Tech Brew Ride Home - Wed. 08/11 – Samsung’s Galaxy Unpacked Event

Episode Date: August 11, 2021

All the flipping and folding phone news from today’s Samsung Galaxy Unpacked event. A big crypto crime in the DeFi space. Did AWS beat out Microsoft for a secret NSA contract? And why are all the major tech platforms so concerned about protecting kids all of the sudden? Not that that’s a bad thing! Sponsors: Quantummetric.com/podoffer offer code Podcastcode Metalab.co Links: Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 3 delivers S Pen, better screen durability, IPX8 for $1,799 (9to5Google) Samsung breaks the triple-digit barrier w/ Galaxy Z Flip 3 priced at $999 (9to5Google) THE GALAXY WATCH 4 INJECTS SAMSUNG’S CAPABLE HARDWARE WITH GOOGLE SOFTWARE (The Verge) At least $611 million stolen in massive cross-chain hack (The Block) Poly Network attacker returns $256 million of the stolen cryptocurrency (The Block) NSA Awards Secret $10 Billion Contract to Amazon (Nextgov) OpenAI launches Codex, an API for translating natural language into code (The Machine) Google restricts ad targeting of minors and will delist photos of kids at their request (The Verge) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On April 4th, 2023, around 2 in the morning, a man was found stabbed multiple times on a sidewalk in downtown San Francisco. Hey, who did this to you? What happened next turned the story into a political firestorm. Reports have identified the victim as Bob Lee, the founder of Cash App. From Bloomberg Podcasts, this is Foundering, the Killing of Bob Lee, beginning April 16. Welcome to the Tech Meme right home for Wednesday, August 11th, 2021. I'm Brian McCullough today. All the flipping and folding phone news from today's Samsung Galaxy Unpacked event,

a big crypto crime in the DFI space. Did AWS beat out Microsoft for a secret NSA contract? And why are all of the major tech platforms so concerned about protecting kids all of the sudden? Not that that's a bad thing. Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. So it was another Galaxy Unpacked event from Samp. Samsung this morning, but today it was mostly about foldables. Samsung announced the Galaxy Z-Fold 3 with a 120-hirts 7.6-inch primary screen, S-Pen support, and IPX8 water resistance. All of this

on sales starting August 27th for $1,79. The Z-fold is the long candy bar-looking foldable that has a fully functional cover screen that operates like a normal slab of glass smartphone, but when you unfold it to get to the main screen, you have that tablet-style 6.7-inch display, quoting 9 to 5 Google. In terms of size, it's virtually identical to the Galaxy Z-Fold 2 with a 6.2-inch outer display and a 7.6-inch inner display. That's not to say improvements can't be found, though. With the outer display, Samsung is upgrading the HD Plus panel with a faster 120-hertz refresh rate,

without sacrificing on resolution or the super ammo-led tech. The inner display, meanwhile, is the same 7.6 inch 120-hertz panel, but this time with thinner bezels for an overall smaller footprint. 67.1 by 158.2 by 16 millimeters when folded, and 128.1 by 158.2 by 6.4 millimeters when opened up. Weight also drops a bit to 271 grams. There's also a selfie camera that hides under. the inner display, a first for any Samsung product. You'll take a hit on quality at just

four megapixels, but the outer display has its own 10-mapixel selfie camera, and you can also use the rear shooters with the cover display for even better quality. Sticking with the hardware, Samsung has only marginally altered the design with more rounded corners and an updated design for the camera module. The cameras themselves, though, are mostly unchanged from the fold two with a trio of 12 megapixel sensors, standard ultra-wide and telephoto, only using Corning DX Plus glass over top this time. Durability is a clear area. Samsung tried to improve on the Fold 3-2.

