 The 10th year of Daily Tech News show is made possible by its listeners. Thanks to all of you. That includes you, Tony Glass and you, Phillip Less and you, Howard Yermish and new patron Doug. Everybody welcome, Doug. Thanks, Doug. On this episode of DTNS, Shannon Morris vets the rumors about the Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra. Science confirms Zoom calls are exhausting. And while your local news is scared of iOS 17, the answer could kill you. This is the Daily Tech News for Monday, November 27th, 2023 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt in Studio Colorado. I'm Shannon Morris and I'm the show's producer, Roger Chen. It is the return from the long weekend here in the U.S. of A. I hope you all missed us. We missed you. It's good to be back. Let's start with the quick hits. Bleeping Computer is one of many outlets noting a growing number of Google Drive users posting on Google forums that their recent files and folder changes have disappeared. The user's activity logs show no recent changes, indicating no, they didn't just accidentally delete them. Offline caches might contain the missing data, but there are no clear instructions from Google on restoring from a cache. A post from Google support volunteers does say that Google product engineers are aware and investigating, and they advised Google Drive users who are affected not to make any changes to the root or data folder until the engineers provide further instructions. At the same time, Google is scheduled to begin deleting Gmail data and photos from inactive accounts starting December 1st. Now, I'm not trying to apply there's a connection between these two because I really don't think there is, but it's a good thing to know. Your account is considered inactive if it has not been logged into for more than two years. So if you got a Google account you haven't logged into in a couple of years, you might want to log in before December 1st. Reuters sources say TikTok parent company Bite Dance will shut down much of its newverse gaming division, which publishes Marvel Snap, among other games. I know it's sad. Bite Dance told Reuters that it will, quote, restructure its gaming business after a review. Reuters said Bite Dance told newverse employees they must stop working on unreleased games by December. It's coming up quick. It's unclear where released newverse games like Marvel Snap or Crystal of Atlan will end up. Laefs do appear to be underway. A ransomware attack against Fidelity National Financial has disrupted the ability to use the company or its subsidiaries related to title insurance, escrow, title related services, mortgage transaction services, and technology related to the real estate and mortgage industries. So you can't use services like loan care, for instance, to pay a mortgage and you can't get anyone on the phone because the phone system's down. The only public statement from FNF has been an SEC filing, which said we blocked access to certain of our systems, which resulted in disruptions to our business, you think. So if you can't pay your mortgage or get that title insurance approved, that could be why. Hopefully we don't get in trouble for not paying our mortgages. Yeah, right. Oppo's Realme line of phones announced that they have shipped 200 million phones in the last five years. Realme sells phones with decent specs for a discounted price. The Realme 11 Pro sells for less than 300 euros. The next flagship phone from Realme is the GT5 Pro yet to be announced. This is a piece of news that's helpful for people in the T-Mobile store so they can go like, oh, Realme, you know, they have shipped 200 million phones. Oh, wow. You really know your phones. Wall Street Journal sources say that according to internal Amazon data, the company's in-house delivery system delivered more packages to U.S. homes in 2022 than UPS. This is Amazon trucks. This is Amazon's in-house shipping unit. We're not just talking about Amazon shipped a lot of packages. They also delivered them more than UPS. Amazon already passed FedEx back in 2020. So Amazon is now the largest package delivery business in the United States. Data indicates that Amazon will increase its lead on the others this year. All right, folks, if you've been seeing a promo on your local news either in Ohio or maybe in Detroit, they have been reporting that police have issued warnings about iOS 17. Shannon, the police are warning parents. Beware of iOS. It's an Android user's dream. They're not saying don't use iOS 17. The Middletown Division of Police in Dayton, Ohio, I think was the first to do this. They posted a warning on the Facebook page for the police about iOS's new name drop feature. That's the one that lets you touch two iPhones together. So you touch the heads of them together and then you can share contact info. The process can be canceled very easily. In fact, just moving the device away often will interrupt it even if you want it to happen. Locking the phone will also interrupt it. Once the transfer is complete, you also have to approve sharing your info and accepting info from the other person. However, the police are warning parents to turn it off in the bringing devices together setting under the air drop settings if they have children. So their children don't accidentally share their contact info. Shannon, I'm not against this warning, but does it deserve this much attention? It seems like this is out of proportion for the risk. Yeah, I feel like it's kind of clickbaity in a sense. Like it's it's it's running on that fear tactic of