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There will be plenty of jokes. “Why is tonight different from all other nights,” the first of The Four Questions, will almost certainly serve as a laugh line in all but the most serious Seders this year. As for the plague — haven’t we had enough plague talk already?

For Jews across the world, Passover will serve as another attempted return to normalcy. There are few things in the calendar as reliably consistent as Passover, with its customs, prayers and extremely set menu.

Here in the States, Passover is the most commonly celebrated holiday among Jews. According to Pew, roughly 23% of the Jewish American population attend services monthly, while 70% say they attended a Seder a year prior. That the figure includes 42% of non-religious Jews is a testament to how transcendent the consistency and practice can be.

This year, however, things will be different. Because everything is different. It has been clear for some time now that this year’s holiday would be profoundly transformed by COVID-19, first through bans on social gatherings that made religious services an impossibility and ultimately due to international stay at home orders that are keeping many family members apart.

For Passover 2020 (or, 5780, depending on where you start counting), teleconferencing services — Zoom in particular — will have to do in a pinch.

“Judaism does not have a central governing body that can tell individuals or congregations how to respond in this crisis, and in Judaism’s very long relationship with technological development rabbis have almost always been playing catch-up to norms established by the Jewish public; even after the Industrial Revolution, rabbis were rarely the first to respond,” David Zvi Kalman, Fellow in Residence at Shalom Hartman Institute of North America told TechCrunch. “That being said, the religious questions that this pandemic raises are often about how a Jewish community is supposed to function, and so rabbis have an unusually large role to play in shaping the communal response.”

Late last month, a group of 14 orthodox rabbis signed a ruling declaring that families would be allowed to use teleconferencing technology to conduct Seders.

The document cited similar exceptions as those invoked during Shabbat, which otherwise has a blanket ban against the use of technology. “Just as it is permissible for a non-critical patient to receive treatment on Shabbat in order to cure him of illness, such is the case here,” the rabbis explained.

“We have made the decision, in these emergency situations, to knowingly put aside some of the restrictions regarding the use of electronics on Shabbat in order to stay spiritually connected even though we are physically separated,” New York-based Rabbi Rachel Ain told TechCrunch.

She has been among those leading congregations in services for much of the city’s stay at home order. “We have made the decision, in these emergency situations, to knowingly put aside some of the restrictions regarding the use of electronics on Shabbat in order to stay spiritually connected even though we are physically separated,” she add, explaining that the synagogue has explored a wide variety of different avenues.

When Passover begins tonight at sundown, Jews all over the world will be engaged in TeleSeders — most for the first time, including all of the trials, tribulations and novelty that brings. For many Christians, the event will also, perhaps, set an interesting precedent for the upcoming Easter holiday, as Trump’s earlier promises to end the shutdown ahead of then have become increasingly unrealistic.

Like so many aspects of our life, there’s a pervasive question of whether this will ultimately serve as a kind of new normal, going forward. The phrase “Next year in Jerusalem,” sung by many at the Seder’s end, will take on a special sort of diasporic resonance, as many are forced to remain at distance from friends and family.

“While I suspect that virtualized learning will be taken much more seriously after this crisis is over, I think a vast majority of Jews would prefer to attend prayer services in person (at least among those Jews who attend services at all),” Zvi Kalman tells TechCrunch. “A lot of rabbis are definitely worried about setting precedents for virtual community that will end up diminishing in-person gatherings. At the same time, this crisis is causing a lot of rabbis to take social isolation — which isn’t a problem specific to this pandemic — a lot more seriously.”

On Wednesday, two-time Democratic candidate Bernie Sanders announced that he would end his bid for the party’s nomination, marking an end to a deeply influential progressive political campaign.

“I cannot in good conscience continue to mount a campaign that cannot win and which would interfere with the important work required of all of us in this difficult hour,” Sanders said in a livestream Wednesday morning delivering the news. In states with remaining primaries, the former candidate will stay on the ballot in an effort to exert ongoing influence on the Democratic party as it moves toward nominating former Vice President Joe Biden.

