Year: 2020

Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health has released updated projections of when we can expect U.S. case numbers of COVID-19 infections to peak and decline, based on different levels of social distancing measures. The updated projects, which take into account the most recent information, show that with around a 30 percent decrease in social contact we could be nearing a national peak of new cases for now by the end of April – but that if you decrease social contact by just 20 percent, the picture changes drastically, with a late peak that extends into mid-May and grows the number of new daily cases to as many as 30,000.

The Columbia projections are used to advise the White House Coronavirus Task Force, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), New York City and many other governments across the U.S. These updated projections also note that while we may hit a peak in the coming days, that also means that hospital and ICU capacity will be at their max in the same period. Again, Columbia researchers note, too, that this info doesn’t take into account local variances in when peaks arrive, and that some areas could have different peaks at different times even with a consistent 30 percent social contact reduction.

The model developed by the Columbia research team includes transmission and fatality numbers, movement by populations across city and state lines, and information like the capacity of emergency field hospitals, all info that was not available when the original modelling was done. You can take a look at the interactive graphs and daily estimates resulting from the model yourself here via Columbia’s website.

This is one of a number of recent updated projections from public health experts, epidemiologists and medical researchers that predict the impact of a relaxation of social distancing measures now could have disastrous consequences in terms of prolonging and worsening the spread of COVID-19, and also on taxing healthcare resources (not to mention frontline workers).

MIT also projected a similar impact from the relaxation of measures currently in place, predicting an “exponential explosion” would result. Meanwhile, some states are already implementing such restriction relaxations, despite consensus from informed experts and researchers indicating it’s too early to begin such rollbacks.

The tech industry (and the world at large) is not experiencing temporary anxiety — the uncertainty we’re all coping with is the new normal.

Sudden shifts in behavior have made some startups targeting slow-moving, old-school industries more relevant than they could have imagined, such as those in telehealth, distance learning and remote work. Most, however are seeing massive decreases in revenue, forcing them to cut costs and even lay off teams to slash burn rates. Other startups simply won’t be here in three to six months.

Cowboy Ventures founder and managing partner Aileen Lee, who coined the term “unicorn,” says tech companies going through scenario planning need to begin thinking long-term.

“We’ve spent the last month scenario planning with our portfolio companies, and in most cases, we’ll have conversations about what these scenarios can include,” said Lee. “And when we look at the planning around those scenarios, they often don’t feel conservative enough. Most entrepreneurs are optimists, and we are, too! But it seems safer to have more conservative plans [and start expecting] that this is going to impact us for longer and be worse than we expected.”

Lee and Cowboy Ventures partner Ted Wang joined TechCrunch on Tuesday for our first episode of Extra Crunch Live, a virtual speaker series for Extra Crunch members. In a live Q&A that included questions from myself and the Extra Crunch audience, Wang and Lee covered a wide range of topics, including PPP loans, advice for business leaders around layoffs, the right time to seek funding and the right firms from which to seek that funding, how to pitch during a downturn and which sectors in particular Cowboy is interested in financing right now.

You can check out the best insights from the call, or catch up on the full conversation via the YouTube embed below.

We have several outstanding guests, including Charles Hudson, Mitch and Freada Kapor, Mark Cuban, Roelof Botha, Hunter Walk and Kirsten Green, joining us on Extra Crunch Live over the next few weeks. Sign up for Extra Crunch to get access to all of them.

SpaceX CEO and founder Elon Musk said on Twitter on Wednesday that the cause of the failure of a single Merlin engine during the most recent Starlink launch (which didn’t prevent the launch from ultimately succeeding at its mission) was the result of an undetected, “small amount” of a learning fluid that ignited during the flight.

The SpaceX Falcon 9 vehicle uses nine Merlin engines on its first-stage, and can still operate successfully in case one stops working. One did stop working during the ascent phase of the Starlink mission that took place on March 18. The engine failure didn’t affect the subsequent deployment of 60 Starlink satellites, which went as planned, but it did prompt an investigation into the cause by SpaceX, which was joined by NASA ahead of the commercial crew flight that will carry NASA astronauts for the first time using a Falcon 9 on May 27.