The entire package now offers actual water resistance rated at IPX8, which should mean that an accidental drop in the water, spill, or getting caught in the rain should leave the device just fine. Samsung also says that the top plastic layer of the Fold 3's display is 80% strong. stronger than the fold two and should feel smoother to the touch. On the note of that display, Samsung has also managed to bring the S-pen to its foldables. You'll get the same accurate and low-latency writing as the Note series is known for, but with a special S-pen fold edition that has a retractable tip to prevent damage to the screen. A special case will also be available to hold the stylus,

but neither are included, and the S-pen won't work on the outer display. Under the hood, the Galaxy Z-Fold 3 offers up the Snapdragon 888. processor with its full 5G support, including MMWave. That's paired with 12 gigabytes of RAM on all models and either 256 gigabytes or 512 gigabytes of storage. There's no micro-sd card slot or headphone jack for that matter. Stereo speakers are also here, end quote. So that's the fold. Samsung, however, also announced the Galaxy Z Flip 3 with a 120 hertz, 6.7 inch internal display, plus a 1.9-inch fold-out panel starting at $999, shipping August 26th. This is the phone that looks sort of like a razor flip phone of old.

Quoting 9 to 5 Google again. One of the first thoughts around foldable smartphones is a high price tag, but that tune is changing. Today, Samsung is officially announcing the Galaxy Z Flip 3, its first foldable smartphone to carry a triple-digit price. Unlike its most expensive counterpart, the Galaxy Z-Fold. The Flip series is designed to imitate the form factor of a classic flip phone. You can't do much from the outside, but you'll end up with a smaller, more pocketable device that still packs a sizable display.

Getting right to the internal display, it's a 6.7-inch Ph.D Plus display, just like the last time around, though now with a faster 120-hertz refresh rate. When folded, there is still a cover display, and this time it's a much bigger 1.9-inch panel that's big enough to show a full text message or display additional information on a widget. The Flip 3 comes in at a tiny 72.2 by 86.4 by 17.1 millimeters when folded up, and weighs 183 grams just a little more than the standard Galaxy S-21. Like the Fold 3, Samsung also says the plastic outer layer of the Flip's main display is 80% stronger, but it won't work with the S-Pen.

But the hardware is also IPX8 water resistant. Looking at the spec sheet, there's a... a Snapdragon 888 and its associated 5G at the core, MMWave included. That's paired with 8 gigabytes of RAM and either 128 gigabytes or 256 gigabytes of internal storage. The package is powered by a 3,300 mill-amp hour battery that accepts 15 watts wired charging and 10 watts wireless. In the camera department, Samsung is offering a 10-mixel selfie camera on the internal display with a duo of 12 megapixel sensors on the outside. One is a standard lens with the other ultra-wide, both using Corning DX Glass, end quote. I'd say that the fold is the sexier-looking

phone, though the flip is pretty impressive looking unfolded. Those bezels are tiny. Of course, it's way more expensive, too. Anyway, there's more. Samsung also announced the Galaxy Watch 4, starting at $249, and Galaxy Watch 4 Classic, starting at $349, both with WearOS powered by Samsung shipping August 27th, quoting the Verge. I get the sense with these two smartwatches that Samsung is hitting a bit of a reset button with its wearables lineup. Yes, there's the WareOS operating system, but Samsung has also taking the opportunity to tweak the branding on its ranges. So instead of splitting its smart watches between the active and regular ranges, now there's the default watch four and

the more premium watch four classic. The watch four is best thought of as a successor to the watch active 2 from 2019, which means that, yes, Samsung has skipped the active 3, rest in peace. While the watch 4 classic with its chunkier design and rotating bezel looks like a follow-up to last year's watch 3, basically the Galaxy Watch 4 is now the default, and the classic is the step-up version. The big difference between the two models is that the Watch 4 classic has one of those physical rotating bezels that we've liked so much on Samsung's previous smartwatches. while if you opt for the standard watch four, there's a touch-sensitive bezel accessible by swiping at the edges of the screen. The watch four classic is also made of a more premium stainless steel rather than the aluminum you'll find on the watch four.

On the right of both watches are a pair of control buttons. The lack of physical bezel means the watch four is more compact of the two models, and it's also around a millimeter slimmer than its predecessor, the active two. The watch four is available in 40-millimeter and 44-millimeter versions, while the watch for Classic is available in 42 and 46mm versions. Both ranges have the same screen sizes and resolutions, with a choice of either a 1.2-inch 396 by 396 display in the smaller body or a 1.4-inch 450 by 450 display in the larger one.