“While this campaign is coming to an end, our movement is not,” Sanders said.

Sanders built momentum quickly in the 2020 race, with strong early showings in Iowa, New Hampshire, and Nevada, but his momentum was upended when Biden surged back in South Carolina in late February. With the remaining centrist candidates dropping out in quick succession just before Super Tuesday, a blitz of support recharged the lagging Biden campaign as Sanders struggled to build a winning coalition. After Super Tuesday, it became clear that the Sanders campaign was not driving record turnout among young voters, a critical metric for the campaign’s success.

More than any candidate, Sanders reshaped the Democratic race—and often the entire political conversation—pushing the party left with a tireless message of fair wages, universal health care, and financial reform. It’s not a stretch to argue that the policies core to the Sanders campaign could have provided some protection for the U.S. against the existential threat it’s facing now, with record unemployment, dangerous working conditions for hourly and gig workers, and uninsured Americans left out in the cold.

With Elizabeth Warren out of the race, Sanders appeared to pose the last major Democratic threat of sweeping reform to the tech industry, though some comments from Biden in January suggest otherwise. Over the last few years, the tech industry has faced intense scrutiny for its monopolistic tendencies, questionable labor practices, and the failure of social media platforms to prevent Russia from interfering in the 2016 U.S. election. While Republicans and Democrats largely agree that tech needs to be held responsible for its failings, their motivations and proposed reforms don’t always overlap.

Biden hasn’t suggested that regulating tech would be a central priority for his presidency, but he has stated that breaking up big tech is “something we should take a really hard look at” without making any firm commitment to do so. In January, Biden also said that he believed tech platforms should no longer be shielded by Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, a deeply controversial policy stance that could upend some of tech’s biggest businesses while causing a cascade of side-effects that could prove extremely consequential for a broad swath of the internet and its users. With Sanders out, Biden will likely be building out his policies with more clarity, and we’ll be following those developments closely.

Sanders’ exit from the 2020 race marks the end of an era, even if his ideals live on in future candidacies. From 2016 to 2020, no Democratic political figure exerted as much influence from the outside, completely transforming the national political conversation. And even out of the race, the leftmost wing of the party Sanders championed continues to wield influence as the 2020 race marches on—influence Biden would be smart to court to expand his support beyond the moderate coalition that paved his way to the nomination.

Facebook’s ad review system is failing to prevent coronavirus misinformation from being targeted at its users, according to an investigation by Consumer Reports.

The not-for-profit consumer advocacy organization set out to test Facebook’s system by setting up a page for a made-up organization, called the Self Preservation Society, and creating ads that contained false or deliberately misleading information about the coronavirus — including messaging that claimed (incorrectly) that people under 30 are “safe”, or that coronavirus is a “HOAX”.

Another of the bogus ads urged people to “stay healthy with SMALL daily doses” of bleach, per the report.

The upshot of the experiment? Facebook’s system waived all the ads through, apparently failing to spot any problems or potential harms. “Facebook approved them all,” writes Consumer Reports . “The advertisements remained scheduled for publication for more than a week without being flagged by Facebook.”

Of course the organization pulled the ads before they were published, saying it made certain no Facebook users were exposed to the false or misleading claims. But the test appears to expose how few barriers there are within Facebook’s current ad review system for picking up and preventing harmful ads targeting the coronavirus pandemic.

The only ad in the experiment Facebook rejected was flagged because of its image, per Consumer Reports — which says it had used a stock shot of a respirator-style face mask. After swapping the image for a “similar alternative” it says Facebook approved that too.

Last month, as part of its own business response to the threat posed by COVID-19, Facebook announced it was sending home all global content reviewers “until further notice” — saying it would be relying on more automated review as a consequence of this decision.

“As we rely more on our automated systems, we may make mistakes,” it wrote then.

