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In response to the COVID-10 outbreak, Hulu is adding a free, live news stream to its app for customers who only subscribe to its on-demand service, not its live TV add-on. The news coverage is provided in partnership with ABC News Live, and brings live news 24/7 to Hulu on-demand subscribers as part of their existing subscription.

This includes those who pay for Hulu alone as well as those who pay for the newer Disney+/Hulu/ESPN+ bundle subscription, the company noted. And it will be available to both tiers of Hulu’s on-demand service, including the ad-supported and Hulu’s No Ads plan.

The live stream will also be featured in the “Hulu Picks” section for easy access and will be available across living room and mobile devices, as well as popular game consoles.

Hulu Live TV customers, meanwhile, already have a number of live TV news channels they can watch as a part of their subscription. But Hulu’s on-demand service is far larger, with 27.2 million paid subscribers, compared with just 3.2 million for Live TV.

Health organizations and political leaders have urged Americans to get their news from trusted sources during the COVID-19 crisis — not from social media, where misinformation spreads more quickly than tech companies can moderate or remove. (When and if they try to do so.)

Meanwhile, the uncertainty around the coronavirus outbreak has led to a significant number of online rumors, hoaxes, conspiracy theories, and snake oil cures. Earlier this week, for example, a fake news report of a national quarantine spread so quickly that the National Security Council had to post a statement to assure Americans the news was untrue.

The addition of live news for Hulu arrives at a time when a growing number of U.S. consumers have cut the cord with traditional pay TV or chose to never sign up in the first place. In Hulu’s case, the company says close to half its customers fall into one of those two buckets.

“More than 45 percent of Hulu viewers have either cut the cord or never had cable, and may not have access to live, televised news to receive critical information during times of national crisis,” the company said, in an announcement. “With this live stream, we aim to keep our viewers informed during this unprecedented time when having access to information is vital to our communities,” Hulu said.

In addition, fewer U.S. consumers today subscribe to a daily newspaper than in generations prior. Instead, much of our “TV viewing” is now taking place in on-demand apps like Netflix and Hulu, and our news is gathered in bits and pieces online.

Hulu isn’t the first streaming provider to add free live news to its service as a result of the COVID-19 outbreak. This week, Sling TV launched free streaming that included live news from ABC News Live, as well.

Of course, you don’t need to be a Hulu subscriber to watch ABC News Live. The news service streams online and through the ABC News app for free. But integration into major streaming apps like Hulu will make the service more accessible and more visible, as it won’t require people to seek out a separate app just to watch.

In a career spanning several decades, artificial intelligence researcher and professor Stuart Russell has contributed extensive knowledge on the subject, including foundational textbooks. He joined us onstage at TC Sessions: Robotics + AI to discuss the threat he perceives from AI, and his book, which proposes a novel solution.

Russell’s thesis, which he develops in “Human Compatible: Artificial Intelligence and the Problem of Control,” is that the field of AI has been developed on the false premise that we can successfully define the goals toward which these systems work, and the result is that the more powerful they are, the worse they are capable of. No one really thinks a paperclip-making AI will consume the Earth to maximize production, but a crime-prevention algorithm could very easily take badly constructed data and objectives and turn them into recommendations that cause real harm.

The solution, Russell suggests, is to create systems that aren’t so sure of themselves — essentially, knowing what they don’t or can’t know and looking to humans to find out.

The interview has been lightly edited. My remarks, though largely irrelevant, are retained for context.

TechCrunch: Well, thanks for joining us here today. You’ve written a book. Congratulations on it. In fact, you’ve actually, you’ve been an AI researcher and author, teacher for a long time. You’ve seen this, the field of AI sort of graduated from a niche field that academics were working in to a global priority in private industry. But I was a little surprised by the thesis of your book; do you really think that the current approach to AI is sort of fundamentally mistaken?

Stuart Russell: So let me take you back a bit, to even before I started doing AI. So, Alan Turing, who, as you all know, is the father of computer science — that’s why we’re here — he wrote a very famous paper in 1950 called “Computing Machinery and Mind,” that’s where the Turing test comes from. He laid out a lot of different subfields of AI, he proposed that we would need to use machine learning to create sufficiently intelligent programs.

Robocalls have been targeting the vulnerable and unsuspecting for years, so it’s no surprise that the scumbags would take advantage of the current global catastrophe to enhance their scams. The FCC warns that it has received numerous reports of coronavirus-related robocall cons in the wild — here’s what to look for.

