Gmail Wants to Verify Your Phone Number with a QR Code - DTNSB 4962
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love. Guaranteed to fit every time. eBay. Things people love. This is the Daily Tech News for Monday, February 24th, 2025. We tell you what you need to know, follow up on the context of these stories, and just try to help each other understand this crazy world of technology. Today, Michelle Roman tells us about the OnePlus Watch 3 and more from your emails. I'm Tom Merritt. I'm Rob Dunwood. Let's start with what you need to know with the big story.

Forbes' Davey Winder reports that Gmail spokesperson Ross Richendorfer says Google will ditch text messages or SMS as a form of second-factor authentication for Gmail. SMS is often used along with a password to make extra sure you're the right person for whatever, and not just somebody who happened to get a hold of somebody's password. But it's not the most secure way of doing that.

SMS is insecure because you can trick a carrier into giving you someone else's account. Even more likely, ways of tricking you into giving them the code that you got by text. This is all called phishing. If you know what phishing is, that's what we're talking about. Pass keys are more secure because they stay on your device and you can't accidentally copy the number from them to someone like you can with SMS.

And there's another less well-known problem with SMS called traffic pumping. This doesn't affect you so much as it affects the carriers. It's when criminals create a high number of accounts, like Gmail accounts, for example, and then associate them to numbers they control. So they've created and registered these phone numbers and then

they can charge carriers for any text messages to deliver that are delivered to the numbers they control uh and then of course what they do is they take those thousands and thousands of gmail accounts fake gmail accounts that they created and they trigger a bunch of sms confirmation messages by logging into them repeatedly and the carriers have to pay to deliver those text messages and so they collect money that is in fact fraud pass keys solve a lot of these problems but

Gmail still has reasons to verify a phone number, especially when you set up an account. There's also account recovery. There's just verification that you're not a bot. So it's not able to use Passkey for phone number verification.

For that, it's going to use QR codes. Instead of entering your phone number and getting an SMS code sent to it, you'll scan a QR code with the camera on the phone with the number you want to verify. This means no code that you might accidentally share with the wrong person, no SMS fraud possibility because they're not sending any text messages. Rich and Durford told ZDNet to look for more from us on this in the near future.

The one question I had, Rob, is if I'm doing this on my phone, how does that work? Well, let me start off by saying I am team pro-team.

not using passwords anymore. There's so many issues that just come up with them. And this isn't necessarily an issue with the passwords, but an issue with how you do two-factor authentication on the passwords where things are less secure. So if you're doing this on the phone, my thought would be is that it's probably gonna be time sensitive. You probably can only use that. I would hope that you could only use that QR code for a very short amount of time to make sure that there's nothing fishy going on there.

But that's just the thought. I'm not necessarily 100% certain, but that seems like how that would work for me. Yeah, there are ways to do screenshots and then scan QR codes from within your own phone without having to point your camera at something. I'm just curious how they're going to handle that because that could be another way that someone perpetrates some kind of security breach.

uh, with screenshots and all of that. So, I mean, they're not at the point where they're releasing a lot of details. They say that they're working on this and they'll have more details in the future, et cetera, et cetera. Uh, I think they kind of wanted to float this out to the public as a trial balloon to see what kind of reactions they got. Pass keys are awesome. Um,

it's going to take us a while for everyone to get converted over to them. It's not insignificant to change the entire way you've authenticated people for the last 40 plus years. But clearly the best way to get rid of passwords is to literally get rid of passwords and just make humans not have to remember these things. Yeah. And in that respect, I kind of like what Richard Durfer is doing here, which is saying, hey, there's a situation where passkeys aren't

built to solve it, right? It's not a failure in Passkeys. They just aren't built for phone verification. But Google has an idea for how to not have to use SMS for that either, which makes it even more secure. Right. So DTNS is made possible by you, the listener, thanks to Logan Larson, Mike Akins, and Norm Fazekas, and our new patron, Lisa. Welcome, Lisa.