Consumer Reports’ investigation highlights how serious those mistakes can be, as a result of Facebook’s decision to lean so heavily on AI moderation — given the company is waiving through clearly harmful messages that urge users to ignore public health advice to stay home and socially distance themselves, or even drink a harmful substance to stay “safe”.

In response to the Consumer Reports investigation Facebook defended itself — saying it has removed “millions” of listings for policy violations related to the coronavirus. Though it also conceded its enforcement around COVID-19 misinformation is far from perfect.

“While we’ve removed millions of ads and commerce listings for violating our policies related to COVID-19, we’re always working to improve our enforcement systems to prevent harmful misinformation related to this emergency from spreading on our services,” a Facebook spokesperson, Devon Kearns, told Consumer Reports.

A Facebook spokeswoman declined to specify how many humans it has working on ad review during the coronavirus crisis when we asked. Though the company told Consumer Reports it has a “few thousand” reviewers now able to work from home.

Back in 2018 Facebook reported having some 15,000 people employed doing content review.

It’s never been clear what proportion of those are focused on (user) content review vs ad review. But a “few thousand” vs 15k suggests there has likely been a very considerable drop in the number of eyeballs checking ads. (Pre-COVID, Facebook also liked to refer to having a safety and security team of over 35,000 people globally — with the 15k reviewers sitting within that.)

Facebook’s content review team has clearly shrunk considerably as a result of coronavirus-related disruption to its business. Though the company is refusing to come clean on exactly how many (few) people it has doing content review right now.

It’s also clear that the risk of harm from tools like Facebook’s ad platform — that can be used to easily and cheaply amplify damaging online disinformation — could hardly be higher than during a pandemic, when there is a pressing need for governments and health authorities to be able to communicate facts, official guidance and best practice to their populations to keep them safe.

Facebook’s platform becoming a conduit for false and/or maliciously misleading messaging risks undermining public health at a critical time.

Last month the company was also revealed to have blocked links to legitimate news and other websites that were sharing coronavirus-related content — following its switch to AI-led moderation.

While, in recent weeks, the company has faced criticism for failing to live up to a pledge to take down ads for coronavirus masks.

At the same time, Facebook’s platform remains a hotbed of user generated coronavirus-related misinformation — with individuals widely reported sharing posts that claim bogus home remedies such as gargling with salt water to kill the virus (it doesn’t) or playing down the seriousness of the COVID-19 pandemic by claiming it’s ‘just the flu’ (it’s not).

France’s health minister Olivier Véran and digital minister Cédric O have officially announced that the French government is working on a smartphone app to slow the spread of coronavirus. The government is putting a stamp of approval on the Pan-European Privacy-Preserving Proximity Tracing (PEPP-PT) project but remains cautious about what to expect from an app.

Using mobile apps to track the coronavirus is a sensitive issue in Europe. Dozens of nonprofit organizations have written a common statement urging governments to respect human rights.

They fear that governments could use this opportunity to enforce far-reaching surveillance measures that don’t comply with the regulatory framework and that remain in place after the coronavirus crisis. The European Commission reminded governments that they should implement “appropriate safeguards” as EU citizens are not going to trust contact-tracing apps if they don’t treat personal information appropriately.

That’s probably why the government is preventively trying to reassure people before releasing the Stop Covid app. According to a statement, the Ministry for the Digital Sector says that it is working with the Health Ministry, the Justice Ministry and the Ministry of Higher Education, Research and Innovation to coordinate tech-based initiatives.

Led by Germany’s Fraunhofer Heinrich Hertz Institute for telecoms (HHI), the PEPP-PT project that was unveiled last week is a coalition of dozens of research institutions across multiple countries. France’s INRIA is a member of the PEPP-PT and the French government is willing to collaborate with the INRIA as part of the PEPP-PT effort.

They’re working on an open standard to develop contact-tracing apps. Those apps would rely on Bluetooth Low Energy to identify other phones running the same app. If, at some point, you are near an infected person, you would be notified.