That means higher resolution screens across the board, particularly if you opt for a larger model. External differences aside, internally, both watches share a lot of the same specs. They're both powered by the same 5-nanomenex-Eos W920. 20 processor Samsung detailed yesterday, paired with 1.5 gigabytes of RAM and 16 gigabytes of storage. Battery capacity varies between sizes, but Samsung reckons you'll average around 40 hours of battery life regardless of model. There's LTE on select models, but if you were hoping for 5G, you'll be disappointed. Samsung says it doesn't think it's worth it because the amount of data smartwatch's

process is too small, end quote. And one more thing. Samsung also announced the $150 Galaxy Buds 2 with active noise cancellation and a similar design to the Galaxy Buds Pro, all available August 27th. These are apparently the smallest and lightest wireless earbuds yet with active noise cancelling and wireless charging. In one of the biggest crypto heists of all time, reportedly, the group behind Polly Network, a cross-chain protocol used for defy applications, says a hacker has stolen $611 million worth of crypto using what one researcher thinks was a basic crypto flaw, quoting the block. Polly Network is a protocol for swapping tokens across multiple blockchains, including Bitcoin,

Ethereum, and Ontology. It was formed by an alliance between the teams behind multiple blockchain platforms, namely Neo, Ontology, and Switchayo. According to the block researches, Igor Egmerdyev, the root cause of the hack was a cryptography issue, which is not usually the case. It may have been similar to the any swap exploit, which saw 7.9 million stolen due to a hacker reversing the private key. The hack has also had wider implications. As a result of it, O3, a trading pool that uses Polly Network to trade tokens among different blockchains, has had to suspend its cross-chain functionality. The assets Stolten were $273 million worth of Ethereum tokens, $253 million in tokens on Binance smart chain, and $85 million in USDC on the Polygon

network. Since the theft, Tether has blacklisted the USDT on Ethereum that was stolen in the attack, roughly $33 million in tokens. That means they can no longer be moved, end quote. Even more wild, the attacker who stole the tokens is now reportedly returning them, at least as of now, returning more than $4 million in USDC, BTC, B, Shiba, and others saying they were, quote, ready to surrender, quoting the block again. After the heist, blockchain security firm Slowmiss claimed that they already tracked down the attacker's IP and email information while the investigation on other ID intel relating to the attacker continued. Slow Miss Wibow post on Tuesday suggested that the attacker used a little-known Chinese crypto exchange called Hu,

when putting together the funds for the attack, hinting at how their digital footprint was trailed at the beginning. Other crypto sluice also found details relating to other exchanges, that may help to identify them. Around four UTC time on Wednesday, the attacker wrote, quote, ready to return the fund in an Ethereum transaction that was sent from the Poly Network Exploiter address to itself. That message was followed by another one that reads, quote, failed to contact the Polly, I need a secured multi-sig wallet from you, end quote. About 20 minutes later, the team behind the Polly network responded to the exploiter address through a transaction that it is, quote, preparing a multi-sig address controlled by known Polly

addresses, end quote. And in a follow-up transaction, the Polynetwork team identified three addresses that they hope the attacker returns the funds to. The money is currently being sent to these addresses, end quote. According to sources, the NSA awarded a cloud computing contract worth up to $10 billion to AWS. But, you know, it's the NSA, so this was a secret contract, unlike the whole Jedi contract for the Pentagon. However, like that brouhaha, there are hurt feelings here too, as Microsoft has reportedly filed a bid protest with the General Accounting Office in response to ostensibly losing out on the deal, quoting Nextgov.com. The contract's code name is wild and stormy, according to protest filings, and it represents the second multi-billion

cloud contract, the U.S. intelligence community, made up of 17 agencies, including the NSA, has awarded in the past year. In November, the CIA awarded its C2E contract, potentially worth tens of billions of dollars to five companies, A. Microsoft, Google, Oracle, and IBM that will compete for specific task orders for certain intelligence needs. Details on the NSA's newly awarded cloud contract are sparse, but the acquisition appears to be part of the NSA's attempt to modernize its primary classified data repository, the Intelligence Community GovCloud. For the better part of a decade, the NSA has moved its data, including signals intelligence and other foreign surveillance and intelligence information it ingests

from multiple repositories around the globe into this internally operated data lake, analysts from the NSA and other IC agencies can run queries and perform analytics against. In 2020, intelligence officials signaled an intent to bring in a commercial cloud provider to meet demands caused by exponential data growth and massive processing and analytics requirements that are challenging the NSA's ability to scale. The effort, called the Hybrid Compute Initiative, would effectively move the NSA's crown jewel intelligence data from its own servers to servers operated by a commercial cloud provider, end quote. Devs, these things just keep coming.