While previous robocall scams threatened IRS penalties or promised free vacations, the new ones are using both pandemic-related and personal information to make what could for some be a pretty convincing pitch. Here are a few common scams the FCC has been alerted to:

• Warnings of national quarantine or martial law —  these could be trying to get you to order something or just part of a coordinated disinformation campaign
• Messages purporting to be from the WHO or charities asking for money
• Offers of free virus test kits —  some of these are targeting individuals with diabetes specifically, offering a free blood sugar monitor as well
• Offering HVAC cleaning or upgrades to protect against the virus
• Promotions of various bogus products and treatments for the virus
• Asking for information to confirm a check from the government — the process for this if it happens will not be a random text message

The FCC post has some examples, including audio, of some of these scams in case you’re wondering what it might sound like to receive a malicious HVAC solicitation.

As a general robocall rule, unknown numbers — especially from your home area code — are a red flag. Let them go to message and you can always listen later. If it’s a local business saying your order’s ready or a hospital reminding you of your appointment, they’ll say so.

Anyone asking for personal or payment info over phone, text, or email is almost certainly a scammer. There is almost never any need to share this information insecurely.

Links in text messages from unknown or suspicious numbers are never to be touched. They may lead to being hacked or tracked via means hosted on the web.

Stay safe out there and let’s hope the upcoming regulatory framework aimed at combating robocalls does the trick.

As society comes to grips with the growing worldwide crisis related to the COVID-19 virus, many companies are stepping up in different ways. Today, two major tech companies — Amazon and IBM — each announced programs to encourage developers find solutions to a variety of problems related to the pandemic.

For starters, AWS, Amazon’s cloud arm, announced the AWS Diagnostic Development Initiative. It has set aside $20 million, which it will distribute in the form of AWS credits and technical support. The program is designed to assist and encourage teams working on COVID-19 diagnostic issues with the goal of developing better diagnostic tooling.

“In our Amazon Web Services (AWS) business, one area where we have heard an urgent need is in the research and development of diagnostics, which consist of rapid, accurate detection and testing of COVID-19. Better diagnostics will help accelerate treatment and containment, and in time, shorten the course of this epidemic,” Teresa Carlson wrote in the company’s Day One blog today.

The program aims to help customers who are working on building diagnostics solutions to bring products to market more quickly, and also encouraging teams to work together who are working on related problems.

The company also announced, it was forming an advisory group made up of scientists and health policy experts to assist companies involved with initiative.

Meanwhile IBM is refocusing its 2020 Call for Code Global Challenge developer contest on not only solving problem related to global climate change, which was this year’s original charter, but also solving issues around the growing virus crisis by building open source tooling.

“In a very short period of time, COVID-19 has revealed the limits of the systems we take for granted. The 2020 Call for Code Global Challenge will arm you with resources […] to build open source technology solutions that address three main COVID-19 areas: crisis communication during an emergency, ways to improve remote learning, and how to inspire cooperative local communities,” the company wrote in a blog post.

All of these areas are being taxed as more people are forced to stay in-doors as we to try and contain the virus. The company hopes to incentivize developers working on these issues to help solve some of these problems.

During a time of extreme social and economic upheaval when all aspects of society are being affected, businesses, academia and governments need to work together to solve a myriad of problems related to the virus. These are just a couple examples of that.

Spotify is opening up its podcast catalog to third-party apps. The company this week launched a new version of its Podcast APIs that makes it possible for third-party apps to connect to Spotify in order to manage a user’s podcast library, search its podcast catalog, and fetch detailed information and podcast shows and episodes, the company says.

The launch is significant as it taps into the wider developer community to help Spotify grow its podcast user base. More importantly, it offers access to Spotify’s exclusive shows outside of Spotify’s own app for the first time.

Spotify, like many streaming providers, has begun to use the term “podcast” loosely. To Spotify, the name simply means an audio program, presented in an episodic format. But originally, the word was meant to refer to audio episodes made available over the web using the open format RSS.

Apple’s own Podcasts app, despite its majority market share, never changed what a podcast was by putting select shows behind some sort of paywall, membership or paid subscription.

But Spotify (and other newcomers like Luminary), have done exactly this. In Spotify’s case, it acquired technology startups designed to help people create and manage their podcasts, as well as a number of podcast networks — including The Ringer, Gimlet, and Parcast — which put out some of the industry’s top shows. The investments in the podcast-streaming side of Spotify’s business helped boost podcast listening on its service by 200% last year and have paved the way for the company to generate additional revenue through better-targeted ads. 