Musk said the cause of the Merlin failure was a “[s]mall amount of isopropyl alcohol (cleaning fluid) [that] was trapped in a sensor dead leg & ignited in flight.” Isopropyl alcohol is a common cleaning and disinfectant agent used in sterile environments, and is also available over the counter as rubbing alcohol for consumer use. Based on Musk’s explanation, it sounds like some was accidentally trapped in the sensor housing for a pressure valve in the Merlin’s fluid systems, and then it caught fire when the engine was ignited. That likely wasn’t enough to damage engine, but told the sensor that heat levels were exceeding acceptable limits and caused a shutdown.

Based on the fact that NASA and SpaceX have since announced an official date for their Commercial Crew Demo-2 mission, it seems very likely that the agency was satisfied with this investigation and the cause that SpaceX identified. The issue seems relatively easy to mitigate in future through post-cleaning checks, and even in the off chance of a similar reoccurrence, the redundancy built into SpaceX’s Falcon 9 engine system seems very likely to be able to ensure continued successful operation of the spacecraft.

Earlier this week, Facebook confirmed that it had begun pulling down select COVID-19 protests, citing violations of State-enforced social distancing. The social media giant was attempting a sort of diplomacy noting that all rallies/protests would be assessed on a case by case basis, and crosschecked with local government.

CNET today noted that Eventbrite has begun taking a similar approach, citing violations of both  social distancing policy, as well as its own site guidelines. The news specifically covers a “Freedom” rally set for Ottawa on May 2, which, like a number of recent events across the U.S., is aimed at pushing authorities to reopen business, in spite of nearly universal warnings from health care officials.

In a statement offered to TechCrunch, the site is also quick to note that the actions being taken are not new, but rather in accordance with existing rules,

We ticket millions of events a year and strive to ensure our community has a safe and positive experience using Eventbrite. Our Community Guidelines have always prohibited events that promote or contain harmful and/or illegal behavior, and events in locations that violate the current government-issued social distancing and shelter in place mandates during this global pandemic are deemed as such. Our community plays an essential role in reporting any concerning listings or content and when we become aware of content on our platform that’s in violation of our Community Guidelines, we investigate and take appropriate action. The COVID-19 global pandemic is a very dynamic situation, and any action we take will vary based on the local guidelines.

Like Facebook before it, Eventbrite appears to be taking action while attempting to avoid taking sides. The motivation for blocking events that break safety guidelines and could have massive repercussions for public healths is clear. Though the current battle being waged by protesters is one that pits economic normalcy against the potential of mass death.

Apple will patch a newly discovered iPhone vulnerability that security researchers say hackers have already used to steal data from their victims’ devices.

News of the vulnerability dropped Wednesday by security firm ZecOps. Zuk Avraham, the company’s chief executive, said the firm found the bug last year during a routine investigation. At least six organizations were targeted by attackers as far back as 2018, he said.

Avraham said the bug is in the iPhone’s default Mail app. By sending a specially crafted email to the victim’s device, an attacker can overrun the device’s memory, allowing the attacker to remotely run malicious code to steal data from the device, he said.

Worse, the bug doesn’t require any user interaction on the latest version of iOS 13, said Avraham.

The bug dates back to iOS 6, which was first released in 2012. Avraham later confirmed in a tweet that macOS, which also comes with an in-built Mail app, is not vulnerable.

iPhone vulnerabilities are some of the most valuable bugs for hackers because they are so difficult to find. Some buyers will snap up these highly sought after bug for as much as $1 million. But because these more sophisticated bugs are so valuable, they are typically only ever obtained by well-resourced threat actors, such as governments. These exploits are often used against their targets, such as criminals or terrorists, in highly precise operations. But some governments are also known to target certain ethnic groups, activists, and journalists.

To wit, Avraham said in his blog post that the targets of this attack included staff at a U.S.-based Fortune 500 company and a journalist in Europe. Avraham also did not name the apparent hackers but said that at least one of the attackers was likely a nation state.

