't be able to add people to their circles after October 31st. They won't be able to create new posts either, but they will be able to remove people from past circle shared posts if they feel like it wasn't, you know. Yeah. Happy Halloween. You've been removed from a circle. Well, let's talk a little bit more about what's going on with the Amazon Prime video because you'll either be mad about this or you won't care. Ads are coming to Amazon Prime video unless you pay extra. So Amazon Prime video is included with Amazon Prime at no additional charge. Amazon Prime gets you lots of other things. You get free shipping. You get, you know, either cost $14.99 per month or $139 per year for that. And if you get a lot of stuff that is shipped to you, it might make out, might not, but for most people it does. You can also pay for Amazon Prime video on its own for $8.99 per month. Now starting in early 2024, Prime video subscribers in Canada, Germany, the UK and the US will see a limited advertisements thing. Australia, France, Italy, Mexico and Spain are going to get this later this year. In the US, you'll be able to pay $2.99 per month extra to go back to being ad free. A lot of people say, okay, I like ad free. Oh, you know, what else? No prices were announced yet for the other regions. How many ads are we talking about here, you might say? Well, Variety says that Amazon plans to run fewer ads than broadcast TV or other streamers. When you say other streamers, it's like, oh man, estimating that the lowest ad load right now would be about four minutes per hour. Are we outraged, Shannon? Yes, everyone's outraged. Right, Shannon? I'm not outraged, but I am very annoyed by, especially by like how they're marketing this. Instead of, so I'm so used to whenever streamers decide to raise the price, you still get all the benefits of the tier that you were currently on. I'm, I don't really like how Amazon is doing this change where they're saying, okay, now you have to increase to a different tier to get the thing that you were currently paying for. So instead of saying like, hey, we're going to introduce a new tier that's cheaper and you can just like downgrade to that one, they're saying now you have to upgrade to a new tier to still get the ad free experience that you've had for the past like umpteen years. And we've had Amazon Prime Video for a very, very long time without ads. So this is somewhat, I just, I don't like how they're advertising it. I don't like this one either. And, and usually I'm not bothered by this stuff. Personally, when I don't like price increases, but I don't get offended by them like some people do. If somebody thinks that their service is worth a certain amount, then they should try charging for that. And if I think it's worth that amount, I'll pay it. And if I don't, I won't. Like to me, it's that simple. When the ads come along, if they do what Netflix did where they're like, hey, we're going to have ads for cheaper, you can stay on the tier you're on, or you can pay less, you can switch and pay less and get ads. That's perfectly fine. That's my choice. I can decide to do that or not. Disney Plus did a different thing where they're like, we're going to put ads in your, in your tier that you're at right now, or you can upgrade to a more expensive tier to get rid of them. To me, that's just like a price rise. They're saying, instead of forcing you to pay extra, we're just going to put ads in it. And if you don't want to pay the price raise, that didn't bother me either. This bothers me, I think, because it's Amazon Prime. And what they sold me with Amazon Prime was you get all these things as a member of Amazon Prime. You pay for Amazon Prime. I pay my $140 a year. I get all this stuff. And now they're saying, oh, but to keep the benefit of Amazon Prime, now you have to pay a little extra. And there's something about that that rubs me the wrong way, because I don't want to have add-ons to my Amazon Prime membership. It just feels weird. The simplicity of Prime was so nice for such a long time. So I really enjoyed just, it's just a big, fancy, happy bundle. And you don't even have to think about it. You just pay the membership once a year. Yes, that's exactly right. I just got a notification from Amazon yesterday, I think, of Amazon Prime annual subscription coming up, which actually threw me for a loop last year when I was like, what is this? Because I forget. I forget that I do pay for Amazon Prime, but once you do, a lot of the stuff is just sort of seamless, right? You don't have to think about, you know, oh, some extra Prime thing, you know, all the things that I get, whether it be physical deliveries, video, certain audio subscriptions, all of that is kind of supposed to be understood. You pay for this, what is it now? $119 per year annually, I think. That's fine with me. I'm down to do that. But yeah, all the extra stuff is going to, I don't know, anybody who would say, oh, that seems cool. No, it's complicated. It's not the first time they've done it either. Amazon Music is the same way. You get a certain amount in Prime, and you have to pay extra for other stuff, but that bothers me less, probably because they started it that way. This feels like it's taking something away, and psychologically, we never like it when something is taken away. But in the end, I think it's probably fair. All right, foldable phones. We've talked