 Coming up on DTNS, we break down the Samsung Galaxy Z Flip Galaxy S20 and Galaxy Buds Galaxy of Samsung announcements, plus a US intelligence cryptography backdoor from the 1980s and should they cancel Mobile World Congress this year? This is the Daily Tech News for Tuesday, February 11th, 2020 in Los Angeles, I'm Tom Merritt. And from Studio Redwood, I'm Sarah Lane. And from the dark forests of Finland, I'm the very awake Patrick Beja. And I'm Roger Chang, the show's producer. Shout out to Joe, who is also producing the show in assistance today, and also shout out to us. We were in a great conversation about podcasting gear before the show. If you want to hear that, you got to be a good day internet subscriber. Get it by becoming a member at patreon.com slash DTNS. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. A new Nielsen study shows that in the last three months of 2019, in the US, Netflix accounted for 31% of streaming to televisions. YouTube was second with 21%, Hulu came in third with 12%, Amazon took 8%. Other free and ad-supported options, including new offerings from Apple or Disney, for example, took a combined 28% chunk of viewership as well. Nielsen also reported that overall, in the US, video viewing on TVs that streaming now makes up 19%. Those Christmas movies on Netflix, very popular. Microsoft is reversing its plans to, by default, install a Microsoft search extension for Office 365 Pro Plus customers using Chrome, which would have changed users' default search engine to Bing. The installation includes Microsoft's Search in Bing Internet Search capability. A new plan for the extension's rollout will come in the next few weeks. That was the enterprise thing that CIS Edmunds could have worked around, but it sounds like Microsoft's going to do the right thing and make it an option, not something you have to opt out of. US District Judge Victor Marrero ruled in favor of the Sprint T-Mobile merger, which still needs the California Public Utilities Commission to weigh in before it can go forward, but it's pretty close now. Attorneys General from a dozen states argued the merger would stifle competition and raise prices, but the judge found that Sprint, and I quote, does not have a sustainable long-term competitive strategy, ouch, and will in fact cease to be truly national, double ouch. If the merger was not allowed, he figured Sprint would go away anyway, so you know what? It's not going to hurt competition if Sprint dies. The case may yet be appealed, and the Attorneys General are reviewing their options, so we may not be done with this part of it either. Apple has joined the Fast Identity Online, or FIDO, alliance, which makes a universal second factor, or U2F, an open standard meant to replace passwords. Other members include Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft, and Samsung. Chrome, Firefox, Edge, and Opera browser natively support UTF, and in iOS 13.3, Safari also supports FIDO2 compliance physical security keys, like Ubiqui. And Google's partnering with the non-profit Defending Digital Campaigns, or DDC, to distribute Titan security keys for free to political groups, plus offer help setting up the second factor keys. DDC already offers reduced price Ubiquis. Those are all useful if you want to do universal second factor, like Patrick was just talking about. All right, let's go from Ubiquis to FTCs. Indeed, the US FTC has requested information from Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Microsoft, or as we like to call them in France, the GAFAM, because we use Google as a substitute for Alphabet, about mergers that were too small to report to antitrust agencies. The companies are asked to provide terms, scope, structure, and purpose for each transaction made between January 1, 2010 and January 31, 2019. They will also be asked to provide details on post-acquisition integration, product development, and pricing. The FTC said the request was part of a study of the issue of companies buying potential competitors to reduce competition. The result of the study are intended to inform future policy. Yeah, you accidentally said January 31, 2019, or December 31, 2019, but essentially they want a decade's worth of information about small mergers that previously weren't required to be reported. The idea is they want to look at that and say, well, should they have been? Do we need to change their policy and make companies report this? This isn't meant, although they didn't say they wouldn't use it for that, but it's not meant to be a punitive investigation. I wonder how much a small purchase of a small company that a company does, where they don't have to report it, okay, not doing anything wrong, how many of those cumulatively become a problem? Yeah, if you're consistently putting out of business your competitors, yeah, maybe. It seems like anything that could potentially be a competition issue would need to be reported. So definitely something like Instagram bought up by Facebook would need to be reported, I suppose. Although that was big enough, it qualified for the reporting anyway. Exactly, yes, absolutely. But it seems, well, we don't have the data, but it seems to me unlikely that's something that's so small it doesn't need to be reported would be an actual threat to competition, but who knows? Maybe cumulatively, as you said it might. But we talked about Mobile World Congress, and it might be a strange event this year. Facebook, Vivo, and Intel joined Amazon, Sony, LG, Ericsson, McAfee, NTTDocamo, and Nvidia in canceling plans to attend the event in Barcelona, which is set to start on February 24th. Google and Microsoft are still planning to go to MWC, but more companies are still reviewing plans. 