When reached, an Apple spokesperson did not immediately comment. Motherboard, which first reported the story, said the bug has been fixed in a beta version of the software, and a fix will be rolled out in an upcoming update.

Until then, high-risk users should disable the Mail app for now.

Facebook today is introducing another feature aimed at making it easier to see who’s behind the posts published across Facebook and Instagram. The company says it will now display the location of the Facebook Page or Instagram account with a large audience on every post it shares, so end users have a better understanding of how reliable or authentic the accounts may be. While the feature is described as one designed for overall increased transparency, it will initially launch only in the U.S.

That means Facebook will display the location information for Facebook Pages and Instagram accounts that are based outside the U.S., but that reach large audiences located primarily in the U.S.

The move is the latest attempt to crack down on outside influence on U.S. politics and elections, following the revelation that Russia-backed content reached as many as 126 million Americans on Facebook’s platform during and after the 2016 presidential election.

That led Facebook to implement several new processes around Pages and political ad transparency in the years since.

In August 2018, for example, it implemented a new measure for securing Facebook Pages with large U.S. followings in order to make it more difficult for people to administer a Page using a fake or compromised account. This process involved having Facebook Page managers secure their accounts and verify their location. By December 2018, this “People Who Manage This Page” section had rolled out to all Facebook Pages with a large audience.

Facebook last year made this section easier to find by adding it to the Home tab on every Page and expanded the feature to those who managed Pages with large audiences in India, Indonesia, and the EU, as well.

Similar authentication and verification tools were also rolled out to Instagram in 2018.

The new feature arriving today is an expansion on those earlier efforts, as it will display the location of the Page or Instagram Account directly beneath their Page or Account name on the posts they share. This will read “Poster based in…” followed by their country on posts published on Facebook and “Based in…” on those published to Instagram.

Users will also be able to access an informational pop-up about the Page or Account which further explains that the person or account who posted this content and many of its followers are based in different locations. The message will also state that Facebook or Instagram is providing this information because some accounts attempt to mislead people about where they’re based.

This is a significant change compared with providing this location information somewhere more buried on the Facebook Page or profile, where it can be easily overlooked. And because it follows the account as the post is shared, it could cut down on the viral re-sharing of misleading information.

However useful, this feature will only be the latest volley in an ongoing war with often state-sponsored propaganda bot networks aimed at misleading Americans. As Facebook’s systems evolve, so will the bot networks’ tactics. They’ll find new ways to fake their location as being U.S.-based…or simply being based outside of Russia. In fact, Russian trolls had already outsourced some of their propaganda efforts to Africa, a recent investigation found. And the battle will continue.

Facebook says it’s piloting the new location transparency feature in the U.S. now and is exploring ways to bring this transparency to more places on Facebook Pages and Instagram Profiles.

It’s launch day for yet another batch of Starlink satellites, which will bring the total launched by SpaceX to 422. With each launch, there’s renewed discussion around the impact the growing constellation of low Earth orbit small satellites has on night-sky visibility and scientific research, and SpaceX has said it’s making changes to attempt to address those concerns. Now, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has provided some more detail about some of the latest measures his company is taking to minimize Starlink’s impact on nighttime sky observation.

In response to a question about why the Starlink satellites have seemed to be even more visible and brighter in recent weeks, prompting many reports of them being spotted by more individuals, Musk said that this was due to the angle of the satellites’ solar panels during their orbital raise and parking maneuvers, and said that a fix is being deployed to address this “now.”

All satellites will also be equipped with “sunshades” starting with the ninth Starlink launch, which is still three launches away from the one that’s happening later today – Starlink 6. These will be made from “a special dark foam that’s extremely radio transparent,” which is important for the constellation’s main purpose of transmitting broadband internet connectivity to ground stations for use by customers on Earth.