about how the new form factor trend, we're seeing more and more of them in the world. The prices are starting to at least trend towards affordability, rather than insane expensiveness. What should go on a foldable phones cover screen, though? That is the question du jour from smartphone form factor makers. And China's techno to ECNO has decided to try a circle. Not the first circle on a cover screen. Huawei did it, but it was a little tiny screen. It was a little preview screen. This is the whole thing is a circle. It fills most of the cover. Obviously, it doesn't fill all of it because the cover is square, and it's a circle inside of a square. It's called the Phantom 5 or the Phantom V. It's a clamshell foldable similar to the Razer Plus or the Samsung Flip. And it's a 1.32 inch AMOLED screen where you can access your notifications, your widgets, take selfies, all the things you can do on the other clamshell foldables. But it's a circle. What do you think? You like circle, Shannon? No, I don't like it at all. I'm so used to having like a Z Flip where especially the newest one that came out this year, it has this nice big rectangle on the front. And I have access to so much information on here. And if you download third party apps, you can even type on it. You can access entertainment and you can watch square YouTube videos right on the front display. So it makes sense to me to have something that has like a square or rectangle aspect ratio over having a circle. I have a friend. Her name is Issa. She does a lot of tech reviews of smartphones from Asia. And she did a little preview of this one with the circle. And to be honest, it looks like you're sticking a Samsung or a Google Pixel watch face on the front of the square phone. And you're leaving all this blank space around it. And it just seems like a waste of space to me. Sarah, I know you don't have a foldable, but do you like the circle? Does it entice you? It doesn't. No. And here's the thing. Having something on the outside that could give me something that I don't know would be akin to notifications that I would get on my watch. That is great. You could have a watch and also have a foldable phone. But let's just say that the foldable top screen kind of giving you weather, maybe a notification here and there, kind of the basics, right? That is fine. When Tweetbot, God rest its soul, first had its, I guess, probably the latest version was 2021? I don't know. Before things with Twitter changed significantly. One of the things was, do you want Shannon Morse's avatar to be square or circle? And I was like, why would anyone want circle? All you're doing is like cutting off parts of the original image. I don't get it. I don't get circular stuff at all. If your watch itself or if your phone itself somehow is circular, okay, you're constrained. Otherwise, no. No, thank you. I mean, you really aren't losing any important part of the screen, though. How much of your information goes into the corners? But it's like, but why cut off the sides for no reason? Why force everything into a box? Literally, a box shape. Let's think outside the box. Go circle. Come on, everybody. I mean, I get what you're saying, Tom. I get it. I know what you're doing here. Somebody had to speak up for Techno. That's just my best shot. I feel like if a form factor is circular, great. Okay. But otherwise, we should not do that. We should not do that just for the fun of style. Why not? Let us know. Feedback in DailyTechnoShot.com. Take him. You're taking pencils out. All right. Well, as you've heard, it alluded to on the show already a couple of times. Some of us have a problem with Elon Musk. I know nobody said his name, but we did mention X a couple of times. But how much do you really know about Elon Musk? Probably less than you think. Find out things you don't know about him. And this week's Tom's Top Five, where I share shocking and surprising Elon Musk secrets. You probably actually know a couple of them, but I bet you don't know all of them. So catch it at youtube.com slash Daily Tech News. A few bits of Apple news kicking around this week. Of course, the iPhone 15 shipping today went on sale. My wife got hers already. Some people are still waiting on there. Some people picking theirs up at the store. And in fact, in China, where there's been a bit of a backlash against U.S. companies lately, the lines were long. And the delivery requests, they use companies like JD and Dada to deliver your iPhones to you. Like, you know, you can order it and have it delivered up 253% over the iPhone 14 last year. Everybody loves that USBC connector. I'm kidding. Friend of the show, Brian Tong also interviewed Apple's VP of Sensing and Connectivity, Ryan Wang, and to find out why the USBC AirPods can support lossless audio, but not the existing lightning port versions. In fact, I was one of those people who said, but why? Turns out the H2 chip in the USBC version supports the 5 GHz band, and the lightning version of the chip only supports 2.4 GHz. And Apple has news. In fact, there's an update you want to keep an eye out for and apply to your phone, whether it's new or old, fixing three zero-day bugs in macOS, iOS, and iPadOS. Apple's security advisory said it was aware that the patched vulnerabilities may have been actively exploited, hence the zero-day. Apple has patched 11 zero days since the beginning of the year. Now, we're