 Coming up on DTNS Instagram goes after TikTok. Disney sends Mulan to Disney Plus. Plus you'll have to pay extra for it. And Samsung's new Galaxy Note and more. This is the Daily Tech News for Wednesday, August 5th, 2020 in Los Angeles, I'm Tom Merritt. And from Studio Redwood, I'm Sarah Lane. And I'm the show's producer, Roger Chang. If you were expecting Scott Johnson, he had to bow out at the last minute today. He's got a little thing with his eye, but hopefully that gets better real quickly and he'll be back when we have him back next week, as well as on TMS and his other shows. Sarah and I were just talking about spotting celebrities and Sarah being a scoff law for student parking. Get that wider conversation at our companion show, Good Day Internet, patreon.com. Slice DTNS. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. AdGuard, which provides ad blocking solutions shared with ZDNet more than 295 Chrome extensions that hijack and insert ads inside Google and also Bing search results, potentially affecting 80 million Chrome users. Along with fake ad blockers, AdGuard said it found extensions purporting to be weather forecast widgets and screenshot capture utilities, although 245 of the malicious extensions just allowed a custom background for Chrome's new tab page. Former Google and Uber engineer Anthony Lewandowski was sentenced to 18 months in prison. We're not talking at home confinement. He's getting jail time on one count of stealing trade secrets from Google self-driving car project, which later became Waymo. Lewandowski will also pay $756,499.22 to Waymo, 22 cents, very precise, as well as a fine of $95,000. Lewandowski has in return filed a lawsuit against Uber over the indemnification agreement they signed when Uber bought Auto, OTTO, Lewandowski's automated trucking company. Lewandowski is also seeking damages for the agreement made between Uber and Waymo that settled Uber's side of being culpable for Lewandowski's theft. So this is not over yet. Wow, this is a long running story. Bleeping Computer reports it's been tracking a Canon, Canon, that camera company, ransomware attack that impacts Canon's email. It's Microsoft Teams account. It's US website and other internal applications. Canon's image dot Canon cloud photo and video storage service appeared to be the subject of the attack resulting in data loss for users of their free 10 gigabytes per month storage feature. The site suffered an outage on July 30th and for six days it was showing status updates until it went back in service Tuesday, August 4th. Canon claims there was no leak of image data. All right. Through the Hacker One bounty program, a researcher told Twitter about a vulnerability that could have allowed outside access to Android users' Twitter direct messages. An attack would have required you to install a malicious Android app and then that would have to be on the same phone as your Twitter and then they could have got access to your DMs. The vulnerability only affected Android 8 and 9. It has since been patched and Twitter said it has no evidence that it was exploited. So this is the bounty program working. Well, in non-exploit news, DoorDash announced it's launching a chain of virtual convenience stores called Dashmart to sell snacks and groceries and other food related products from partner restaurants. Dashmart is now available in eight U.S. cities, Chicago, Columbus, Ohio, Cincinnati, also in Ohio, Dallas, Minneapolis, the greater Phoenix, Arizona area, Salt Lake City and Redwood City, California. Dashmart stores are owned, operated and curated by DoorDash. Scott Johnson and Rob Dunwood couldn't take advantage of this. We'll have to ask them. Finally, Microsoft announced it will release Open Service Mesh, a new open source project designed to help companies manage building applications in a modular way. Microsoft plans to transfer the project to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation as soon as it can. At least that's according to Gabe Munroy, Director of Product Management for Microsoft Azure. All right, let's talk a little bit about Disney. Oh, let's. Disney announced that Disney Plus now has more than 60.5 million paying subscribers, which is up from the 57.5 million reported in its earnings for the quarter ending on June 27th. ESPN Plus has grown more than 100% to 8.5 million. Hulu grew 27% to 35.5 million. 3.4 million pay for Hulu plus live TV. And Disney also announced that it's live action movie of Mulan, and this one was a little bit of a head scratcher, Tom. It will premiere on Disney Plus on September 4th for an additional fee of $29.99. So you have access to the film for as long as you remain a Disney Plus subscriber in regions without Disney Plus, it will show in theaters, however. All right, put a pin in that one for a second. I do want to acknowledge the Disney Plus numbers. Getting close to that 100 million plus that Netflix has for Disney Plus, I'm surprised with ESPN Plus. Streaming would grow during a pandemic, but there was no sports. So I would have thought maybe this would have been a little smaller. Yeah, no kidding. But that's a good, healthy number. 