2,800 exhibitors are still planning to attend as of Tuesday morning. However, the GSMA has said that any attendee from China must prove they were quarantined for two weeks prior to attending the show. Reuters sources say that the GSMA board will meet Friday to discuss canceling the conference altogether. The board contains 26 leaders of telecoms groups and is chaired by Stefan Rashard, the CEO of Arange. So it's starting a week from Monday. So we've got just under two weeks before it starts. They're going to wait till Friday to make the decision, which I suppose logistics require. I don't know. Will I also think like how many other companies might pull out by then? Well then maybe they're waiting for companies to make their decisions. A lot of them may make their decisions in the next couple of days. And if not enough companies are coming, maybe that helps them make the decision look nobody's going to be here anyway. Let's pull it. But for small businesses that have spent a lot of money preparing for this and maybe future success hinges on it, that can be a problem and they need to take that into consideration too. There's also like a legitimate public health concern with the coronavirus. There's no doubt about it. It's hard to tell where the line is between overreacting and not being careful enough. Patrick, what do you think they should do? I think that that kind of decision, of course, they can make it themselves, but it seems to what I'm not hearing at all is people and organizations consulting health authorities to make those decisions. And especially in the case of GSMA, I think deciding to cancel it, of course, if they want to be overly cautious. But as you said, when does it start bordering on paranoia, they can cancel it. It would seem to me that for all of those 2800 exhibitors, if the health authorities are saying, look, it's fine, just do it. I would think that they should probably listen to that advice. No, I think that's what they have been doing up till now is saying, look, the health authorities say we should do it. People in Barcelona say we should do it. And so what we're saying is we'll do temperature screening, we'll make sure people coming directly from China have been quarantined for 14 days, will advise you not to shake hands, but companies are pulling out anyway. And at a certain point, it may become a financial decision more than a public health decision, because so many companies have pulled out. It may not be worth doing the show. Possibly, I would suspect that the ones who pull out so late are either insured for these kinds of things or are still paying. And out of the few that have been pulling out, it's not like there's a hundred exhibitors, there's there's almost 3000. So I guess there's a lot of business that should be happening there, even if those big ones have pulled out. Maybe a lot of small, small ones have pulled out, too. But I guess we'll know on Friday, I guess so. Switzerland's Crypto AG is a company that started building code making devices for the Allies and the United States Army in World War Two. It still to this day provides encryption systems to more than 120 countries. However, the Washington Post and a German broadcaster, ZDF, got a look at some Central Intelligence Agency documents that show that throughout the Cold War, Crypto AG was secretly owned by the US CIA and Germany's BND intelligence agencies. The BND left the company in the mid 90s, but the CIA stake ended in 2016. So not that long ago. The advent of digital encryption reduced the usage and utility of the company for the agencies. We're talking about analog encryption here, not digital, but at its height, the intelligence agencies used their access to Crypto AG to access communications during the Iranian hostage crisis, the Falklands War, the Egypt-Israel peace negotiations, Libya's bombing of a West Berlin disco in 1986, Iranian communications were allegedly 80 to 90 percent readable during the Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s, according to documents seen by the Post and ZDF. SwissInfo reports the Swiss government officially opened an investigation into Crypto and the general export license for crypto devices has now been suspended until open questions have been clarified. Well, and, you know, a lot of what a lot of chatter about this today. And, you know, so much of it is like countries were paying top dollar for something to get by it on. And it's it's if you hadn't gotten CIA documents in the hands of obviously publications who want to make the the situation public, no one would have known about it. What kind of information was gathered? How did it change the course of the variety of crises, Tom, as you laid out? You know, I'm not totally sure about that. But yeah, I can I can imagine Switzerland being like, hold on a second, we were neutral. Yeah, we are. That's that. That's that's not what we do. But let's let's halt this whole thing, even though, yes, it sounds like the devices that were used at the time are in decline because our technology has advanced so much, but still pretty big deal. That what strikes me when I read this is in a company. Well, in an intelligence organization that has had that kind of access for a very long time. I understand a little bit better why they are that livid and frightened and worried about end to end encryption. It doesn't