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Apple announced on Monday that it will spend $500 billion over the next few years in the US. Among the projects will be working with Foxconn on the facility in Houston to make servers for Apple Intelligence. Apple will expand its data center capacity in Arizona, Oregon, Iowa, Nevada and North Carolina. Apple will also open a location in Detroit to train suppliers and increase spending on US suppliers. Apple estimates this will result in 20,000 new jobs.

Although I think something like $440 billion or more of that was already on the books. So Apple's doing a good job of saying, hey, it's now $500 billion and making it sound new. We do kind of casually throw around the billions with it. That's still a significant amount of money. So, hey, if you're going to spend money and get people jobs, I'm for it.

Microsoft is canceling some data center leases totaling a couple hundred of megawatts of capacity. This according to broker TD Cohen. TD Cohen kind of looking at agreements and leases and things that they're finding out in other manners and saying, yeah, it looks like Microsoft is letting some options to do leases fall away instead of confirming them, that sort of thing. It suggested some of it may be due to OpenAI working more with Oracle.

So you won't need to exercise a lease on a data center if OpenAI is not going to use it. Or Microsoft is also shifting some resources from abroad back to the United States. Microsoft did not comment on the capacity changes, but it did reiterate it has not changed its projected capital expenditures.

I think in this case, you know, competition is actually a good thing. If you can go to more than one data center, that might actually be a good thing. Yeah. And the fact that we've got more efficient models arising, you know, that could be playing a part in this too. T.D. Cohen didn't think that that was necessarily the explanation this time, but we may not need as much of this as everybody thought now that we've found some more efficient ways to do AI.

What was that you were just saying about competition?

competition is a good thing. Clearly it is a good thing in this situation. It's just the more times you have the opportunity to use other than just one vendor kind of makes things better. Your prices are lower and they innovate a little bit faster because they have to. Yeah. And, and it's going to work better for employees at these companies if you're in Google workspace and you don't have to switch over to something else. You can just like, you know, publish that document right into your Salesforce.

instance and all of that. It's a little more efficient for everybody.

Speaking of Google, Google announced pricing for its generative video model VO2, which it announced back in December. It's going to cost you 50 cents per second for up to two minutes of 4K video. By comparison, OpenAI's Sora gives you 20 seconds of 1080p video tops, but that's included in ChatGPT's paid plans. So basically, Google's giving you a little better, but you got to pay by the mile, so to speak.

It sounds like that could be expensive, but it really isn't. When you think about what you're doing with these models and what they can create as compared to paying a person to try to create something similar, this is actually not terribly expensive. Yeah, you would pay more than $300 if you were going to get a good piece of stock video. Now, the question people will have is, can I get that level of quality out of VO2? And your mileage may vary there. But yeah, it's...

If you're using this for professional purposes, then this cost makes sense.

Oppo has still not announced which markets its foldable Find N5 will come to beyond China and Singapore, but it has announced it won't come to Europe. Oppo said that instead it will introduce the non-foldable Reno 13 series in Europe on February 24th. That's today. Ah, yeah. So you're getting something you didn't ask for. I don't know if they were asking for the Find N5 either, but the Find N5 is that foldable that Juan and I were talking about last week. That's pretty cool. It seems like

Asia is going to be the market that you're going to get the Find N5 in. It's not coming to Europe or North America. Maybe South America. We'll see. We'll see. These folding phones, though, they're pretty incredible, what they're doing with the technology and how thin they can make these things. And price is just starting to come down. So I'm looking maybe the next couple of years at seeing a mid-range foldable come out.