3.4 million for Hulu plus live TV. I mean, not bad related to the competition, but probably not what they want to be seeing for live TV right now. So that's a little slow, but 35 million for Hulu. Okay, great. What is up with this Mulan thing? I don't understand this. Like Mulan was supposed to premiere right as the lockdown started. In fact, they had the red carpet premiere. Yeah, I was highly anticipated. My wife was scheduled to go to the media screener the Monday after, or I guess the Tuesday after the premiere, and then it would open in theaters later that week. The red carpet happened, the media screener got canceled because of COVID. So it was like right there on the edge. And everybody's been thinking this would be the show that got everybody back in the theaters. Well, Disney has finally given up on that. You would think even for $30 that they would just put it on demand. You could buy it at iTunes, Google Play. That's what people have been doing with these movies. That's what happened with trolls. So this is a weird thing to say, we're gonna make it available for kind of purchase for $30. It's not a rental. You have to already be a Disney plus subscriber. I don't know if this helps them with their negotiations with theaters. I mean, I guess they might think it would help drive Disney plus subscriptions, those don't seem to need a lot of help. Yeah, I mean, my initial reaction was, oh, they just want people to need an excuse to have to be in the Disney plus ecosystem. And then they might stay. But yeah, it's not like Disney plus is hurting. In fact, it's been one of the video on demand darlings of the last however months that everybody has been launching their VOD product. So I guess Disney was like, make them get it through Disney plus, they'll come. It's a big enough movie. I mean, maybe this keeps the theater chains from getting mad at them because they're putting it on a streaming service like they did with Hamilton, but they're also charging for it because they don't want to lose the money that they would get from putting this in the theaters. I mean, I'm not like running to watch Mulan, but I do subscribe to Disney plus. And I'm not paying another $30. I already subscribed to Disney plus. That's the deal. Well, I think a lot of people, if this is the $30 rental would be like, oh, well, family of four going to the theater would cost more than that. Fine, we'll pay it. I think there's going to be a psychological problem with saying, but we already pay for this service. Why do we need to pay extra? You know what I mean? Like, even though it doesn't make sense, I think a lot of people will hit a roadblock on that. Maybe not that many. Disney also announced it will launch a streaming service under its international brand name Star outside the United States. Star will include programming from ABC, FX, Freeform, Searchlight, and 20th Century Studios, but will not license content from outside Disney. So it's different than Hulu in that way. It's not going to be in the US competing with Hulu anyway. And Hulu isn't anywhere else but Japan, and even the Japanese Hulu isn't owned by Disney. They just licensed the name. So this makes sense. They're saying, look, Star is a big brand outside of the United States. Let's take advantage of that. Take content we own from the networks we own, put it together in a streaming package. It seems like a smart idea. Well, in some contact tracing news, Virginia is the first US state to offer an app statewide called COVIDWISE using the Exposure Notification API that was developed by Apple and Google, which is available now on both the Google Play Store and iOS. COVIDWISE uses Bluetooth to exchange random identifiers with nearby phones, then checks to see if people who have reported a positive test might have been in close contact with you. The signals are date stamped if the app estimates that two phones were close enough for at least 15 minutes, and the estimated distance was within six feet, then the other user receives a notification of possible exposure. No names or locations are shared. Now, Alabama's Guide Safe also uses the API and was released on August 3rd, so technically Alabama was first, but it was targeting students at the University of Alabama, Birmingham. Canada and Brazil launched their contact tracing APIs, or contact tracing apps based on the API, July 31st, and 11 other countries are also using it with Ireland, boasting more than 1.4 million people downloading it, and 137 receiving close contact alerts. Yeah, Ireland seems to be making the best use of this. It's getting decent adoption. You probably want like 60% and this is closer to 30%, but it's still in its earliest days. And actually having contact alerts going out to let people know like, hey, you were near someone, you should get tested. That's what this is all about, and it's actually working in Ireland. I know Amber wanted to mention this yesterday, and we didn't, but she was excited that