change my judgment on any script encryption. But it might this is very anecdotal and small piece of evidence, but it might actually be a bigger deal for them than I previously imagined. Right, because backdoors and digital are much harder than these kinds of analog backdoors. And you're you're right, Patrick, have been used to like, but we always get to have access to this information. I mean, China and the Soviet Union never bought this stuff, so they didn't have access there. But, you know, large parts of the world that makes a difference. Moving on to Microsoft News. The company launched a preview SDK for developers to adapt applications for dual screen devices running Windows 10X. Among the tools are an emulator to see how apps would work, since no Windows 10X hardware is actually out yet. The SDK includes patterns for three main kinds of apps, including expanding apps across two screens, putting an app on one screen and tools on another, and running connected apps side by side for easier multitasking. Microsoft also added dual screen support for its UI toolkit on the Xamarin cross-platform development platform and is also making React native dual screen modules available. Microsoft is also proposing to the W3C, a new JavaScript API and CSS media query that support dual screen devices. Big on dual screens. Also, out of Microsoft Developer Day, Windows 10X separates system, drivers, and apps in a way that lets it reboot and apply an OS update in 90 seconds, nice and snappy. Microsoft uses container technology for Win32 apps, meaning they can't interfere with system files or data. Also, if Windows 10X runs on an Intel Lakefield processor, developers can choose which core the app runs on. That's kind of nice. Powerful apps can run on the larger core for performance while lightweight apps can run on the smaller core and save battery. I mean, the ability to run on the different cores on the Lakefield is pretty nifty and Windows 10X taking advantage of that is pretty cool, but 90-second reboots for a system update just sounds like heaven, doesn't it? Doesn't it? Yeah, it's Christmas. You know, the Nintendo Switch updates incredibly fast. When I compare this to my PlayStation 4, sorry, I don't have a PlayStation 5. Rumors, fights. Now the truth finally comes in. Which takes, you know, as much as regular systems. It is truly, it encourages people to update more and more quickly. So I think that actually does matter beyond the wow factor. Yeah, and beyond that, you know, it's cool that we're getting companies to take a serious look at how dual screen devices are gonna work because this is gonna percolate to the entire industry as dual screens because become a bigger and bigger part of that industry. Yeah, so the Windows Duo, Microsoft Duo is expected to come out by the holidays and when it comes out, they wanna have apps for it. So that's why you put the SDK out now at the Microsoft 365 Developer Day, hopefully get some people making some cool stuff by then and then get people excited about Windows 10X with these innovations. Of course, everybody's gonna say, well, could you do that for Windows 10 regular? The 90 second update, a little more complicated, I think, given what you have to do. You have a more limited hardware profile with Windows 10X, I'm assuming. But if anybody's a Windows engineer and knows whether you could or why you couldn't do a 90 second update, why you couldn't containerize things the way they have in 10X on regular Windows 10, I'd be very curious to hear that feedback at dailytechnewshow.com. If you wanna get all the tech headlines each day in about five minutes, be sure to subscribe to dailytechheadlines.com. Let's talk about those Samsung Galaxy announcements starting with the one that leaked out. We knew the name and then they did an advertisement on the Oscars Monday before they even put out the name officially. The Galaxy Z Flip, a 6.7 inch screen when unfolded, but it is a glass screen, not a plastic one that folds up into a clamshell form factor just like the Razer. 200,000 folds, they say. We'll see if it breaks like the Razer did when CNET puts it in its little machine. The cover display is just a little thin band. When it's folded up though, it can show notifications, time, and battery life. And they even showed it being used as a viewfinder. So if you wanted to do a selfie without opening up the clamshell, you could do that. Purple, black, and in some countries gold, there's also a special Olympic gold version that'll be given to Olympic athletes in Tokyo. You get access to YouTube premium as part of the plan. I'm not sure for how long, I didn't see a term, I assume it's something like a year. Also, they talked about the flex mode where you can kind of have it as a laptop and do hands-free things and selfies and stuff. And there'll be a Tom Brown edition with the Tom Brown stripe on it. That'll be shown off at Fashion Week in New York starting tomorrow, it's a custom case. Galaxy Z Flip, available February 14th for $1,380. It's a foldable. People are skeptical about foldables. Sarah, Patrick, did this do anything to change your views? No. Ah, good. I have to say, well, here's the thing. And we talked about this with Charlotte Henry on the show yesterday. The foldable model, it's not going anywhere. It's going to get better. Comedies are going to figure it out. But as soon as I hear something like 200,000 folds and you're good, even if that's true, I'm like, well, after 200,000 folds, now I got to get a new phone, even though I probably would