three quarters away through the year, but that's still more than I think people are used to hearing from them. That could sound bad, but better to catch and patch than not. Shannon, how do you view this? Why do we see more zero days targeted at Apple, do you think? You know, that's a good question, and I think an even better question is, are we seeing more zero days now than we used to? And going back in like, I went down a rabbit hole looking at the news for Apple zero days and Apple zero click vulnerabilities for iPhones over the past couple of years. And this year, they've almost doubled. Last year there was about nine, I believe, nine different zero days by October. So this year, we've already seen more than that. And it's September. So chances are we'll probably continue to see this trend until the end of the year, where we end up having them patch a lot more zero days than they did last year. So then that leads on to the next question is, why are we seeing more like you asked, Tom? And it's really hard to say why, but my first inclination is that oftentimes when it comes to new vulnerabilities, we see these weird trends in terms of what hackers are specifically targeting, like going back to when the pandemic first started, we saw a lot of industrial control systems being attacked. A lot of like B2B type of businesses were attacked at the time too. And now we're starting to see a lot more like state sponsored attacks against consumer devices, but specifically targeting like specific people that are using these consumer devices, like we had the most recent one where it was targeting, I believe it was a president or something. So we often see these kinds of trends. So maybe because, and this is just my hypothesis here, maybe we are seeing these trends towards consumer devices because these attackers are targeting specific people and they're finding more vulnerabilities on these devices at this time. And we could see that trend completely change next year where they go back to ICS or they go to banks or hospitals or whatever. It's just, I think it's a part of this like ongoing loop of what we see attackers decide to go after at the time. Yeah. And there's always the possibility that detection got better. Maybe there were just as many that just didn't get detected in the past. So when you catch more criminals, it looks like crime went up, but it may not have. It may just be that you're doing a better job. So I imagine that could be part of it. Apple also is a much larger surface area than it used to be. Everybody's using iPhones around the world in large amounts. So it's a big surface area to attack. But I like where you're going, Shannon, and it feels right to me that with more international tensions, there's a war in Ukraine. There's a war in Ethiopia. There's a war in Yemen. There's, you know, there's all of these. There's more tensions between China and the U.S. There's China, Russia, North Korea. All of this stuff means there's probably a rise in espionage in general, I would guess, which would then make sense that you're seeing these some of these are specifically for spyware like Pegasus, which is usually targeted by state actors against significant individuals. It would make sense that they would go after that, and that alone could explain this. That's a great point. Earlier this month, I had reported on one called BlastPass, and that was, I believe, from NSO Group. That is another state-sponsored group that is specifically targeting these consumer devices. You do see those kinds of things happen quite often, and I don't think that's reason enough to be super concerned, but it is a really excellent standpoint of saying you need to make sure, especially in this day and age, that you're having really good security hygiene, like an all-encompassing idea of how to figure out how to protect yourself, because, yes, while Apple is rolling out these out-of-band updates and patches, which is a really good thing, we still need to depend on ourselves to make sure that we are auto-updating and that we are making sure that we know when these trends happen so that we can protect our devices and we don't fall vulnerable whenever these things come around. BeBastar asked a good question. Are the bad guys using AI, using co-pilot, chat GPT, et cetera, to find more vulnerabilities, to make more code? That's a good question. I don't know if I could answer that honestly. Yeah, I don't know if anybody could really. I would have to ask some red teamers. It'd be interesting to note, you would have to hear about it. You'd have to hear that's how they're developing it. I'm not sure if it would show up even in the detection of the vulnerability. Yeah, that's a really interesting thing to answer though. I would love to know if that's something that any of my friends in cybersecurity have experienced, like noticing that more attackers are using AI. Now I have questions to ask my friends next time I see them. Good one, BeBastar. Thank you for that. Well, obviously, if you are attacked, it can be a nightmare, a different kind of nightmare. It's something that I'm about to describe to you all. Hope you're sitting down. A woman was rescued from an outhouse toilet in northern Michigan after she climbed in to retrieve her Apple watch that somehow had gone into the ether, then got stuck. After dropping her watch at the Department of Natural Resources' boat launch at Tixon