Canada has got their app out, and it's good to let Canadians know that you can download this. It is private. It is the definition of privacy because we've gone through this before on the show, but it doesn't know anything about you other than what numbers you got from phones near you. And those don't mean anything unless one of the phones that generated that number is changed in the system to be a phone that was associated with someone who got infected. So if you get infected, you go to your health agency, they verify that, they press the button that says, yes, these numbers are associated with a phone that was owned by someone that was infected, and you don't know who the person is. You don't know where you were or anything, but it will let you know like, hey, you might've been near this person, you might wanna go get tested. So it's not gonna replace manual contact tracing, but it is a good supplement. And we talked about this a lot in the early days of the pandemic after March. It's only now in August that we're really seeing the momentum happening of these apps being used. It'll be interesting to see if they have an effect. Yeah, I mean, the whole backlash if there even is one will be from people being like, oh, well they say it's not, they say it's anonymous, but it's not gonna be. I'm gonna be tracked somehow. Let's just say that it's going to work as advertised. This is a great thing. There are so many situations where I think people think, well, am I safe? There were a lot of people around me just now just to have a little bit more context on whether or not you should take it to the next level and get yourself tested or quarantine or any of the things that you do when you're trying to stay safe and keep others safe as well. This is the way to do it. So I look forward to a wide adoption by many other states, but it'll be interesting to see how that works because states operate differently. Yeah, unfortunately the state of California is not developing an app on this platform. So I won't be able to participate in this unless I go get an app from another state. That's not a problem in and of itself to me if you have very robust manual tracing. Cause we talked with Ariel Waldman earlier this year about how the fact that, well, manual tracing is the better way to do this anyway. Like hopefully people wouldn't see the app as a replacement for that because that would be bad. This is just a supplement to that. I'm not sure that the manual tracing is up to snuff either. And that's a separate problem that the app wouldn't fix. But I kind of wish they had better versions of both here. Kudos to Ireland though, for really leading the way on this, doing it right. Absolutely, yeah. And listen, however, a small percentage of all the people that are participating got a ping saying, hey, you might need to check yourself. So that's good too. But it just goes to show that if stuff is, if people adopt these sorts of things then we're all safer in the end. UCLA is launching a three-year study on how things like sleep or physical activity and other factors affect depression and anxiety. Apple is cooperating to provide participants in the study with an Apple Watch and the Bed-It sleep tracking device. Apple bought Bed-It not that long ago. So that is also an Apple device now. Data will be tracked with an app on iPhones, of course, as you might expect. The study will be conducted remotely and data will be anonymized. So this is gonna be safe. People aren't gonna have to come into labs and risk exposure to the virus. And the data compiled will not have people's names associated with it or anything like that. But it's an important thing to study because as this Engadget article pointed out we haven't really updated our way of diagnosing depression in like a hundred years. Yeah, as somebody who's like, well, I can tell you lack of sleep contributes to depression and anxiety, but I'm also not a doctor. I mean, and a lot of the stuff just needs to be more robustly researched. I would be thrilled to participate in a study like this. Anything that just, I don't know, raises awareness about mental health and particularly these days because I think a lot of people are slightly more confused than they normally would be about just like what the heck's going on. So yeah, that's awesome. And I did not realize that Apple bought better either. Yeah, I had missed that until I read this press release today. I'm like, oh, look at that. So that's cool. Yeah, I think this is a great example of using technology to help develop better medical procedures and do research that is needed. And I think that, you know, Apple deserves some credit for being willing to kind of push the ball forward and work with these sort of things. UCLA deserves most of the credit. Don't get me wrong because they're the ones actually doing the research in the study, but yeah, this is a good cooperation. Well, we've been talking about this for a while and today's the day. Instagram is launching its TikTok feature called Reels in 50 Countries. The feature