SpaceX had previously discussed testing painting the Earth-facing side of Starlink satellites black in order to cut down their reflectivity, but this foam approach sounds like an additional measure that could go further. Ultimately, SpaceX anticipates launching many thousands of these small satellites, so it’s unlikely that the controversy around their impact on scientific observation is going anywhere soon, unless some of these measures really do significantly alter their nighttime visibility.

A year ago, back in the days of in-person conferences, Google officially announced the launch of its Anthos multi-cloud application modernization platform at its Cloud Next conference. The promise of Anthos was always that it would allow enterprises to write their applications once, package them into containers and then manage their multi-cloud deployments across GCP, AWS, Azure and their on-prem data centers.

Until now, support for AWS and Azure was only available in preview, but today, the company is making support for AWS and on-premises generally available. Microsoft Azure support remains in preview, though.

“As an AWS customer now, or a GCP customer, or a multi-cloud customer, […] you can now run Anthos on those environments in a consistent way, so you don’t have to learn any proprietary APIs and be locked in,” Eyal Manor, the VP of engineering in charge of Anthos, told me. “And for the first time, we enable the portability between different infrastructure environments as opposed to what has happened in the past where you were locked into a set of API’s.”

Manor stressed that Anthos was designed to be multi-cloud from day one. As for why AWS support is launching ahead of Azure, Manor said that there was simply more demand for it. “We surveyed the customers and they said, hey, we want, in addition to GCP, we want AWS,” he said. But support for Azure will come later this year and the company already has a number of preview customers for it. In addition, Anthos will also come to bare metal servers in the future.

Looking even further ahead, Manor also noted that better support for machine learning workloads in on the way. Many businesses, after all, want to be able to update and run their models right where their data resides, no matter what cloud that may be. There, too, the promise of Anthos is that developers can write the application once and then run it anywhere.

“I think a lot of the initial response and excitement was from the developer audiences,” Jennifer Lin, Google Cloud’s VP of product management, told me. “Eric Brewer had led a white paper that we did to say that a lot of the Anthos architecture sort of decouples the developer and the operator stakeholder concerns. There hadn’t been a multi-cloud shared software architecture where we could do that and still drive emerging and existing applications with a common shared software stack.”

She also noted that a lot of Google Cloud’s ecosystem partners endorsed the overall Anthos architecture early on because they, too, wanted to be able to write once and run anywhere — and so do their customers.

Plaid is one of the launch partners for these new capabilities. “Our customers rely on us to be always available and as a result we have very high reliability requirements,” said Naohiko Takemura, Plaid’s head of engineering. “We pursued a multi-cloud strategy to ensure redundancy for our critical KARTE service. Google Cloud’s Anthos works seamlessly across GCP and our other cloud providers preventing any business disruption. Thanks to Anthos, we prevent vendor lock-in, avoid managing cloud-specific infrastructure, and our developers are not constrained by cloud providers.”

With this release, Google Cloud is also bringing deeper support for virtual machines to Anthos, as well as improved policy and configuration management.

Over the next few months, the Anthos Service Mesh will also add support for applications that run in traditional virtual machines. As Lin told me, “a lot of this is is about driving better agility and talking the complexity out of it so that we have abstractions that work across any environment, whether it’s legacy or new or on-prem or AWS or GCP.”

Facebook makes a $5.7 billion investment in Reliance Jio, Netflix’s latest quarter was even better than expected and Patreon lays off 30 employees.

Here’s your Daily Crunch for April 22, 2020. (And happy Earth Day!)

1. Facebook invests $5.7B in India’s Reliance Jio

As China’s fast-growing ByteDance (owner of TikTok) emerges as a formidable competitor in what has become the world’s second largest internet market, Facebook has found the horse it wants to bet on in the new decade.

The social media giant announced today it has invested $5.7 billion for a 9.99% stake in India’s Reliance Jio Platforms — a three-and-a-half-year-old subsidiary of Reliance Industries, the biggest telecom operator in the country. Facebook said it will focus on collaborating with Jio to create “new ways for people and businesses to operate more effectively in the growing digital economy.”