people not fully understanding how a new feature or a new technical aspect works of the devices that they already own. And we see this kind of thing happen so often when it comes to mainstream media where people are just like, Oh my God, your thing can get hacked. And you're like, well, I mean, it's it's a very, very specific use case. It's a very specific use case and it does require you to be active. It sounds like you have to be actively using the phone in order for this to even work. Now you have actually tested this, correct? Because I'm an Android user. I haven't I haven't tried this myself. Yeah, and I think that's what caught my eye because if this had just been the local news saying there's a new feature to be aware of, I would have dismissed it. It's the fact that the police posted about it on their pay on their official pages that that caught my eye because yeah, I have run into this at conferences and meetups with my relatives where even to airdrop to you could actually airdrop photos this way to you just touch the tops of the phones together and then a little thing you have to hold it there. You kind of have to push a little bit and then a thing will pop up that says like, hey, this person wants to share their contact info or are you cool with that? Do you want to send yours? And you say accept and then it does it wirelessly transfers all that info similar to how airdrop works. I've had it not work a lot because maybe somebody doesn't have iOS 17 yet. I've had it not work because your hands are shaky and just can't quite. It's like you have to hold it very still for it to be like, okay, no, we're really doing this. We're really doing this. So it's kind of hard to make this happen accidentally. Yeah, it does sound like this is something that I wouldn't be super concerned about. However, if you are a parent, there is a reason why you may want to disable this for your kids, especially if your kids are like going to school on public transit, like in a city, you might be a little bit more worried about them. I don't know, maybe meeting a stranger and getting groomed or something like that. Like you might want to worry. You might get socially engineered into doing something like this and your kids might not fully understand or grasp what they are transferring or sharing with another party. So in that sense, like, yeah, you might want to disable this, but I think for most people, since you do have to actively accept and or reject the data that is being transferred back and forth, I think that there is a sense of, okay, yes, it is opted in already, but you do have to actively choose whether or not you are sharing this data. It's very much like AirDrop and it sounds like it's very, very much like nearby share for my Android phones where I do have to accept the transfer before anything actually happens. Brian in our YouTube chat says, I'm in Metro Detroit, heard this on the news last night, thought it was a bit weird to hear this warning from the general news instead of DTNS. I thought so too. I'm like, there's nothing wrong with this. Shannon's absolutely right. If you're a parent, you might want to look into this just so your child doesn't get tricked into using it on purpose. It's not likely to accidentally happen. So I wondered like, OK, why this? There's so many other things that are also risks or higher risks on a phone. Why are the police paying attention to this one? And it did did strike me that it is the new iOS 17 feature that the most people I know know about. Everybody who I've run into where I said, oh, do you want to do the thing? They all know they're like, oh, yeah, that thing where you tap it together. So maybe this feature just got more popular and more awareness. And that could explain why the police are like, OK, everybody knows about this feature. So let's make sure people know that, you know, it's an on by default, which is another thing. Apple turned it on by default. They don't always turn these things on by default. Yeah, I think you're right in the sense that like it's it's the popular thing. So I think it's the thing that everybody is grasping on to. But without understanding how the entire system works, there's a little bit of I want to say misinformation, but there's a little bit of skepticism or again, that fear that's coming into this explanation. Yeah, I I would I would hurry to add almost hesitate to add. I would hurry to add that there are lots of other things you should pay attention to on your children's phone, you know, and look those up. Don't feel like if you turn this one off, you've done everything to protect them. Yeah, I don't think it's a bad thing necessarily that police are warning like, hey, this is a thing. But for me, I would say OK and or OK. But there is additional information that you should know about how to use this. All right, we've talked about Zoom fatigue before on the show. It's a thing a lot of people have talked about since video conferencing became much more widespread back in 2020. Previous studies have been done on self-reported feelings indicating that there's a real effect. People say they feel exhausted. They say they they feel a little more drained after a video conference. But for Austrian scientists, wanted to find out if there's physiological effects that it's not just self-reported. So they have published a paper in the journal Scientific Reports called Video Conference Fatigue from a neurophysiological perspective. Experimental evidence based on EEG and ECG. So scan in the brain, scan in the heart. In other words, they didn't