had previously been tested in Brazil, India and some parts of Europe. Reels not a standalone app. So it's not exactly like TikTok, but it works in a very similar way. A feature inside the Instagram camera lets you create 15 rather second videos with ARFX, a countdown timer, large catalog of legally licensed music, among other features. You can also caption and hashtag recordings, including tagging your friends. Reels also, Reels that you make public may show up in a section of the Explore tab chosen by an algorithm, again, very TikTok-like, and displayed in a vertical feed and they'll also show up in a tab on a user's profile. Yeah, this is, I mean, this is Instagram's playbook these days, right? You take features from competitors, like Snapchat usually, and you incorporate them into Instagram. You don't necessarily create a competing thing. That's what Facebook does. Facebook did a TikTok competitor called Lasso and it didn't work, but Instagram seems to have some success with taking features like stories and saying, well, we're not gonna become Snapchat, but we're gonna put all the best parts of Snapchat inside Instagram, and that's what they're trying with TikTok. Now, they're gonna get a boost because of all the confusion about whether TikTok's even gonna stick around or not, so a lot more people are probably gonna try this than would otherwise. Yeah, there's so much talk about, oh, everybody, you know, the big TikTok folks are already moving their communities over to the next platform, and I'm sure that's true in some sense. I also was so wrong about Instagram stories when it first launched. Snapchat was pretty hot at the time and kind of gaining a lot of momentum and worked really differently than any other social network, and I was like, this is like so sad, Instagram stories. Instagram stories widely used, very widely. It's a feature that definitely has benefited the company, and I just, I don't know. I downplayed how much people want to just stay in one place and do a bunch of different things with the audience that you have there and your community, and that counts for a lot, so based on the history, I see this probably doing pretty well. Yeah, next time you, I don't know how fast this is rolling out, but the next time you open up Instagram, like you would make a story, look down at the bottom for all the different options you can swipe through, and one of them should be called Reels, and then you can do a countdown timer of you riding a horse or whatever it is. Lots of dancing. Yeah, dance around. You know, we underplayed this, but the part you mentioned about the licensed music is the big Instagram advantage here. They have that Facebook license, which not only includes the major labels, but a bunch of indies too. So you're not gonna run into that thing where you're like, oh, I wanted to use that song, but they don't have it. Like they're going to have almost all the songs you could think of. But that's the beauty of TikTok is everybody dances to the same song, you know? I don't know. We'll have to see in a month what this looks like. So if you get all the tech headlines each day in about five minutes, you must be a subscriber to Daily Tech Headlines. If you don't, go become one, dailytechheadlines.com. Let's talk about all those Samsung announcements. Samsung launched its Galaxy Note 20 phones Wednesday, the 6.9 inch Note 20 Ultra is the big one. It has 108 megapixel rear camera sensor with 12 megapixel telephoto and ultra-wide for up to 50 times hybrid zoom, similar to what the Galaxy S does too. 3088 by 1440 QHD plus Super AMOLED screen, 120 Hertz buttery refresh rate, pixel density of 496 PPI, S Pen stylus of course, and on the Ultra, the stylus latency is down to nine milliseconds. It also supports new gestures for scrolling, opening apps, system navigation, that sort of thing. The slightly smaller, although still very big, 6.7 inch Note 20, that's the base model, has a 1080P display, less buttery 60 Hertz refresh rate, 12 megapixel primary camera, no micro SD card slot. Both models run on the Snapdragon 865 plus processor, include Ultra Wideband, which can be used for tracking and stuff, it'll probably for Samsung at least, be used for nearby share, can record 8K video at 24 frames per second. Both notes support wireless connections to Miracast enabled TVs, which is great if you're using DeX. DeX is the thing that lets you plug in a mouse and keyboard and use your Samsung Note like a laptop. You can now wirelessly connect to a Miracast enabled TV to be your display as well. Both notes have in-screen fingerprint sensors, so no facial ID problems there, a 10 megapixel selfie camera, which selfies may be more important when you're doing so much video conferencing these days. The Note 20 costs $999, it's available in bronze, gray and green, the Note 20 Ultra starts at $1,299 in bronze, white and black. My big question is, this is a great phone when you're on the go, with fewer people on the go, who's gonna pay a thousand bucks or more for one? Yeah, I guess you're gonna get some