iPhone X takes on Pixel 2 in camera shootout (The 3:59, Ep. 323)

[MUSIC] Welcome to the 3:59. I'm Roger Cheng. I'm Alfred Ng. It's a royal rumble smartphone cameras. C|net pitted the iPhone X against Pixel 2 in a camera shootout. And while the Pixel has an edge in sharpness the iPhone photos tend to come out a little bit warmer. So it really kind of is basically your preference. If you like warmer photos it's probably better for portrait mode or for portrait photos in general. The, speaking portrait mode, the Pixel 2 offered a pretty strong option despite the fact that it only uses one lens. But when it comes to a telephoto lens and actually zooming to 2X, obviously the iPhone X with its second lens wins. But they're surprisingly close. Right? Yeah, I think it comes down to what you take your photos of the most. Yep. If you're a person who likes to travel a lot and takes pictures of the landscape around you, look at this beautiful site, I think the Pixel 2 wins it in that scenario because there is a lot more for you to play with there's just more that you can capture in the lens. But I think if you're the type of person that likes taking photos of people. Yep. The iPhone X wins out in that scenario where your Instagram feed is full of Look at this person and look at this person that I met. Right, or in my wife's case just photos of my kid. Yeah, exactly, so yeah. I think it depends on the type of photographer that you are. I am pretty impressed that the Pixel 2 is able to do [UNKNOWN] with one lens on the portrait mode. Cuz it's really effective. And the people The people there on the focus really pop from this. Look at that. Yeah, I'm a big fan of that. I think it makes a lot more sense to focus on to make the software better than it does to stack it with hardware. Makes it cheaper for everyone involved if you think about it. Right, speaking of which, you can get the base line pixel too. You don't have to get the super sized version. Has this feature whereas if you really want the best camera you have to get the iPhone 8+ or the iPhone X or ten. That's already right there a premium that you have to pay for for the best camera features. So next up the NSA is Dealing with yet another breach, Alfred, whats the lowdown on this? Alright, so essentially, a researcher from upguard or security company had discovered an Amazon web service server that had no password on it, holding up more than 100 gigabytes of NSA data. It had come from A branch of the NSA called INSCOM, which is essentially Intelligence Security Command. Yep. Which is their joint effort with the US Military. It basically had red disk on it, which was an old program from 2013 that the military spent $93M on. It was basically A program that tagged, had drove strike footages and satellite images of people and just basically commands going back and forth on it. Right. And this was all publicly available on this website. Yeah. The researcher Chris Vicary he basically just did a scan for, he finds a lot of these open AWS servers. And he found this one from the NSA. Stop. I want to focus on that. By the way I want to give a shout out to Zack Whitaker and ZDNet who got the scoop on this. The AWS, like I feel like I've seen a lot of reports about this. AWS storage servers that are un-encrypted and a lot of this information gets leaked out that way. Why aren't people just encrypting this stuff? Yes, so when I asked the researcher about this, he brought up a good point where on a lot of these buckets, so on these servers, sometimes you need it to not have a password if you are trying to share it with Then your organization, or if you're trying to point to it from another web service that is protect. If I'm trying to use my program to run based off of this, but my program can't get the password without it. To be fair though, in this scenario, when I spoke to Chris about this specific server, he basically said that there is no reason that it didn't need [UNKNOWN]. Yeah, So this is- It should have been- This is human error. This is humans being stupid. Yes, all right. Last week, Google's working on a security feature that can keep strangers from glancing over your shoulder and looking at your phone. Called it electronic screen protector and it uses AI, of course, cuz everything uses AI now. The facial recognition alerts you if someone is looking at your screen. Alfred, you're disappointed in this? I'm not a fan of this. To be fair, I would hate it if someone was looking over my shoulders at my phone, so I am a hypocrite for this. You're a bit of a lurker. I don't know. That's my favorite thing to do when I'm bored on the train is looking over stuff. If someone has their phone it's like, that's cool. This guy has lunch in an hour. All right, well as for For what it's worth, I think it's cool and I kinda wanna see this. Unfortunately it's still a feature that's being worked on so we're hoping that it'll come to Android soon. For these stories and more check us out on CNET. I'm Roger Chang. I'm Alfred Yang. Thanks for listening. [MUSIC]