Today, many of Spotify’s 700,000 some podcasts are exclusive to its service. That means if you want to listen to them, you have to join Spotify.

Unfortunately for podcast listeners, it also means you had to use the Spotify app to stream these shows, instead of your otherwise preferred third-party podcast app like Overcast, Pocket Casts, Breaker, Castro, or the many others that fill the app stores.

Spotify new podcast APIs don’t change this, sadly.

Instead, the new API is focused on podcast discovery, search and managing shows — not on streaming Spotify’s podcasts, exclusives, or originals through a third-party app experience.

Spotify anticipates the new features available now will be useful to apps that import shows to a user’s Spotify library, or for integrations with calendar apps, or social podcasting experiences to help Spotify users share what they’re listening to with their friends.

“Launching this podcast API is very meaningful for Spotify right now as we continue to delve deeper into creating value in new ways for listeners with podcasting,” the company wrote in its announcement. “We are excited to unleash the creative power of the developer community and allow the expansion of Spotify into areas we’ve yet to explore,” it said.

Prior to the launch of its new podcast API, Spotify worked with a select group of partners who were building out their external integrations in order to gain feedback. Spotify made some revisions to the design of the API and improved the developer onboarding experience as a result. However, the company says it plans to continue to work closely on the project over the next six months to refine it further as its more broadly available.

Further down the road, it expects to highlight new apps on its developer website.

Satellite operator OneWeb has confirmed that its workforce has been reduced via layoffs, after TechCrunch learned that it reduced its workforce by as much as 10 percent this week. The company did not confirm the total size of the layoff, but provided a statement to TechCrunch regarding the current state of its operations, and citing cost that it deemed necessary in light of the ongoing global coronavirus pandemic and resulting economic turmoil.

A OneWeb spokesperson provided this statement, provided in full, regarding the situation:

The OneWeb launch is going ahead on Saturday with more launches planned later in the year; however, like others, we are impacted by the global health and economic crisis and we need to dynamically adjust our workforce. Unfortunately, we think it is inevitable that there will be delays to our launch schedule and satellite manufacturing due to increasing travel restrictions and the disruption of supply chains globally. Therefore, we made the difficult decision to make eliminate some roles and responsibilities as we work to focus on core operations.  We are sorry to have had to take this step and we’re doing everything we can to support those affected.

This follows a report from Thursday by Bloomberg that OneWeb, which has nearly $3 billion in investment from SoftBank over its past two rounds, is considering filing for bankruptcy protection as one possible way to deal with a crunch in its available cash. Some of the highest flying SoftBank-backed startups have faced challenges lately, precipitated in part by the high-profile reversal of co-working startup WeWork’s fortunes. OneWeb did not comment on the reported bankruptcy consideration.

Bloomberg’s report says that it is looking at other options beyond a formal bankruptcy filing to stay afloat, but the company faces big challenges in terms of operating costs. As noted in its statement to TechCrunch, OneWeb has a launch scheduled for Saturday, which will take 34 of its satellites to space aboard a Soyuz rocket taking off from Kazakhstan. That will put its total constellation at 74 satellites, including a batch of 34 that were earlier this year, and six that went up last March.

OneWeb aims to provide high-bandwidth communication services using low Earth orbit satellites, with a focus on rural and other areas that are hard-to-reach for terrestrial networks. It faces competition from companies including SpaceX, which has launched 302 Starlink satellites for its own network to date, and Amazon, which has yet to launch any spacecraft, but is planning a similar offering under its own Project Kuiper.

Google announced on Twitter today that it was canceling its annual I/O developer conference out of concern for the health and safety of all involved. It will not be holding any online conference in its place either.

“Out of concern for the health and safety of our developers, employees, and local communities — and in line with recent “shelter in place” orders by the local Bay Area counties — we sadly will not be holding I/O in any capacity this year,” the company tweeted.

This is not a small deal as Google uses this, and the Google Cloud Next conference, which it has also canceled, to let developers, customers, partners and other interested parties know about what new features, products and services they will be introducing in the coming year.

Without a major venue to announce these new tools, it will be harder for the company to get the word out about them or gain the power of human networking that these conferences provide. All of that is taking a backseat this year over concerns about the virus.