OpenAI has debuted a private beta for Codex, an API for turning natural language into code of one of over a dozen coding languages. Codex, by the way, is what powers GitHub's co-pilot, quoting Venture Beat. Able to understand more than a dozen programming languages, Codex can interpret commands in plain English and execute them, making it possible to build a natural language interface for existing apps. According to OpenAI, the Codex model. available via the API, is most capable in Python, but is also proficient in JavaScript,

Go, Pearl, PHP, Ruby, Swift, TypeScript, Shell, and others. Its memory, 14 kilobytes for the Python code enables it to take into account contextual information while performing programming tasks, including transpilation, explaining code, and refactoring code. OpenAI says that Codex will be offered for free during the initial period, quote, Codex empowers computers to better understand people's intent, which can empower anyone to do more with computers, the company wrote in a blog post. We are now inviting businesses and developers to build on top of open AI codecs through our API, end quote. The rolling controversy around Apple scanning photos for CSAM images continues, but have you noticed there is a bit of a trend going on with all of the

platforms suddenly pulling out all of the stops to protect kids better online? I'm not saying there's anything nefarious behind this and certainly nothing wrong. Protecting kids is a good thing. But why is this happening now? Why all of a sudden, has there been some sort of behind-the-scenes pressure from, I don't know, some authorities somewhere about getting serious about protecting kids? For example, just so far this week, Google announced it will let under 18 users delist photos by request restrict ad-targeting of children based on age, gender, or interest, and a lot more, including with YouTube, quoting, The Verge. Google says it's introducing its changes based on new regulations being introduced in some

countries, and that it wants to offer, quote, consistent product experiences and user controls globally. Requesting an images removal from Google's image search won't remove it from the web entirely, Google cautions, but it says this should give users more control over the spread of their images. Alongside its changes to ad targeting, Google also says it's expanding safeguards to stop age-sensitive ad categories from being shown to teens. The search giant is also making a number of other tweaks to its services for children. Safe Search will now be on by default for users under the age of 18, after previously being on by default for users under 13. The feature which blocks explicit results from appearing in search is also coming to Google's web browser on smart displays. Users under the

age of 18 will also no longer be able to turn location history on in their Google account setting. Google says the setting is already off by default for all accounts. Instant-enabled smart devices will also be able to block news, podcasts, and access to the web in the coming months. On YouTube, Autoplay will be off by default for kids under 18, and it's turning on break reminders. YouTube Kids is getting a new autoplay option, but it'll also be off by default, and there will be new resources available, quote, for young people and their parents to help them better understand Google's data practices, end quote. The changes are similar to what Facebook introduced last month when it said Instagram accounts for kids under 16 will be set to private by default, meaning users have to choose to make their profiles public. It also banned

ads targeted at children based on their interests or their activity, although it still allowed them to be targeted based on age, gender, and location, end quote. Hey, since it is Samsung's Day, and since you all gave me so much crap for complaining about that earlier, Dell laptop that I bought, I thought I should let you know that I replaced that one with one of those Galaxy Book Pro 360s. And yes, You were right. It's not the Windows ecosystem that sucks. It's, well, it's if you buy a mid-range laptop, you get what you pay for. However, this new Galaxy Book Pro 360 works great. I feel like the screen is maybe the best I've ever seen on a laptop. It's insanely thin and sexy. Like, this thing is so thin. It makes the MacBook Air look and feel like the phone book,

which remember those. They were big and thick and heavy. The only niggle that I have actually is that the track pad is still sort of frustrating. You don't know why Apple is the only one that can get that perfect, and everyone else just kind of gets halfway there. But anyway, yeah, good build quality allows me to feel how grown up the Windows platform is these days, so consider this a Mia Kulpa. Windows fans, talk to you tomorrow.

Oh, and real quick edit, we do have a Twitter space tonight at the usual time 9 p.m. Eastern, 6 p.m. Pacific. We're going to be talking about what else? today's Samsung event and some other things as well. Now, talk to you tomorrow.