sales from people who were like, I just, this was my year to upgrade and this is a great phone. I mean, it's not a cheap phone, so if you want the Note 20 series of phones, then you're gonna have to pay for them, but they're very nice phones. Yeah, they're good looking and the notes are workhorses, 6.9 inches, like that's a good amount of screen real estate. I remember when the first notes came out and they were considerably smaller than this and we thought they were ridiculously big. Now they're actually tablet size, that's crazy. You know, this is, I'm sure lots of people listening will be like, I do it, I don't see a lot of people using stylus pens with phones. I see them a lot with tablets. This is, you know, large phone, yes, but not a tablet. I would love to know if, you know, how many people find that to be a selling point because I'm sure that they're out there. I just don't see that in practice very often. Send us your note stylus use cases. I'm sorry, your S Pen use cases, feedback at DailyTechNewsShow.com. Well, Samsung had quite a few other announcements today, so we'll run through some of the other ones. You'll also be able to run an app from your Note 20 on Windows 10 and coming sometime in November that will increase to multiple apps at once. So notes from your Samsung Notes app will be able to sync with the OneNote app and with your OneNote feed and outlook on the web, for example. Microsoft said this feature is coming soon and Samsung reminders will be able to sync across Microsoft to-do outlook and Microsoft Teams apps. Samsung also promised three generations of Android updates for the SNNZ series phones. The A series, they say will be updated as hardware allows. So some people are put out there like, why didn't you promise three generations of Android updates for the A series? Those are more popular. And I think the reason is that the A series hardware just dates out and can't support the newer Android operating systems. That's why. Samsung also announced its second foldable tablet, the Galaxy Z Fold 2. It has a full 6.2 inch screen when folded up instead of the little inset that it had on the first version. So it looks like an actual phone when it's folded up. And then it unfolds to a larger 7.6 inch OLED display. That's also larger than the original one. The camera in the unfolded display is now a whole punch so it doesn't take up a part of the screen space or at least less of it. It'll come in black and bronze and no price and release date. They say they're gonna have another announcement on the Z Fold 2 in September. They just kind of wanted to give us a preview. Well, so I still think back at CES when I saw my first foldable device and I was like, cool, but who wants this form factor? And then there were some issues. Samsung obviously back doubling down on the foldable tablet and I don't know, I'm very curious to again tell me if you like this and why? Because it's a cool gimmick and I can't really get past the fact that it feels like a gimmick to me. You know what's funny is we've been watching this Korean show called It's Okay Not To Be Okay on Netflix and Samsung, which always has product placements in Korean shows, put the flip, not the fold, but the flip, the foldable cell phone and that started to look normal. In fact, Eileen evens like, I kind of want that now. It's funny how just seeing somebody use it, that product placement does sort of change your perception of it. Interesting. Yeah, I mean, 6.2 to 7.6, it's not a huge difference either, but I mean, it's significant. Again, without having put it into practice on my own, it's hard for me to understand. I still, I'm sort of like, do we want this? The foldable stuff, it won't go away, but we had a little bit of a setback on people using it, but how it actually works in practice, I'm curious about. We'll find out more in September. Yes, we will. Samsung also introduced the Galaxy Watch 3 with a physical rotating dial, two buttons on the side and a thinner and lighter form than the original Galaxy Watch. So not a huge difference, but an update. The watch runs the Tizen OS, comes in 41 millimeter and 45 millimeter sizes with or without LTE. All models have always on OLED led displays, stainless steel cases and leather bands. A titanium case option with a titanium link band is promised for later this year. The watch also has blood oxygen monitoring and in Korea, we'll get blood pressure and EKG later this year with EKG also coming to the US. It also has a trip and fall detection, very helpful. Samsung's Galaxy Watch 3 will be available on August 6th, starting at $399.99. Yeah, this is a nice-looking watch and, you know, not as slim and sleek as the active, which is the more fitness-oriented one, but it's still got a lot of this health stuff. It does feel like they're, Samsung's still playing a little bit of catch-up here, but, you know, it's holding its own, decent watch. Yeah, very much so. The Samsung Galaxy Buds Live are the new wireless earbuds that were announced today at Active Noise Cancelling. That's why they're