just rely on self-reports. Participants in the study viewed a lecture, some of them in person, others over a video conference. And then they had their heart rate measured, their cognitive attention, tasks measured while they did the tasks. And they were also asked about their mood. So there was some self-reporting data in here, too, but it wasn't the only data they had. And they did all of that before the lecture and after the lecture for everybody who was in person and everybody who watched it on Zoom or whatever video conferencing app they used. The lecture was about 50 minutes long. And they found that those who watched the video conference showed signs of fatigue, that there was evidence that their brain had to work harder than the people who were there in person. That's really interesting. I mean, it kind of makes sense in a way. Like I remember sitting in classrooms and just like falling asleep when I was in college. But that's when I was younger and I didn't fully understand a grasp like my health and how I can stay awake and what interests me the most. Sure, sure. Yeah, and that is one of the things about this. They did it in an academic setting, not an office setting. The mean age, like the average age was 24. So these are young folks. They didn't do an all ages thing. And they admit this in the study. This is good science. They're saying, we noticed that self-reporting indicates this. We wanted to see if there were physiological effects. We noticed there was physiological effects, but our sample was limited in this way. So further study should look at others things, et cetera, et cetera. All of that said, I think a lot of us are probably heartened that yeah, it does seem like doing a video conference is harder on us or more exhausting than being in person. And there's a lot of theories as to why those haven't been tested. But my personal theory, Shannon, is that the fact that you know everyone can see you. That's why a lot of people turn their camera off. But even then, the feeling that there's a camera I am definitely seeing is different in a video conference than it is when you're sitting in a conference room and you know everybody's eyes are pointed towards the speaker, right? So you don't feel the pressure on you. The way you do in a video conference where you're like, well, everybody could be looking at me. I don't know who is, but everybody could be. And I mean, even from our perspectives as presenters, there's definitely something to say there in terms of even if it's not in front of a live audience, being on camera is very tiring because you are more poised, like you're working your core and sitting up straight, like you have a better posture. You're using your voice and expressing a lot more and using a lot more gestures and hand gestures and whatnot. So there's a lot more that goes into it when you are being looked at and you know that you're being looked at. So we describe it as being on quote unquote all the time. And that's something that you definitely experience when you're in a video conference. I would love to know. I would love to see them do a test to kind of compare like an office setting with people doing a video conference where they're in a meeting type of mindset for 50 minutes compared to listening to a lecture for older people, for like, you know, 30s, 40s, people that are really, really deep into their careers to see if it affects you in terms of like working from home. Like is it better or is it worse? Like that would be a really interesting experiment for me. Yeah. And is being young worse because you have less experience, you know, being on than people are older or does that make any difference? Lion Jim Video in our Twitch chat says, I sit in the last row of chairs in church for similar reasons. I think that does sort of explain the last row phenomenon. Whenever you're filling up a conference room or an auditorium, they always have to ask people, come on, sit in the front. Nobody wants to sit in front because they don't want eyes behind them, right? You want to be looking at everyone else, not everyone else looking at you. If I do my hair good, I'll sit in the front row because then I don't mind. Yeah. Well, and I was about to say, and that also applies to video conferences. If you do your hair well, then you're less likely to be worried about people looking at you. But then I immediately jumped to the fact that like it probably is, and this would be interesting to study too, slightly less stressful for us to do Zoom calls because we do this, because we're used to it. Right? Yeah, because it comes a lot more naturally to us. Yeah. And because we've gotten used to like, oh, of course I do this show every day. So I'm used to people looking at me. But even then, when I took my, I was taking a Zoom class in Korean earlier this year and it was interesting to have the video on all the time and know like, okay, anybody can be looking at me even though I'm not supposed to be on, even though I'm not talking. Yeah. Makes a difference. Huh. Well, folks, we have a YouTube channel. You may have heard me mention it earlier in the show. And there's lots of great stuff there. If you want to watch the show as a YouTube show, instead of listening to it as a podcast, you can do that. You can even listen to it as a YouTube show. Go check it out. We have other shows there as well. I enjoyed Faithful is on our YouTube channel and a show I do called Top Five. This past Friday, we released the Top Five Historical Newsroom Technologies. I kind of did a tour through the tech of