And the French government says that there will be an app specifically designed to track people living in France. That app will leverage the PEPP-PT protocol.

People in favor of contact-tracing apps say that it would help break infection chains if you combine those apps with proactive tests and self-isolations.

In an interview with Le Monde, Cédric O and Olivier Véran detailed the effort. France isn’t going to force you to install the app and Stop Covid is only going to use Bluetooth. A prototype is in the works, but it’s going to take three to six weeks to develop.

Even then, the French government might not even release the app. “We’re not sure that we can overcome all the technical difficulties because Bluetooth hasn’t been designed to measure the distance between individuals. We will decide later if it would be useful to roll out such an application or not,” Cédric O told Le Monde.

When it comes to privacy, Cédric O says the app will be open-source and France’s privacy watchdog the CNIL will have a say. We’ve reached out to the CNIL for comment but the agency said it was too early to comment.

More importantly, details are still thin on the implementation of the PEPP-PT protocol in France. Privacy experts are debating the design of the system. Some argue that it should be as decentralized as possible. Smartphones should keep a log of your social interactions (via ephemeral Bluetooth identifiers). Your phone would regularly fetch a list of infected ephemeral Bluetooth identifiers and do the heavy lifting.

The PEPP-PT project currently supports centralized and decentralized approaches, which means that governments have to decide on an implementation. In a centralized system, a server would assign each user an anonymized identifier and collect data about your social interactions. Each user would be able to fetch the status of its identifier to check whether they’ve been potentially infected or not. It creates a single point of failure and presents risks if someone is able to match anonymized identifiers with real names.

The Ministry for the Digital Sector also detailed how France is leveraging tech in general to understand the coronavirus outbreak, improve COVID-19 treatments and plan the end of the lockdown in France.

In addition to the app that is currently in the works, the French government has rolled out an official website to inform people, is encouraging telemedicine services to treat patients (such as Covidom from public hospitals in Paris), is mining aggregated data from telecom companies to understand how people move around the country and is leveraging machine learning on big data to forecast the coronavirus outbreak.

The CEO of Twitter and Square makes a major commitment to COVID-19 relief, Tesla shuts down its U.S. factories until May and PlayStation unveils its latest controller. Here’s your Daily Crunch for April 8, 2020.

1. Jack Dorsey creates $1B COVID-19 relief fund using Square equity

Jack Dorsey announced in a series of tweets that he is shifting $1 billion in his Square equity to create a fund dedicated to COVID-19 relief. The Twitter and Square CEO is calling the fund Start Small and posting a tally of disbursements and recipients in a public spreadsheet.

The first Start Small contribution listed is $100,000 to America’s Food Fund — an effort led by Leonardo DiCaprio and Laurene Powell Jobs dedicated to providing meals to vulnerable populations disrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic.

2. Tesla to cut salaries, furlough workers as COVID-19 shutdowns expected to last until May 4

Tesla will suspend production at its U.S. factories until at least May 4 due to the COVID-19 pandemic, prompting the company to cut pay for salaried employees between 10% and 30% and furlough workers, according to an internal email sent Tuesday night.

3. PlayStation 5’s new DualSense controller is a sleek and futuristic gaming accessory

Sony has revealed the design of the PlayStation 5‘s controller. It’s a follow-on to its popular DualShock line that takes on a new name for a new generation: DualSense. The DualSense controller is kitted out in black and white, and in some ways looks like a futuristic, plastic armor-plated robot companion more than a gamepad.

4. Netflix now lets you lock your personal profile with a PIN to keep kids (and roommates) out

Want to let your kids poke around Netflix without them wandering their way beyond the kids section? Got a roommate who keeps inexplicably forgetting to use their profile and is totally screwing up your “Continue Watching” list? This is good news for you.