way before that anyway. There are just, there are some form factor things that I will not be a first adopter of this. But I am really curious to see how much people love them. Patrick, you said yes to change your mind. Well, not quite changed my mind, but it's a confirmation that this is an interesting evolution for the devices that we use all the time. I think I'm still not convinced that it's for me, but there are two things that I thought were interesting. First, it is the eps and bounds better than what we had last year. This is, I think, much more of a product than a concept. It's also much more affordable. It's a smaller screen, but it's still better technology and it's more affordable than the fold they presented last year. And the second thing is they presented it as a very premium device. Of course it's expensive, but they have the shiny thing. It feels like a thing you want to show off a party, an accessory almost. And I think that there might be a market for this specific type of devices. The viewfinder-ish little band, when the phone is closed, is also a little bit more functional than I expected it to be. So overall, it's still not for me, but I'm pleasantly surprised. It does feel like a fashion accessory. And I don't mean that as a criticism. It's got that mirror finish on it. It would drop really nicely in a purse. And I think that's why they brought Tom Brown into this to try to sell that aspect of it, rather than just a functional, because a lot of people who are just into function are like, why do I need it to fold? But having it fold as a cute little fashion accessory, as Charlotte said yesterday, kind of like a compact, I think starts to make a lot of people think, okay, well, that's interesting if they can afford it. Like you said, it is a premium device at $1,388. Let's talk about the Galaxy S20, which is available in three models. The S20 is $999, 6.2 inch screen, 4,000 milliamp hour battery. There's also the S20 Plus, which is a 6.7 inch screen, 4,500 milliamp hour battery. And that's 1,199. And if you wanna spend more money than you would on a Galaxy Z Flip, you can get the S20 Ultra, which is a 6.9 inch screen, 5,000 milliamp hour battery, $1,399. All three of these are 5G, although the plus in the Ultra support millimeter wave, which here in the US is what Verizon does. Others have that and some other frequencies. So if you're in an area that only has millimeter wave service, you won't be able to use the Galaxy S20. You'd have to get the S20 Plus or the S20 Ultra. Samsung says that they're going to launch an S20 with millimeter wave support in Q2. That doesn't mean that you won't be able to use the S20 on 5G. Some carriers may not have it. For instance, Verizon's not gonna sell the S20 at launch. It's gonna only get to sell the Plus and the Ultra. The phones also have 120 Hertz refresh rates, so buttery smooth vision on the display, whole punch camera, Qualcomm 865 Snapdragon, solid processor in there, starts at 12 gigabytes of RAM, up to 16 gigabytes of LPDDR5 for the Ultra, and 128 gigabytes of storage to start, but that goes up too. They're putting Google Duo in the dialer of your phone, and if you have the connection for it, AKA 5G, you can do high def video over Google Duo. So good news for Google Duo, and also good news for Samsung users who now get video chat right there in their phone app. There's also something called Music Share, which will let you share a Bluetooth connection to listen to songs together. There's Space Zoom, which is using the folded lens, meaning there's no bump in this camera to do a hybrid of optical and digital zoom to offer an effective 100x zoom on the Ultra and 30x on the Plus and the regular. They also kept until Patrick was about to puke, talk about 8K video recording at 24 frames per second. You can take 32 megapixel stills out of that. You can edit 8K video on the phone. There's a deal with YouTube, so you can upload your 8K video to YouTube or stream it to a Samsung 8K QLED TV. There's Super Steady Zoom, nighttime hyperlapse shooting, something called Single Take, where you can use all the cameras at once and then pick which of the videos and or stills out of the single take that you wanna have. Smart Binning is how they get that 108 megapixels out of a 12 megapixel camera by combining nine pixels into one on the Ultra, and they even have some gaming partnership. Microsoft forts the street, coming to mobile for the first time in the Galaxy Store in the spring. They've got three other Microsoft titles as well. Pre-order for all three models starts February 21st with wide availability coming on March 6th. Galaxy S20, Patrick, what do you think? This is all about the camera. They spent the most time on the camera, and this confirms how little phones change. Well, most phones, I guess we have foldables now, but most phones change very little from one model to the next. And the camera is very impressive, or seems to be very impressive at least. I don't think anyone is gonna really be using 8K, although you can do that for editing and do tricks with editing and cropping and stuff like that. But the one take thing is really cool. The zoom can be useful. The camera looks very, very impressive. And I think that's 5G and a lot of other features are kind of sticker features that aren't super useful for most people for a long time. But the camera is what will convince a lot of us, I think. Oh, I did wanna add a clarification on the pixel binning. I think you had it reversed. So it's 108 megapixels. And then through