Another thing people have been looking for is Intel to announce that its 18A process is now ready to roll, and they have. Factories can now start doing what's called tape-out, which is the last part of the design process, and manufacturing should begin after tape-out, which is supposed to happen in the first half of this year. 18A's architecture replaces fin-fet with ribbon-fet.

as well as offering backside power delivery for the first time in a chip. If you know what those are, then you're like, ooh, that's interesting. If not, better power efficiency. That's your takeaway. Foundry revenue for 18A will rely on its performance matching current TSMC offerings. That's Intel's promise. We'll see if it bears out in reality. And even if it does, you're not going to see this show up on Intel's balance sheet until 2026.

asus is launching the frequence mouse with a refillable vial on the underside the vial can be washed and refilled with aromatic oils it also is bluetooth and wireless capable and comes in white or pink no price or availability yet now tom i've got one question how did this actually come into being i thought it was a good idea to make a mouse smell good i'm not saying that they should stink but how do you how did this accident happen well yeah and the one thing i didn't get from the press release that i'm curious about is

Is there like a method for the oil coming out of the vial or is it just like, well, it's in there and it'll slowly evaporate and smell nice.

Because, yeah, I was thinking the same thing. Did somebody have their essential oils evaporator next to their mouse and was like, well, the mouse could do that. I wouldn't need two things. I don't know. I don't know. Maybe one of those airwook press, you know, those kind of airwooks that you put plug into the wall fell into a vat of mice. And somebody said, these mice really smell good. Maybe we should figure something out. Could be that. That's like a comic book origin story right there.

uh samsung has agreed to a 5.1 wage increase and stock awards for staff uh the samsung union will now vote from february 28th until march 5th on whether to accept the concessions as part of a preliminary agreement if you recall the national samsung electronics union conducted its first ever strike last year uh and uh well seems like they're finally coming to an agreement with samsung which

As you might have been following, Samsung has been having some issues with feeling the competitive pressure these days. Those are the essentials for today. Let's dive a little deeper into an ongoing story. We're going to follow up on this one. Last week, we talked about the upcoming OnePlus Watch 3, which comes out February 25th for $330. The advanced reviews are pretty glowing. So Tom talked to Anthro Faithful's Michelle Roman about why that is. Michelle, thanks for talking to me about this.

Thanks for having me on, Tom. So I was listening to this week's Android Faithful and hearing you and also Jason's impressions of the watch. And it strikes me that I don't think I've heard a reviewer or read a reviewer out there say something negative about the OnePlus Watch 3. People aren't saying it's the best watch ever, but people seem really positive about this watch. Why do you think that is?

I think the biggest reason why people are so positive about the watch is because for the longest time, people have kind of given up on smartwatch battery life.

You know, there's been this this like a huge gap between regular watches with like dumb, quote unquote, operating systems. They run real time operating systems. They don't have access to huge swaths of apps. They don't have all the features that we're accustomed to on smartwatches like the Apple Watch, Galaxy Watch, you know, Pixel Watch and so on. But the thing is, those old those, quote unquote, dumb watches have like a week of battery life or even longer at times.

But smartwatches, they've struggled. They've had a day of battery life. Now we're getting two days at best, and that's like without AOD or always on display. But now comes OnePlus. Well, last year they came out with the OnePlus Watch 2, which has received critical praise across the board for its three to four day battery life with its default smart mode. But now they top that with the OnePlus Watch 3 that gets about five days or 120 hours of battery life with its default smart mode.

And for me, with always on display, I've gotten about five days of battery life so far. And that's just, it just sets the bar. It sets a new standard for smartwatch battery life because you no longer have to really think about charging your watch every night or even every other night. You can do it just once a week, basically.

Especially with sleep tracking being a thing that people like to use these for, right? Nobody wants to have to remember to charge a watch. They just want to wear it. And if they're wearing it overnight, then they don't want to have to think about it. I know with other watches in the past that had long battery life, like you were talking about, like the Pebble, sometimes people ran into forgetting that they needed to charge it. Do you think that would be something that happens with the OnePlus Watch 3?