newsrooms throughout history. You can catch that and all the other good stuff we do at youtube.com slash daily tech news show. Got a lot of phone stuff happening. OnePlus revealed its new flagship phone, the OnePlus 12. It's gonna be coming in white, black or green. They released a teaser. It was mostly pretty nature scenes, but it did show the phone sometimes. And that let you notice that there are these new color options. There's a new location for the alert slider on the left-hand side now instead of the right. A lot of people who are OnePlus fans are very interested in that. OnePlus said the new location is meant to accommodate a more powerful antenna. So that's why they switched the sides. Yahoo Tech HK also reported that it'll have a 2K display panel from BOE, support for Rain Touch and infrared remote control. And OnePlus is holding an event in China on December 5th. So we'll get price in all the shipping details then. Global launch is expected to be announced December 15th. That's one trickle of specs in advance of a flagship phone, even farther out, or at least sometime after the first of the year, maybe as early as January 17th, is the Samsung Galaxy S24. Shannon, what are we hearing about that one? Yeah, I'm super excited about this. So there is a leak of Samsung's Galaxy S24 Ultra, which is the highest rate of flagship by an ex-user last week, which showcases the upcoming phone's larger screen and the flat back, which is a slight difference. The curved side design of previous models is also eliminated and the S24 line is also rumored to feature Samsung GALS, the company's proprietary generative AI model. I'm excited. I'm very excited. So you're an Android fan, you're a Samsung user. Which Samsung are you using these days? Yeah, so this'll be fun for me because I'm currently an S23 Ultra user with my beautiful Sailor Moon case on it, of course, of course. And I'm very much in that like high end, I need all the high end flagship specs. I need to be able to edit with 4K and be able to take pictures and edit all my photos and do social media and do vlogs. Like I always buy the biggest of the best flagship and that's one of my daily drivers right now. The other one is my 8 Pro, because I always carry two phones. So for me, I'm very curious about the fact that they switched to the flat back and the flat front. Those are two big differences that we're gonna see on the Ultra, of course. The current model has a slight curvature on the screen, which a lot of people don't like. But if you use the little side dock for applications, then it's very useful. So it's not something that has ever troubled me. I did notice that in terms of the design, as far as where the cameras are set up and everything, that doesn't seem to have changed very much, which is kind of interesting because I've found using the 8 Pro that the flat glass back, which covers all three of the lenses all at the same time, is a lot easier to clean and it's a lot easier to put a case over it and it doesn't wobble at all when you set it down on a hard surface because it's the straight flat back casing. But with the S23 Ultra and it looks like the S24 Ultra as well, you're going to have a little bit of wobble from the lenses and they're all going to be in separate casings for each of the different lenses, which can be kind of hard to clean. Lots of dust gets around those and such. So in terms of like, if you have a pet at home, you might not like that as much. Yeah, especially with the foldables because I have the Pixel 4, it just starts to become really nerve-wracking to see all the little pieces of dust working their way in on those edges, right? Supposedly the S24 Ultra will have the newest Snapdragon as well. I believe last year's was the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2. So this one will be the Gen 3, I believe. Yeah, so I'm looking forward to that and doing some benchmarking and testing to see if it's improved anything, but the fact that they're bringing their generative AI model into it, I'm hoping that will help with some of the photography downfalls that we see between the Samsung Galaxy line versus the Pixel line. The Pixel line has blown it out of the park with everything that they've been doing with generative AI and I'm hoping that we see the same thing out of Samsung because that would be really good competition in that market. But it sounds like we are facing yet another flagship that is gonna have people saying evolutionary, not revolutionary, all of the big updates are in the camera. And the one difference would be Samsung Gauss, the AI on device AI, but that's another example of Samsung doing a thing that everybody's like, well, there already exists, like you can already use the Google one, I could put Bard on there, why do I need Samsung's? What's gonna be better about Samsung's? Yeah, what's gonna be better? I mean, they've always done hardware really, really well. And I feel like if they keep that focus on hardware, even if it's just a very simplistic upgrade between the S23 line and the S24 line, I think that will definitely help keep them at the very high end for flagships. And introducing generative AI, yeah, it kind of feels like they're playing catch-up to other brands, especially the Pixel line in particular, but I think it's needed at this point. Like I think they need to focus more on that because there's only so much that you can do with hardware at this time without turning your devices into something much larger. I just, I don't know, I'm trying, I'm now blanking on, what was the Samsung