pixel binning, they can give you a really good 12 megapixel image on low light by taking advantage of the additional pixels to put in extra. Which actually does bring the eternal question of is the sensor large enough to take advantage of 108 megapixels? Because that's always the issue. You can add megapixels, but if the sensor is small, then the pixels are tiny and don't get enough light. They say it works, but we'll have to wait for tests because this is a common issue with large numbers and megapixels. Well, I mean, it's an issue with cameras on smartphones in general, but a lot of them have been relying heavily on in-camera or in-phone processing to kind of give you the best optimal picture of the information it pulls. And they work pretty well. I mean, they're never gonna replace like a 5D or a full frame format digital camera with a telephoto lens, but considering this thing fits in your pocket, it does pretty well. No, I think the question is more, does the 108 megapixels really add a lot when compared to 12 megapixels? Because if the pixels become so small, yes, the digital processing on the phone can help, but I wonder if it helps enough to justify 108 numbers. I think it's there to get the 8K resolution and I also think it's one of those features you can put on a pamphlet or an advertiser and say, hey, look at this. A few other things to mention, 1.5 terabytes of storage with the SD card is it has a micro SD card slot. That's something a lot of its competitors don't have. Live captioning coming to the Samsung phones in Duo. There's a Global Goals app where you can make donations to UN sustainable programs and Samsung will match donations. And then real quickly, the Galaxy Buds Plus are the new version of the Galaxy Buds, basically with longer battery life, 11 hour battery life, and then you can get an additional 11 out of the case. They say three minutes on USB-C in the case should give you an extra hour of listening time, a little bit better audio dual dynamic driver system, two mics on the outside now for noise cancellation, but not active noise cancellation just for your phone calls, $149 coming February 14th. I don't know, anybody need some new earbuds? The battery life stuff sounds great. I'm not sure about the rest of it. You kind of have to try these things out before you decide if it's right for you, but the prices, if they work well and the battery life is as good as advertised, I think it's priced well. Yeah, I think if you're a Samsung Galaxy user, this is kind of a no-brainer. It's the ecosystem thing that others do very well as well. Hey, thanks everybody who participates in our subreddit, Samsung Stories and others show up there every day. You can submit stories that you care about and vote on others at dailytechnewshow.reddit.com. You can also join in the conversation in our Discord and you can join up by linking to a Patreon account at patreon.com slash DTNS. Let's check out the mail bag real quick. Yeah, we got a really nice email from Al from Acworth, Georgia who said, I commissioned Lynn Peralta again, so it's the second time to do a drawing of my wife and I for our upcoming anniversary. Thanks for having Lynn participate in the show and I never would have thought of this otherwise. And another comment, I really like the editor's desk episodes. Getting into the process is very interesting at least to me. Oh, thank you, man, appreciate that. Editor's desk, if you don't know, is a special feature for patrons at the associate producer level and up. Where I do a weekly 10, 15 minute talk about behind the scenes, how we do the show, a little more of my opinions on things. So if you're interested, you have to be a patron and then you get it in your RSS speed from Patreon. Also, Ben wrote in to point out that today is Patch Tuesday, meaning this is the first Patch Tuesday, Windows 7 users have missed. So it is now officially Windows 7 not getting support. So he says, I won't miss the monthly reboot. Thanks to Ellen, Ben for writing and everyone else as well. Shout out to patrons at our master and grand master levels, including Tony Glass, Ruchan Brantley and Adam Carr. An extra special thanks to Patrick Beja for being with us. Patrick, where can people keep up with the rest of your work? Follow me on Instagram. I am using Instagram a little bit more and stories. I'm young. I use stories, which is a sure sign that I am young. Also, go to Frenchspin.com and subscribe to The Phileas Club. I'm not going to spell it, but Frenchspin.com. We're doing our first Brexit episode tomorrow. Post-Brexit. I'm anxious and excited and scared and sad to talk to all of my former EU cousins and who are now UK friends, I suppose. So it used to be four people from the EU on your Brexit episodes. Now it will be 50% EU, 50% not. It's now three from the UK and Bart from Ireland is still on there, so he will be EU along with me. So it's two-thirds EU, three... No, two-fifth EU, so three-fifth EU. That's very forget it, yeah. But go check it out, folks, The Phileas Club at Frenchspin.com. Also support us on Patreon, patreon.com.com slash DTNS. It's the way to get all those cool things I was talking about. And if you had feedback, our email address is feedback at dailytechnewshow.com. We're also live. That's Monday through Friday, 4.30 p.m. Eastern, 2130 UTC, and you can find out more at dailytechnewshow.com slash live. Back tomorrow with Scott Johnson, talk to you then. This show is part of the Frog Pants Network. Get more at frogpants.com. I hope you have enjoyed this program.