5. Dear Sophie: Is unemployment considered a public benefit?

Here’s another edition of “Dear Sophie,” the advice column from Silicon Valley immigration attorney Sophie Alcorn. This time, she looks at whether getting unemployment benefits would hurt a green card petition — yours or your spouse’s — under the new public charge rule. (Extra Crunch membership required.)

6. Target’s Shipt shoppers walked off work

Yesterday, Shipt’s shoppers walked off work in protest of the way it has treated shoppers amid the COVID-19 pandemic. Iowa-based shopper Angie Kufner told TechCrunch, “Unless you get tested for COVID-19 or you’re half dead, Shipt’s not going to care.”

7. Borderlands 3 bridges the gap between citizen science and blockbuster games

Borderlands 3 publisher 2K and developer Gearbox Software is elevating the series’ latest game to lofty new ideals with a new in-game experience called Borderlands Science, a crowdsourced citizen science project that will leverage the hit game’s massive player base to conduct actual scientific research.

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.

Fintech startups were hot news before the COVID-19 era, but the pandemic hasn’t bumped the sector out of the headlines.

Companies that were pitching optimistic news a few weeks ago are now cutting staff. Others are facing a surge of users trying to find their financial footing in the face of uncertainty. Some fintech shops are sharing data by the heap, while others refuse to disburse even a morsel. 

And what about all those credit card startups?

As a startup category, fintech is in a complex spot as the global markets shed value. Small businesses hampered by shelter-in-place orders are scrambling for alternate capital sources and individuals are eager to secure their financial health.

It’s a time of utmost use — or uselessness — for fintech solutions.

To make sense of all the changes, we dug our teeth into several news stories. We also collected and peppered in fresh data from a host of startups in the space and mixed in commentary from investor Kyle Lui of DCM, a venture firm that invested in the recent (and successful) fintech IPO of Bill.com.

So here’s a brief, contentedly complete look at the world of fintech. We’ll start with who we know is struggling, move on to companies that are either quiet or unclear in their recent performance and we’ll close with some companies that are performing well in the odd world we find ourselves in.

Who is struggling?

The snap from rapid growth and layoffs was rapid for many players in the space. A number of firms that we’ve covered recently have rapidly seen their fortunes change.

Thrive, founded by Twitter alumni Deepak Rao and Siddarth Batra, wants to fund student expenses by looking at job offer letters as a way to evaluate loans. Today, it launched its loan platform and is accessible to students on over 400 campuses across 31 states.

The San Francisco company helps underfunded students, a group that isn’t typically accounted for by traditional financial institutions that issue loans based on credit score. According to co-founder Rao, Thrive is for people like “first generation Americans, people who come from low-income families, or first generation students.”

Before launching broadly, Thrive secured $10.25 million in funding and $5 million in venture debt. Today, the company also announced that it has picked up a $200 million credit line from Credit Suisse.

Investors include Max Levchin, founder of PayPal and Affirm, Adam Bain, former COO of Twitter, and David Sacks, a general partner at Craft Ventures.

“We started the company with the mission to invest in human potential,” Rao said. “We basically built a product that empowers underfunded students and gives them access to funds for whatever things they need in order to transition into their professional lives.”

The cash can be used flexibly for items like new laptops or flights home.

Students can sign up on the platform and upload an offer letter for an upcoming summer internship or full time college postgraduate offer. Thrive validates the document then offers a loan to the students.

For an internship, Thrive unlocks 25% of the student’s total internship salary for a loan. For a full-time job, Thrive will offer 25% of an individual’s first three months’ salary.

Thrive charges students between $7 to $15 per every $1,000 they receive per month, and they’re allowed to take as much as they need from the dollar amount that Thrive offers them. If you take $1,000 and your internship starts in three months, and if you want to pay it back in one go, you have to pay between $21 to $45 above the $1,000 when you pay it back.

Once students prove they’re soon going to be employed, they can access the funds within one business day and then start paying back Thrive once they start their new job.