2. Netflix beats growth predictions with 15.77M net new subscribers

Before the COVID-19 crisis, Netflix had forecast 7 million net new paid subscribers for its Q1 earnings. With the dramatically changed landscape, growth was obviously going to beat the forecast, but the quarter came in at more than double expectations, with 15.77 million paid net additions. That brings Netflix’s total paid subscriber count to 182.86 million.

3. Patreon lays off 13% of workforce

Patreon, which enables creators to build relationships with their fans via monthly subscriptions for content in exchange for perks and other benefits, had seen an uptick in new creators launching on the platform in light of the COVID-19 pandemic. At the same time, the company said it saw patrons exiting the platform more than usual due to financial hardships.

4. Snap surges on earnings revenue beat and Q1 user gains

Daily active users reached 229 million in the first-quarter, representing a 20% year-over-year gain, higher than the 224.5 million users that had been expected. Another interesting tidbit from the earnings release was the 35% year-over-year growth in daily time spent watching content in Discover.

5. Dear Sophie: How can we support our immigrant colleagues during layoffs?

An entrepreneur writes in to lawyer Sophie Alcorn asking how to support an immigrant co-founder and employee as they wind down their startup. (Extra Crunch membership required.)

6. Senate passes new $484 billion relief bill to replenish small business loans, fund hospitals and testing

The focal point of the new legislation is the $310 billion it will allocate to the Paycheck Protection Program. That program was beset by problems from the outset, with a huge portion of small business owners failing to secure the forgivable loans through banks even with prompt applications in the program’s earliest moments.

7. Epic Games launches Fortnite on the Google Play Store, and they’re not happy about it

When Fortnite launched on mobile in 2018, Epic Games very notably sidestepped the Google Play Store and pushed users to download the title directly from their website, an effort made to avoid the substantial revenue cuts that Google takes from in-app purchases of Play Store downloads.

The Daily Crunch is TechCrunch’s roundup of our biggest and most important stories. If you’d like to get this delivered to your inbox every day at around 9am Pacific, you can subscribe here.

Two months ago, seemingly out of nowhere, CrowdStrike’s co-founder Dmitri Alperovitch decided it was time to depart.

Alperovitch, who served as the cybersecurity giant’s chief technology office since its 2011 debut, said he was leaving to launch a non-profit policy accelerator. CrowdStrike named Michael Sentonas, who managed the firm’s tech strategy for three years, as his replacement.

The news came at a critical time for the maker and seller of subscription-based endpoint security software that protects against breaches and cyberattacks. The company’s stock was in recovery after it fell below its IPO price, just months after popping 90% on its first day on the public market. It was one of the biggest offerings of the year, reaching more than $11 billion in value by the end, a far cry from a decade earlier when the security giant started out as a few notes scribbled on a napkin in a hotel lobby.

And then the pandemic happened.

By the time of his appointment, Sentonas was preparing to move to the U.S. from his native Australia, but “that hasn’t been the easiest thing to work through,” he told TechCrunch in a recent call. Despite having to balance the time difference and often swapping days with nights, the newly-appointed chief technology officer says it’s largely been “business as usual” for CrowdStrike.

Here’s why.

This interview was edited for clarity and length.

TechCrunch: Two months ago, you were appointed chief technology officer at CrowdStrike. Prior to that you were vice president of tech strategy. How have things been since the promotion?

Michael Sentonas: In some respects, things have been business as usual. A lot of the work I was doing around tech strategy and longer-term vision about [what] we should be working on hasn’t changed for me. Obviously, when one of the co-founders moves on, they have big shoes to fill. So, I’ve inherited a larger team. It’s working with the team around what can I assist them with to help us continue to focus. Probably the biggest change is just being stuck here because of what’s going on around the world and just adjusting to largely covering a U.S. timezone from Australia, which isn’t easy.

That can’t be easy?

We’re a globally-spread and globally-diverse organization. The last statistic that I looked at a few weeks ago was that 70% of our staff logins are remote. I’m dealing with Europe and the U.S., that’s just the way we’re spread. It’s all around the world.