voice assistant that's still kind of hidden in there? Oh, Bixby. Bixby, yeah. Unfortunately. Ours just has a Bixby feel. Yeah, it's cringe. It's such a potato. And they do this partly because of their Android partnership where they'll have their own thing, but you could still get the Google version. You could still get the Android version of whatever it is. So I wonder if that's gonna change with Gauss. I'm definitely not expecting it to though. Yeah, I'm not really sure if it will or not. So I'm definitely looking forward to it and I'll do a comparison of course between the two phones. I'm hoping that I can get a OnePlus in my studio too so I can review those because the big thing with that that everybody's freaking out about is the alert slider changing the size. Yeah, everybody's like, they changed the size. Oh no. It's been the same for such a long time. Like that's going to be a big difference if you're used to just that muscle memory. I have a feeling a lot of people are not going to be super happy about that. Yeah, so there's a lot of really interesting upgrades happening. One thing I noticed between my 8 Pro and the S23 Ultra is the Wi-Fi is a lot faster on the 8 Pro than the S23 Ultra. I think that's just based on the Wi-Fi spec that's included in the 8 Pro versus the older Samsung phone. So hopefully we'll see faster Wi-Fi to kind of complement what we're seeing from Pixel right now. And hopefully we see some AI going into those cameras. I would love to see some increases there. Yeah, yeah, some improvements there. Just to remind people again, the OnePlus date for the Chinese announcement is a December 5th. That's when we'll get all the details. Global launch date will be announced December 15th and we don't have an official date for the Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra but we are expecting Samsung to do an unpacked on January 17th that will of course announce the Galaxy S24 Ultra because if you're doing an unpacked on January 17th, what else are you gonna announce? Unless they come out with a headset to compete with the Apple Vision Pro, which I guess would be an outside shot, right? But probably gonna be. That could be fine. Yeah. All right, let's check out the mail bag. Scott wrote in and said, I've been meaning to email you for several weeks just now getting around to it. Can you tell me what happened to Rich Truffalino on Daily Tech headlines? My wife and I would listen to him every night before bed and we would both say together, thanks for listening. We'll talk to you next time. And from all of us here at Daily Tech headlines, remember, have a super sparkly day, which is how Rich signs off Daily Tech headlines. Scott said, we miss Rich. We'd love to hear him again. Is that a possibility? Yes, we still work with Rich. He produces, it's a thing with me and Molly Wood, but he no longer hosts Daily Tech headlines on a regular basis. He can fill in from time to time. So keep your ears out. He might be popping in if somebody needs a day off. I know he's done that for us on DTNS once, but he went over to David Spark, our friend David Spark's CISO series company. And so he's doing security headlines over there. So if you like Rich doing headlines, head on over and get his enterprise security headlines from David Spark. That's at the CISO series, C-I-S-O, and check that out. But yeah, Rich did a great job for us. We were sad to see him go, but we were happy that he found something cool to do with David and we love what David does over there. So it's all good. And it means you get more Rob Dunwood. So hey, everybody wins, right? Right, right, right. We love Rob. Indeed. Thank you, Scott. Scott was among many people who wrote in. It was like, did I miss an announcement? And we did make an announcement, but not everybody listens to every second of every show. I get that. So I thought we would pass that along as well. Shannon Morse, thank you so much for being here today with us. What do you got going on to let people know about? I got a lot going on. Well, I left ThreatWire on the Hack 5 YouTube channel. Speaking of moves. Yeah, speaking of moves, even though it still says ThreatWire back there, I got to take that down. So sorry about that. I know, a little awkward. YouTube.com slash Shannon Morse is the best place to find all of my content. I'm still doing security and privacy content on my own channel. I just did a really fun 8 Pro review. It's super, super in-depth. And I did a bunch of photography and videography examples in that video, including some of the AI stuff. So that was really fun. I had so much fun creating that video. So please check it out. Fantastic. Go support Shannon as well. Also, if you're a patron of this show, you not only get an ad-free version, you not only get bonus content like Roger's Column or our Rewind show, but you also get more DTNS. We call it Good Day Internet. It's the extended show. And we're going to talk about using hand gestures to control devices. It always sounds cool. And people have tried it multiple times over the past decades, but every time we get it, we don't end up using it. So we're going to talk about whether we really need it or if this time around is different. You can also catch the show live Monday through Friday 4 p.m. Eastern, 2100 UTC. Find out more at DailyTechNewShow.com slash live. Back tomorrow with Patrick Norton. I think we're talking about card tech. Stick around for that. I'll do that. This show is part of the Frog Pants Network. Get more at frogpants.com. Primeman Club helps you have enjoyed this program.