called Live, because they add Active Noise Cancelling. Also, IPX2 water resistance, you supposedly will get eight hours on a charge unless you're using the noise canceling, then you only get six hours. And then you should get another 21 hours from the carrying case. Galaxy Buds Live available now for 170 bucks. I mean, these are not top-of-the-line wireless earbuds, but a really good price for at 170 bucks relative to the others in the category. If you're looking compared to wired headphones, you're gonna think $170 sounds crazy, but most of the others are more expensive. Eight hours on a charge doesn't sound like a lot to me. I'm a Jabra enthusiast ever since I reviewed the Jabra 65Ts for Live with It. There's now 75T, which is a souped-up model, but in this category, $170 is a lot. If the noise canceling is as promised, then okay, we're getting there, but eight hours on a charge is not that much. Well, we actually have some Samsung tablet news as well. Samsung also announced new Android tablets, the 11-inch S7 and 12.5-inch OLED S7 Plus, running on a Snapdragon 865-plus processor with either six gigs of RAM or 128 gigs of storage and 128 gigs of storage, or eight gigs of RAM and 256 gigs of storage, all with the option for 5G. Both models arrive this autumn in black, silver, war bronze, starting at $650 for the S7, and $850 for the S7 Plus. Yeah, Joanna Stern's review of the Note S20 noted that people aren't going anywhere. They would probably rather have tablets, and maybe the bigger announcement from Samsung today were these top-of-the-line Android tablets. If you're looking for a comparison in the Android ecosystem to an iPad, this is it. They're nice tablets. Yeah, absolutely, very much so. And true, very good point. Foldable stuff. People are like, eh, whatever. I'm sitting around. I'd like a tablet. Thank you very much. Well, you can join in the conversation in our Discord, which you can join by linking to a Patreon account. If you haven't already, patreon.com slash dtns is the link. Let's look at the mailbag. Oh, let's. Micah from what he says is hot north Texas says, I wanted to offer a possible explanation for having colors as a premium Twitter feature. You might recall we talked about this on Monday's show. Micah says, I work as a developer, and I really appreciate it when apps allow me to change colors or some other visual cue, depending on the environment I'm working in, like dev, test, or production. When the screen is bright red, I know I'm in the production environment, I should be extra careful. This could make it easier for people managing multiple accounts to quickly differentiate which account they were posting from and eliminate some confusion from managing multiple identities. That is a very good point. Thank you, Micah. That would be useful and fits in with the idea of these being more targeted towards working situations. That's a good brand manager feature, the way Micah explains it. Thank you for that. And then Mink said, you said during your conversation with Amber on DTNS that the number of cows being milked by machine is doubling every three to four years. Since that's about twice the time of Moore's law, is this new rule going to be called Moose Law? Micah's also amazed that we didn't say that already on the show, or is the pun just that bad? I love your pun, Mink. I wasn't on yesterday's show, but boy was I disappointed not to be a part of a conversation about robots milking cows. I know, right? Yeah. Is that just great? I have to say, I don't know how often it will come up, but if the idea of robots milking cows doubling every three to four years comes up again, I will absolutely refer to it as Moose Law. Thank you, Mink. Moose Law. Hey, shout out to patrons at our master and grand master levels, including Mark Gibson, Dr. Kermine M. Bailey, and Mike McLaughlin. And folks, don't forget, we need your help getting reviews in the store. They could just be ratings, and you don't even have to be using the Apple Podcast app to leave them. It still helps us get discovered by others. So whatever podcast app you're leaving, if they allow ratings and reviews, that helps. But specifically that Apple Podcast or that one definitely gets us in front of more people. Few people have been reviewing this us this week. Thank you for that. Keep them coming, reviews always help. And of course, what helps us the most is just backing us directly and getting a few perks in the bargain. We just sent out our monthly update with some secrets about what's coming up this month. You get those if you're a patron, patreon.com slash dtns. Our email addresses feedback at dailytechnewshow.com and we'd love to hear your feedback, so keep it coming. We're also live Monday through Friday, 4 30 p.m. Eastern, 20 30 UTC. Find out more at dailytechnewshow.com slash live. Back tomorrow with Justin Robert Young. Talk to you then. This show is part of the Frog Pants Network. Get more at frogpants.com. The Time Club hopes you have enjoyed this program. Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha