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Apple finally delivered more details on its gaming subscription program Apple Arcade.

The ad-free gaming service will launch September 19 for $4.99 per month with a one-month free trial.

Users will access the service via a dedicated Arcade tab in the App Store. The company reiterated that the service will boast “more than 100 ground-breaking exclusive games,” also noting that new titles will be added every month.

Arcade titles are playable on iPhone, iPad, Mac and AppleTV. Though, Apple maintained that the additions will be cross-genre, it’s apparent that the emphasis is on more snack-able titles rather desktop class epics.

Apple has partnered with some high-profile studios like Konami, Square Enix and Capcom. We saw a few demos which all seemed very mobile-friendly.

Coinbase is announcing a new initiative called the USDC Bootstrap Fund. As the name suggests, the company wants to support developers with a fund composed of USDC tokens.

DeFi, or Decentralized Finance, is a recent trend in the blockchain space. DeFi projects are traditional financial products that you’d expect from a traditional bank, such as lending protocols and derivatives, built on top of a blockchain.

Thanks to the decentralized nature of these protocols, it’s harder to censor them and more people should theoretically be able to access those services.

Going back to Coinbase, the company thinks there’s not enough liquidity for some DeFi protocols. The startup wants to improve that by investing USDC directly in DeFi protocols. Those investments are smart contracts, and returns should be provided by a counterparty, such as a borrower or taker.

In other words, it’ll become much easier to borrow USDC using some DeFi protocols as Coinbase is providing a pool of USDC tokens. Counterparties will have to provide crypto collateral and pay some interest rate.

Coinbase is also announcing its first two investments through the USDC Bootstrap Fund. The company is handing 1 million in USDC to Compound, and 1 million in USDC to dYdX.

Last week, users around the world found Wikipedia down after the online, crowdsourced encyclopedia became the target of a massive, sustained DDoS attack — one that it is still actively fighting several days later (even though the site is now back up). Now, in a coincidental twist of timing, Wikipedia’s parent, the Wikimedia Foundation, is announcing a donation aimed at helping the group better cope with situations just like this: Craig Newmark Philanthropies, a charity funded by the Craigslist founder, is giving $2.5 million to Wikimedia to help it improve its security.

The gift would have been in the works before the security breach last week, and it underscores a persistent paradox. The non-profit is considered to be one of the 10 most popular sites on the web, with people from some 1 billion different devices accessing it each month, with upwards of 18 billion visits in that period (the latter figure is from 2016 so likely now higher). Wikipedia is used as reference point by millions every day to get the facts on everything from Apple to Zynga, mushrooms and Myanmar history, and as a wiki, it was built from the start for interactivity.

But in this day and age when anything is game for malicious hackers, it’s an easy target, sitting out in the open and generally lacking in the kinds of funds that private companies and other for-profit entities have to protect themselves from security breaches. Alongside networks of volunteers who put in free time to contribute security work to Wikimedia, the  organization only had two people on its security staff two years ago — one of them part-time.

That has been getting fixed, very gradually, by John Bennett, the Wikimedia Foundation’s Director of Security who joined the organization in January 2018, and told TechCrunch in an interview that he’s been working on a more cenrtralised and coherent system, bringing on more staff to help build both tools to combat nefarious activity both on the site and on Wikimedia’s systems; and crucially, put policies in place to help prevent breaches in the future.

“We’ve lived in this bubble of ‘no one is out to get us,'” he said of the general goodwill that surrounds not-for-profit, public organizations like the Wikimedia Foundation. “But we’re definitely seeing that change. We have skilled and determined attackers wishing to do harm to us. So we’re very grateful for this gift to bolster our efforts.

“We weren’t a sitting duck before the breach last week, with a lot of security capabilities built up. But this gift will help improve our posture and build upon on what we started and have been building these last two years.”

The security team collaborates with other parts of the organization to handle some of the more pointed issues. He notes that Wikimedia uses a lot of machine learning that has been developed to monitor pages for vandalism, and an anti-harassment team also works alongside them. (Newmark’s contribution today, in fact, is not the first donation he’s made to the organization. In the past he has donated around $2 million towards various projects including the Community Health Initiative, the anti-harassment program; and the more general Wikimedia Endowment).

The security breach that caused the DDoS is currently being responded to by the site reliability engineering team, who are still engaged and monitoring the situation, and Bennett declined to comment more on that.

You can support Wikipedia and Wikimedia, too.

Service mesh is just beginning to take hold in the cloud native world, and as it does, vendors are looking for ways to help customers understand it. One way to simplify the complexity of dealing with the growing number of service mesh products out there is to package it as a service. Today, HashiCorp announced a new service on Azure to address that need, building it into the Consul product.

HashiCorp co-founder and CTO Armon Dadgar says it’s a fully managed service. “We’ve partnered closely with Microsoft to offer a native Consul [service mesh] service. At the highest level, the goal here is, how do we make it basically push button,” Dadgar told TechCrunch.

He adds that there is extremely tight integration in terms of billing and permissions, as well other management functions, as you would expect with a managed service in the public cloud. Brendan Burns, one of the original Kubernetes developers, who is now a distinguished engineer at Microsoft, says the HashiCorp solution really strips away a lot of the complexity associated with running a service mesh.

“In this case, HashiCorp is using some integration into the Azure control plane to run Consul for you. So you just consume the service mesh. You don’t have to worry about the operations of the service mesh, Burns said. He added, “This is really turning it into a service instead of a do-it-yourself exercise.”

Service meshes are tools used in conjunction with containers and Kubernetes in a dynamic cloud native environment to help micro services communicate and interoperate with one another. There is a growing number of them including Istio, Envoy and Linkerd jockeying for position right now.

Burns makes it clear that while Microsoft is working closely with HashiCorp on this project, it’s also working with other vendors, as well. “Our goal with the service mesh interface specification was really to let a lot of partners be successful on the platform. You know, there’s a bunch of different service meshes. It’s a place where we feel like there’s a lot of evolution and experimentation happening, so we want to make sure that our customers can can find the right solution for them,” Burns explained.

HashiCorp Consul is currently in private Beta.

Volta Charging, the San Francisco-based company that combines outdoor digital advertising with charging stations to give electric vehicle owners free power, has added another $20 million in a follow-on to its Series C round.

The company’s Series C round is now closed at $100 million. Schneider Electric Ventures, SK Innovation, Energize Ventures and a number of existing partners participated in the follow-on Series C round. Volta Charging also borrowed $44 million from Energy Impact Partners and CION.

Volta raised $35 million in 2018 in a round led by the Invenergy Future Fund, the technology investment arm of renewable energy project developer Invenergy, and Activate Capital.

Volta, which launched in 2010, partners with businesses and real estate owners to install EV chargers in high-traffic areas such as grocery stores, entertainment venues and shopping centers. Instead of charging EV owners, the power is provided for free. Volta makes money on the outdoor advertising that is a centerpiece of the charger design.

More than 45 million free electric miles have been given to EV drivers to date, the company said.

The company’s first charging stations popped up in Hawaii. Since then, Volta has expanded to San Diego, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Silicon Valley in California as well as Chicago and its suburbs, Phoenix, and Dallas and Houston.

The funds will be used to expand the company’s network of free, advertiser sponsored charging stations. Volta is focused on adding more chargers to cities where it already has a presence as well as moving into new markets.

“As the electric vehicle industry continues to grow, Volta is well-positioned to build out an economically viable charging network needed to facilitate the shift from gas to electric,” Volta CEO and founder said Scott Mercer said in a statement. “We continue to rapidly scale our business to meet the growing demands of drivers, real estate partners and sponsors. This capital injection will accelerate our mission of mainstreaming electric vehicles.”

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.

1. Payments giant Stripe debuts a credit card in its latest step into the financing fray

Following the launch of its money-lending program Stripe Capital, the company is unveiling the Stripe Corporate Card, a Visa card open to businesses incorporated in the United States.

Those businesses can use the card without worrying about interest rates or fees — Stripe’s Cristina Cordova said the company expects to have “fewer problems” with this, particularly because participants will be approved based on their revenue in the Stripe platform.

2. Jack Ma officially retires as Alibaba’s chairman

Ma is handing the role over to the company’s current CEO, Daniel Zhang. The transition was announced a year ago.

3. Watch Apple unveil the new iPhone live right here

The event starts at 10am Pacific!

A customer exits the drive-thru lane at a McDonald’s Corp. fast food restaurant in Shepherdsville, Kentucky, U.S., on Monday, Jan. 14, 2019. Photographer: Luke Sharrett/Bloomberg via Getty Images

4. McDonald’s acquires Apprente to bring voice technology to drive-thrus

The company has already been testing Apprente’s technology in select locations, creating voice-activated drive-thrus (along with robot fryers) that it said will offer “faster, simpler and more accurate order taking.”

5. Facebook tightens policies around self-harm and suicide

Facebook will no longer allow graphic cutting images, which can unintentionally promote or trigger self-harm.

6. Why am I seeing this ad? AI, ML & human error in advertising

Adboy founder Adam Zelcer investigates why he’s being served irrelevant ads. (Extra Crunch membership required.)

7. The CEO of Naspers — one of the world’s most powerful and lowest-flying investment firms — is coming to Disrupt

Naspers CEO Bob van Dijk is joining us to talk about the process of spinning out a new holding company called Prosus NV. We’ll also ask about how the company thinks about new investments, including how it views different sectors and different geographies.

Mozilla today announced that it is bringing back the Firefox Test Pilot program to allow users to try out new features before they are ready for mainstream usage. While the name is familiar, though, the overall goals of the new program are a bit different from the last iteration and the focus is less on crazy experiments and more on beta testing products that are almost ready for public consumption.

The first new project in the Test Pilot program is the beta of the Firefox Private Network VPN service, which is now available in the U.S. for Firefox desktop users.

The Firefox Test Pilot program has gone through its share of iterations. First launched three years ago, it quickly became the incubation ground for a number of new features. In January of this year, though, the organization decided to shut it down.

Why bring it back now? Clearly, Mozilla was getting valuable feedback from the Test Pilot users, who were surely among the most dedicated Firefox fans.

The organization says that it wanted to take time to evolve the program and this new version is indeed somewhat different. “The difference with the newly relaunched Test Pilot program is that these products and services may be outside the Firefox browser, and we will be far more polished, and just one step shy of general public release,” the team explains.

The new Test Pilot program then is less about giving users the opportunity to test some of the Firefox team’s more eccentric ideas and more like a traditional public beta test program.

The new VPN project, the team writes, is a good example of this approach. It’s a Test Pilot project because the team wants to fine-tune it a bit more before its public release.

The Firefox Private Network isn’t so much about trying to circumvent geo-restrictions and instead mostly focuses on giving users access to a private network when they are on public WiFi and helping them hide their locations from website and ad trackers (and indeed, a lot of the new Test Pilot projects will focus on privacy). That’s probably why Mozilla doesn’t refer to it as a VPN either, though that’s obviously what it is.

“One of the key learnings from recent events is that there is growing demand for privacy features,” Mozilla’s Marissa Wood writes today. “The Firefox Private Network is an extension which provides a secure, encrypted path to the web to protect your connection and your personal information anywhere and everywhere you use your Firefox browser.”

Mozilla is partnering with Cloudflare for this launch and Cloudflare is providing the proxy server for it. It’s available as a Firefox extension, but only in the U.S. and fore Firefox desktop users. For now, it’s available for free, though there have been some hints that Mozilla will at some point start charging for the service. Since it’s not a full VPN service, it remains to be seen how much the organization will be able to charge for it. Last year, Mozilla partnered with ProtonVPN and offered that service for $10 per month.

It’s worth noting that Opera, too, includes a free built-in VPN service, which includes the ability to set your location to either the Americas, Europe or Asia.

If you want to give the new service a try, you only need a Firefox account and sign up here.

Mitsubishi Heavy Industries’s Launch Services division is all set to send a crucial cargo payload to the International Space Station from JAXA today. The launch is scheduled for 6:33 AM Japan Standard Time (5:33 PM ET/2:33 PM PT), and will take off from Tanegashima Island, at JAXA’s Tanegashima Space Center.

The rocket used for this launch is the Mitsubishi Heavy Industries (MHI) H-IIB, and this is the eighth flight launch of the H-11 Transfer Vehicle (HTV) that MHI designed and built in Japan.

In the H-IIB configuration, the MHI-built rocket that will transport he HTV includes a liquid propellant central core, along with four solid propellant rocket boosters to give it additional life capacity. This particular mission will see the HTV loaded with 5.3 metric tons (just under six U.S. tons) of supplies for the ISS on board in both pressurized and unpressurized cargo containers which divvy up the total capacity.

One of the crucial pieces of cargo going up is a small satellite deployment device called ‘Kibo’ created by the Kyushu Institute of Technology and the National Authority for Remote Sensing and Space Science. It’ll be used to deploy a range of super compact ‘CubeSats’ also on board, including a propulsion tech demo create by the University of Tokyo and startup Space BD, which is the first company awarded a contract by JAXA to be the commercial operator for deploying smallsats from the ISS via Kibo.

NASA TV will be carrying the launch live via the stream above, with their coverage kicking off around 5 PM ET (2 PM PT/6 AM JST).

The US government is awake to the remarkable innovation coming the startup scene in many deep tech categories, and the response has been diverse efforts across many government agencies and departments to support select startups with non-dilutive financial backing, technology sharing, fast-track procurement and even start-up competitions with cash prizes.

Space is one of those deep tech categories, and at we’re delighted to announce that Steve Isakowitz, CEO of Aerospace Corporation, is joining us on the Extra Crunch stage at Disrupt SF (Oct. 2-4) stage to discuss how Aerospace Corp sees the rapidly emerging space startup scene. Aerospace Corp is not all that widely known outside space circles, but its 59-year-old R&D legacy is remarkable. Based in El Segundo, California, the non-profit works with the US Air Force and other government space programs to identify emerging technologies from the commercial sector that could apply to future space programs. Examples of core space technologies include communications and spacecraft materials with an increased focus on cloud computing, data analytics, additive manufacturing, cyber security, and AI and robotics technologies.

Isakowitz was formerly CTO of Virgin, where he managed the company’s space launch program, and before that was CFO of the Department of Energy and an administrator at NASA, where he worked on space transportation and government-industry partnerships. He graduated from MIT, where he received his bachelors and masters in aerospace engineering.

We will talk on stage about how startups can take advantage of government funding initiatives, particularly in harder tech areas like space, satellites, defense, and health, as well as talk about what’s next in the space industry.

We’re amped for this conversation, and we can’t wait to see you there! Buy tickets to Disrupt SF here at an early-bird rate!

Did you know Extra Crunch annual members get 20% off all TechCrunch event tickets? Head over here to get your annual pass, and then email extracrunch@techcrunch.com to get your 20% discount. Please note that it can take up to 24 hours to issue the discount code.

Cloud Dataproc is probably one of the lesser-known products in Google Cloud’s portfolio, but it’s a powerful tool for data wranglers who are looking for a fully managed cloud service that lets them run Apache Spark and Hadoop clusters without having to worry about managing the underlying infrastructure. Today. Google announced that it is launching the alpha of Cloud Dataproc to Kubernetes — and while that, too, may not sound all that interesting at first, it’s an important step for Google Cloud as it works to adapt more of its products to a hybrid cloud model.

The general idea here is to give enterprise customers (and make no mistake, enterprise customers are the main focus of Google Cloud these days) the ability to run Apache Spark jobs on Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) clusters. With products like Anthos now making GKE available virtually anywhere, this means customers can now also take Cloud Dataproc to their own data centers. Right now, the service only supports Apache Spark, but Google plans to support other open-source projects, too.

“Enterprises are increasingly looking for products and services that support data processing across multiple locations and platforms,” said Matt Aslett, Research Vice President at 451 Research. “The launch of Cloud Dataproc on Kubernetes is significant in that it provides customers with a single control plane for deploying and managing Apache Spark jobs on Google Kubernetes Engine in both public cloud and on-premises environments.”

Typically, Spark applications run on Hadoop YARN clusters. Google notes that the Cloud Dataproc on Kubernetes will free users from having to use two cluster management systems and will give them a single view across both YARN and Kubernetes clusters. “Supporting both YARN and Kubernetes can bring your enterprise the needed flexibility to modernize certain hybrid workloads while continuing to monitor YARN-based workloads,” the company writes in today’s announcement.

The new service is now available as an alpha. If you want to give it a try, you’ll have to apply for access by emailing Google.