So far, that hasn't happened to me. It doesn't last so long that I actively have to remember that, oh, I need to charge it. You do get warnings that you need to charge it. And when this watch, by default, when it reaches 10%, it enters power saving mode. And you do notice when that happens because even though the watch faces, like the interface looks generally the same, certain features are disabled, like contactless payments when it's in power saving mode. So you would notice that.

Hopefully that your watch is about to die. Yeah, yeah. So you can just wait for that warning and then find the next available opportunity, I guess, rather than having to remember to put it on a charger. The features are pretty on par with, say, like the Galaxy Watch, but they're not exactly the same. What are the trade-offs?

So that's actually one of the things that I highlighted in my review on I Know To Faithful is that with the OnePlus Watch 2, there were a lot of trade-offs. There were a lot of missing features relative to other brands. Like there was no ECG detection. There was no fall detection. The health and fitness tracking features were kind of limited compared to other brands. There was no watch transfer ability. So if you got a new phone, you had to factory reset your watch to transfer it. But now they added all those features with the caveat of...

of ECG not being available in North America, but the sensor is there and present in other markets.

But, yeah, most of the features that you'd come to expect on a Premier smartwatch are available on the OnePlus Watch 3. So there's not really many compromises left, except for, I guess, there's no LTE connectivity. There's no LTE model on this watch. So if you want to have a standalone watch and you don't have to take your phone anywhere, then you don't have that option with this device. It's always got to be paired to a phone.

Yeah. And normally I'd say, well, it's a hit to the battery life, but you've got so much battery to play with. If they did have it, it wouldn't be that much of a deal. But that's it, really? That's the only trade-offs you could think of?

um i guess the other big trade-off would be size there's only one size option okay so if you have a smaller wrist or you know you you notice heftier smart watches this might not be for you um it really depends because this is i think 46 millimeter size smartwatch so if that is too big for you then i there's not nothing you can do about that because they don't make any other sizes

Multiple days battery life is going to be what a lot of people listening are is going to stick out in their head. It's $330 too. So it's not, you know, price wise, it's, it's, it's not the cheapest. Yeah, yeah. What do you think it will do in the marketplace? Because, you know, you're, you have a lot of OnePlus fans out there, don't get me wrong. But OnePlus doesn't have the mindshare that a Samsung or an Apple has when you're talking about watches. Do you think this will change that?

Well, I think the neat thing is that this is not just a smartwatch for OnePlus phone users. You can use this with any Android phone. You can't use it with an iPhone, unfortunately, because their companion app doesn't work for them. But I'm currently not using it with a OnePlus phone. I'm using it with a Xiaomi phone, and it works wonderfully. Almost every single feature is available. There's no artificial roadblocks or limitations on what I can do with it.

Um, so even if you don't have a plan to buy a one plus phone, I still think this is a great option. If you want a smartwatch to pair with an Android phone. Fantastic. Uh, well, if you want to hear more of this discussion, uh, from Michelle and Ron and when, and Jason, uh, of course, check out Android faithful at androidfaithful.com. If folks want to follow you directly, Michelle, where should they go?

i have i am on all different social media platforms um you can find where i post at my link tree link tree slash michelle roman um you can i post a lot about android the android operating system android news android updates on various different social media platforms so if you'd like to know what's happening in the world of android follow me on whatever platform you

prefer to use. Yeah, I highly recommend it too, because it's a regular occurrence that I'll be reading an article that is telling me something brand new about the Android ecosphere and your name is on it. So thank you for that, man. I appreciate it. And thank you for having me on, Tom. Well, what would you want to hear us talk about on the show? One way to let us know is our subreddit. You can submit stories and vote on them at reddit.com slash r slash Daily Tech News Show.

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We end every episode of DTNS with some shared wisdom. Today, Moen, Anand Jr., and Mike are helping us understand. Yeah, so big thanks to Mike on this. This is one of those examples of somebody sharing some expertise, a little bit of insight with us.