The company made clear that it does not intend to reschedule these events in person or in a virtual capacity at all this year, and will look for other ways to inform the community of changes, updates and new services in the coming months.

“Right now, the most important thing all of us can do is focus our attention on helping people with the new challenges we all face. Please know that we remain committed to finding other ways to share platform updates with you through our developer blogs and community forums,” the company wrote.

There are nearly 2,000 corporate venture capital (CVC) firms in existence, many hundreds of them created by first-time investors, according to Global Corporate Venturing.

As GCV also reports, last year alone, CVCs raised $41 billion in investment funds, mostly from their corporate parents.

Given Merck Global Health Innovation Fund’s (Merck GHIF) track record, I’m often asked as a long-time successful CVC investor to describe the business strategies used to ensure our scale and staying power. Merck GHIF is the digital health corporate venture capital arm of pharmaceutical giant Merck & Co. Merck GHIF was founded in 2010 with an initial allocation of $125 million. Today it’s a $500 million evergreen fund, and we’ve invested $800 million in more than 50 companies to date.

The four key strategies

No. 1: Developed an independent LLC with a defined investment charter

From the beginning, we set up an independent business structure with a well-defined investment charter. We created our investment model, strategy and expectations to ensure strategic and financial balance. As a seasoned corporate VC leader coming from Johnson & Johnson, I knew that there was not a corporate parent who says it’s okay to lose money. I knew that if we lost money as a fund, we’d be out of business.

Rivian, the buzzy electric vehicle startup that is backed up Amazon and Ford, is shutting down all of its facilities due to the spread of COVID-19, the disease caused by coronavirus.

Rivian employs more than 2,000 workers across several locations, including its headquarters in Plymouth, Michigan, a factory in Normal, Ill. as well as operations in San Jose and Irvine, Calif., where engineers are working on autonomous vehicle technology. Rivian also has an office in the U.K.

The company said Friday that salaried and hourly employees will continue to be paid during the shutdown. Rivian told TechCrunch that most of its facilities have been at 2 to 5% occupancy for about a week. The length of the shutdown is undetermined at this time, a company spokesperson said.

Rivian spent the majority of its life in the shadows until November 2018 when it revealed its all-electric R1T pickup and R1S SUV at the LA Auto Show. Since then, the electric automaker has picked up investors and commercial customers such as Ford and Amazon, in addition to the reservations consumers have made for its pickup and SUV.

In December, Rivian announced it had raised $1.3 billion in new funding, the fourth round of capital announced by the company in 2019 alone. It followed prior announcements of $700 million led by Amazon, $500 million from Ford (which includes a collaboration on electric vehicle technology) and $350 million from Cox Automotive.

Lincoln, the luxury brand under Ford, is working with Rivian to develop an “all-new” electric vehicle. Amazon has ordered 100,000 all-electric delivery vans from Rivian, with the first deliveries expected to begin in 2021.

The global COVID-29 pandemic has prompted automakers to temporarily suspend operations in Europe and the U.S., where the disease has started to spread. In China, where the disease first started, factories are coming back online.

Automakers have had varied responses to the pandemic; some took action to suspend production faster than others. Honda kicked off closures in the U.S. Ford, GM and FCA followed after the Big 3 formed a task force with the United Auto Workers. Even as these automakers began implementing new safety precautions in its factories based on recommendations that came out of the task force, the UAW continued to pressure them to close. A couple of cases of employees testing positive for COVID-19 accelerated the closures. Nissan and Volkswagen have also paused operations in the U.S.

Tesla has been a notable hold out. The company announced Thursday it would shut down its Fremont, Calif. factory, beginning March 23. The decision to suspend production there came days after Alameda County officials issued an order to close all nonessential businesses. Tesla kept its doors open anyway, even after officials publicly said that it was not an essential business.

Tesla has suspended operations at its New York factory as well. Tesla’s gigafactory near Reno, Nevada, which produces electric motors and battery packs, is fully operational.

Tesla told employees in an email sent March 18, and viewed by TechCrunch, that it was staying open because it has had “conflicting guidance from different levels of government” over whether it could operate. The human resources department told employees in the email to come to work if their job is to produce, service, deliver or test its electric vehicle

But by Thursday, and after meetings with county officials, the company announced it would suspend production. Some basic operations that will support Tesla’s  charging infrastructure and what it describes as its “vehicle and energy services operations” will continue at the factory, which under normal circumstances has more than 10,000 people working there.