Thrive’s payback structure is similar to the income-sharing format that a company like Lambda School uses. Lambda School says it gives students the option to pay zero dollars for tuition, and then pay 17% of their salary they earn from a job that pays a minimum of $50,000 annually for two years.

So while it’s not new to bet on salary, Thrive is looking at turning the concept of incoming sharing on its head and applying it to loan financing.

When they founded  the company in 2017, Rao and Batra were both classmates at Stanford and then co-workers at Twitter. Rao comes from a low income family, so he personally felt the blow of costs that come with being a grad student in the United States, from flying home to paying for your laptop. Or just even dinner.

Thrive declined to share specific financials or comment on profitability. Rao did say that the company is growing “5 times year over year” and has enough funds to avoid raising venture capital until the end of 2021.

“Our biggest expense is the ability to fund loans, and we are not funding loans through equity money,” Rao said. “At the end of the day, it’s like a software business, our biggest cost is the cost of goods, which is capital, and someone else is funding the capital.”

Not needing more venture capital might be especially helpful as we enter a time of economic uncertainty due to COVID-19. Unlike other fintech companies, which have had to harshen their underwriting standards to prepare for risk due to the uncertain economy, Rao tells TechCrunch that Thrive will not change how willing they are to write loans.

Some tech internships have been canceled due to COVID-19, he noted, and if students have had an offer rescinded, Thrive “updates the payment plan accordingly.”

“As long as your internship is still active, your offer is still issued,” he said. That doesn’t matter whether the intern will be remote or in-person.

Thrive is expanding its business as undergraduate and graduate students are entering a job market with historically high unemployment. We’ll see how a tough job market impacts a company that depends on offer letters for loans, and whether their bet on alternative financing pays off.

With more folks working at home than ever, and many on machines outside the purview of IT and security teams, it’s becoming increasingly imperative to find creative ways to protect them from harm. Today, Box announced it was adding automated malware detection tools to Box Shield, the security product it announced last year.

Aaron Levie, CEO at Box, says that it’s important to find new ways of thinking about security, especially with millions of people suddenly working at home using cloud solutions.

“As people have begun working from home in greater numbers, you’re seeing an increase in malware and phishing attacks. [Bad actors] are starting to spread these security vulnerabilities in a much more aggressive manner, and so we’re launching Box Shield with malware protection built-in with advanced tools and policies around that malware detection,” he said.

The company is taking a three-pronged approach with this solution. For starters, it will let users view a file without actually having to download it first, while indicating if there is a risk associated with it. Next, it will actually prevent users from downloading a file with malware attached, and finally it will alert the security team when a file with malware has been uploaded to Box.

The idea is to keep the file from infecting whatever device that employees are working on, alerting end users when there is a problem, while letting them see the content of the file gives them all the information they need to know if the file is actually legitimate in the first place.

It’s so much easier right now to be spreading this kind of malicious package with people working from home, and sharing files at a far greater rate than ever before. This new feature is designed to give everyone in the loop from the end user to the IT security team some confidence that they can know when files are infected or not and keep them from proliferating inside of Box.

Hello and welcome back to our regular morning look at private companies, public markets and the gray space in between.

So far, 2020 has proven to be a year of surprises and disappointments. Over the past month, we’ve seen companies like Toast go from raising huge new rounds this year at heightened valuations to layoffs in mere months. TripActions is another example. Indeed, BounceX went from a rebrand and an announcement that it had reached $100 million ARR earlier this year to layoffs as well.

TechCrunch has been talking to VCs, founders and all sorts of folks to figure out what they are seeing in the market as we race to learn more about venture and startups in the COVID-19 era. To further that goal, this morning we’re going to run a survey of surveys, looking at sentiment and performance data collected by valuation shop Preferred Return, NFX, a venture firm, and 500 Startups, a startup accelerator and investing group.

As a bit of a spoiler, there aren’t too many smiles ahead. But march forward we must.

Rewinding the clock