Lake in Ossego County's Bagley Township in Michigan, state police said Wednesday, the first responders were called when the woman was heard yelling for help, the toilet was removed, a strap was used, hold the woman out, and all as well. No, no, what happened to the watch? That's the key. That's the key question here. Tom, did she get it back? All was as well if she didn't get the watch back after going through all that. I mean, I'm telling you, I shower with my watch almost every day. I mean, it can handle. It can handle some stuff. I don't know if it can handle all that. You can wash it. It's what is it? IP6. You can wash it. Can you ever come back from something like this? I'm not sure. That is the question. I want to know whether they got the watch back or not. I feel like that is an important point. And ABC6 Michigan, by the way, to their credit, said we did not get confirmation whether the watch was found or not. They asked the question. They just didn't get an answer. And the only reason I'm laughing is because this is one of my worst nightmares ever. Every time I'm sort of like, I don't know, maybe I'm doing like a walk, you know, far from home with my dog where there might be an outhouse where I go like, what if, what if? But I have questions. Yes. So many questions. Can I ask what watch band she was using? So I know what not to buy. Like, does this thing just fall off? Was she taking it off? Shannon, I've thought about this. So I often kind of go like, I want it tight. But like, sometimes when I'm exercising, I want it a little looser. Maybe she was like, I'm about to go jogging. So I'm going to loosen it up. Whoops. I have a magnetic strap that occasionally the magnet sticks to like a table or even like a piece of silverware. If it's not so maybe it like stuck to the side of the metal toilet and then loosened up. I don't know. I don't know. You know, honestly, like no, this is why you have insurance. But I do wonder if insurance would cover it. If you went to the insurer and you were like, it has, it fell in poop. Like, yeah, depends on the terms. I just, yeah, I don't think I would use it after that. The big question here that we want your opinion on feedback at DailyTechNewShow.com. If you could get that watch back, would you even want it? Let us know. Feedback at DailyTechNewShow.com. And on that note, let's check the mail back. We got a good one from Mohan who said, we need more of Chris, Ashley, and Rob Dunwood on at the same time because they were on yesterday's show. And you know what? I gotta agree with you, Mohan. They were on fire. Mohan says, love hearing them both. Thanks again, DT and us. Forgive me. Giving me a daily dose of tech news. 100% agree. And if you want more Chris, Ashley, and Rob Dunwood together in your life and you haven't already done this, go subscribe to SMR podcast. Just look it up in the podcatcher of your choice. Well, Shannon Morris, no show is any better without you. Thank you for making this the best show. And sorry that we made you think about diving into a toilet. But let folks know where they can keep up with the rest of your work. You know, it's okay. It's the weekend. It's fine. Time to recover. Yeah, exactly. YouTube.com slash Shannon Morris is my YouTube channel. I'm like thinking about toilets now, which is so weird. If you want to check out and support my content, I recently did this really fun collaboration with Plex where I installed a Plex server on a brand new Synology network attached server rig. So it was really, really fun and very in-depth. If you're ever curious about how to do that. Go check that out, folks. And if you're a patron, which if you're not, why would be waiting on patreon.com slash dts, get over there and join so that you can hear the great Friday debates. It's time again for us to tackle some of the most hotly debated questions of our time. Many of these have been submitted by the folks in the audience. It's all in good fun. So stick around for the great debates on GDI coming up next. But just a reminder, DTS is live. We do this show live Monday through Friday, four p.m. Eastern 2100. 2100 rather. UTC will be 2100 sometime later in the year, but not now. Find out more at daily tech news show.com slash live. We hope you all have a wonderful weekend. We'll be back on Monday with Chris Ashley joining us. This week's episodes of Daily Tech News Show were created by the following people, host producer and writer Tom Merritt, host producer and writer Sarah Lane, executive producer and Booker Roger Chang, producer, writer and co-host Rob Dunwood, video producer and Twitch producer Joe Coontz, technical producer Anthony Lemos, Spanish language host writer and producer Dan Campos, science correspondent Dr. Nikki Ackermans, social media producer and moderator Zoe Deterding, our mods Beatmaster, W.S. Got Us One, BioCow, Captain Kipper, Steve Calderama, Paul Ruiz, Matthew J. Stevens, a.k.a. Gadget Virtuoso and J.D. Galloway, modern video hosting by Dan Christensen, music and art provided by Martin Bell, Dan Looters, Mustafa A, A-Cast and Len Peralta, A-Cast ad support from Tatiana Matias, Patreon support from Tom McNeill. Contributors in this week's show included Justin Robert Young, Scott Johnson, Chris Christensen, Chris Ashley and Shannon Morse. Guests on this week's show included Chris Mancini and Charlotte Henry. And thanks to all the patrons who make the show possible.