Mike said, I've heard several reports about Apple's decision to disallow turning on advanced device protection or ADP for UK users. We talked about that last week. Most, including you guys, have said that Apple's no longer encrypting data on their servers. I very much doubt that is the case, literally.

I'd be very surprised if iCloud data isn't encrypted across the board. The distinction between a normal user's data and an ADP user's data is simply where the key encrypting the data is stored and held. In both cases, a private key is created for encrypting and decrypting the data. In the normal case, Apple stores that key on their server and can use it to decrypt the data. In the ADP case, that key is only held on the user's device so that only that user can decrypt

the data. That is a very good point, Mike. Thank you for bringing that up. We looked this up, Mike and I both, I was like, can you find a link on Apple support about this? By the time he got his link to on Apple support, I'd found one of my own. We'll have both of them in the show notes. But essentially, yeah, we sort of glossed over the fact that your iCloud data is encrypted.

It would be ridiculous if it was not. It's just that the key to decrypting it is held by Apple. So if they come to Apple and say, we need you to hand over the key, in those cases, Apple can hand over the key. They can be compelled to hand over the key because they have the key. Whereas with ADP, the key is on your device. Apple can say, we don't even have that key.

So we couldn't give it to you if we want to. And what's happened in the UK is they have said, we are not offering that service in the UK anymore. So it's a very good point from Mike that the key is, the data is not unencrypted. It's not just sitting in plain text on an Apple server. If someone were to breach into iCloud, they would also have to breach the key management as well.

i've heard people question well we're doing this to apple why aren't they doing this to google and google also they encrypt their data it's i believe they use aes-256 um at rest um type of encryption so it's the same thing they they control the keys so i guess theoretically the uk government could go to google to get the keys and unencrypted and that's probably why google has kind of come under the radar on these stories yeah

Yeah, Mohan and Anand Jr. had exactly that question. Why is Microsoft and Google not under the gun the way that Apple is? Microsoft and Google manage your key for you if you're a consumer. Now, if you're in the enterprise, you can sign up with either Google Cloud or Azure to do key management.

But in those cases, you're doing an API, you're doing a corporate contract. Microsoft and Google know exactly who you are. This isn't, you know, an anonymous user who bought a cell phone, you know, at the store, right? It's a big company. And so governments have a target they can go to to say, you know, we're going to subpoena the company to hand over the key in that case.

versus, well, there's a person who committed a crime and so we're going to go to Apple to get that person's data. They can do that with Google and Microsoft because of what Rob just said. Google and Microsoft for consumers manage the key for them. And again, they're secure. They're in...

security key management from Google and they're in Azure key management from Microsoft. And there's all kinds of security around the key management to keep intruders from getting your keys. But in those cases, Google and Microsoft, if served with a warrant or a subpoena, can't say they don't have the key. They do.

And we've also got some email from Benjamin, and he says, thanks for giving me such a great tech news and celebrated by buying a pair of mouse pads. You can adorn your desk by heading to DailyTechNewsShow.com slash store for your own DTNS swag. Oh, thank you, Benjamin, for the nice little note. That's great. Yeah. We were wondering who would buy the mouse pad first, and now we know it was Benjamin. That's awesome. Big thanks to you.

So big thanks to Michelle, to Mike, to Mohan, to Anand Jr. and Benjamin for contributing to today's show. Thank you for being along for Daily Tech News Show. It is made possible by our patrons at patreon.com slash DTNS. We could not do it without you. DTNS also has a live version called DTNS Live. You can watch that on YouTube and Twitch every day at 4 p.m. Eastern Monday through Friday or get it as a podcast. Find out all the details and more at dailytechnewsshow.com. Talk to you tomorrow.

The DTNS family of podcasts, helping each other understand. Diamond Club hopes you have enjoyed this program. Katherine Johnson plotting the path for America's first astronauts. Tim Berners-Lee and Vince Cerf creating the World Wide Web.

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