During two of this week’s White House briefings, President Trump referred specifically to two potential treatments that have been identified by medical researchers and clinicians, and that have undergone various degrees of investigation and testing in the ongoing fight against the global coronavirus pandemic. It’s important to note upfront that regardless of what you may have heard, from Trump or any other sources, no drugs or treatments have been proven as effective for either the prevention of contracting COVID-19, or for its treatment.

That said, a number of different clinical studies are currently in progress all over the world, and in the U.S., the National Institutes of Health is looking to fill a 400-volunteer study that will provide clinical results related to use of remdesivir, an antiviral drug developed by Gilead originally as a treatment for Ebola, but it’s still only in clinical trials even for treatment of that disease. This study could also add in other drug candidates as additional test therapies. Meanwhile, studies in China and France have examined the effectiveness of anti-malarial drugs including chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine – including one small-scale study that suggests the positive effects of hydroxycholoroquine in reducing both the duration and symptoms of COVID-19 in combination with an antibiotic called azithromycin.

The important thing to keep in mind when considering these or any other potential treatments for the novel coronavirus, which is still relatively young, is that a lot of what we know about them so far is effectively anecdotal, and based not on the kind of scientifically rigours controlled clinical studies that are normally used in the years-long development and certification of drugs. Instead, treatments like remdesivir and chloroquine/hydroxychloroquine are being deployed in the field by healthcare practitioners based on their approved use in similar (but crucially not the same) situations, like the Ebola and SARS outbreaks.

Often, they’re being used under what’s called ‘compassionate’ grounds in the U.S. This effectively amounts to employing a drug that’s not yet certified for general use in treatment of a patient whose condition is so severe that a doctor is willing to go to desperate lengths to try to alleviate their symptoms. This has the advantage of sidestepping typical testing and approval procedures, and requiring that the results of its use are documented, which contributes to the overall body of clinical knowledge in terms of its effects and interactions with patients and with COVID-19.

It’s not a clinical study, however, and that means there are still a lot of unknowns when it comes to its use that just can’t be learned or asserted based on scattered, individual instances of compassionate care treatment.

“As the Commissioner of FDA and the President mentioned yesterday, we’re trying to strike a balance between making something with the potential of an effect available to the American people, at the same time that we do it under the auspices of a protocol that would give us information to determine if it’s truly safe and truly effective,” explained National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Dr. Anthony Fauci during a press conference on Friday. “But the information that you’re referring to specifically is anecdotal, it was not done in a controlled clinical trial. So you really can’t make any definitive statement about it.”

During Thursday’s White House coronavirus pandemic task force briefing, Trump made false claims that chloroquine was already approved by the FDA as a treatment for COVID-19 under an emergency authorization. FDA Director Dr. Stephen Hahn clarified that this and remdesivir were being considered and studied by the FDA, as was an approach that would use plasma extracted from patients who’d recovered from COVID-19 as a potential source of antibodies for others. Still, all of these are still quite far away from clinical deployment in any generally approved way.

Meanwhile, Fauci’s cautions should be taken for what they are: Warnings that are primarily meant to emphasize that the reasons the FDA requires clinical studies, even for drugs already tentatively approved for use in other cases, is because it has patient health and safety in mind. While chloroquine has been used for decades to treat malaria, and chronic rheumatoid arthritis, it can have dangerous side effects, including death, if taken incorrectly. Even when taken correctly, it can cause things like stomach distress, and even permanent damage to a person’s vision.

Fauci’s comments Friday explain the risks of putting too much stock in any potential treatment at this stage, even if they are showing promising results among small or even medium-sized deployments.

“You’ve got to be careful when you say fairly effective, it was never done in a clinical trial that compared it to anything,” he said in answer to a reporter’s question about chloroquine’s efficacy in treating SARS. “It was given to individuals and felt that maybe it worked […] Whenever you do a clinical trial, you do standard of care, versus standard of care plus the agent you’re evaluating. That’s the reason why we showed back in Ebola why particular interventions worked.”

A summary survey of various prospective treatments and their current status was published today In Medscape, and this includes the current state of remdesivir and chloroquine investigations, as well as a number of other drugs being studied by researchers. As has been reported here and elsewhere, there are promising signs that they could prove effective in either treatment, or treatment and even preventative use (in the case of remedesivir), but these are, as Dr. Fauci puts it, only the first step that should lead to more sophisticated clinical studies, which themselves will then need competing peer studies to eventually prove out.