Monday, March 30, 2020
Microsoft Says Skype Users Surge 70 Percent Amid Coronavirus Outbreak
Microsoft Is Replacing Office 365 With Microsoft 365
India's internet curbs in Kashmir hamper coronavirus fight
Money Heist, Extraction, The Departed, and More on Netflix in April
All IITs told to give plans for combating Covid-19 in two days
Shutdown has given time to organize resources, tech: K Vijay Raghavan, Principal Scientific Advisor
Tokyo-based Kyash, which provides digital banking services to individual consumers as well as businesses, raises $45M Series C, bringing total raised to $73M (Pavel Alpeyev/Bloomberg)
Tokyo-based Kyash, which provides digital banking services to individual consumers as well as businesses, raises $45M Series C, bringing total raised to $73M — - Online services aim to take on far larger traditional lenders — Kyash Inc., a Tokyo-based digital banking startup …
Deferring credit card, personal loan payments may cost more
Instacart says worker strike had "no impact" on its operations and that its workforce has seen 40% earnings rise in the past month compared to the month prior (Shirin Ghaffary/Vox)
Instacart says worker strike had “no impact” on its operations and that its workforce has seen 40% earnings rise in the past month compared to the month prior — Why workers at Instacart, Whole Foods, and Amazon are walking off the job in protest.
Amazon confirms that it fired a worker, who led the Staten Island warehouse strike, for violating its quarantine measures; worker says firing was in retaliation (Bloomberg)
Amazon confirms that it fired a worker, who led the Staten Island warehouse strike, for violating its quarantine measures; worker says firing was in retaliation — - Worker Chris Smalls says labor activism led to his dismissal — Amazon says Smalls violated safety conditions, quarantine
Los Angeles-based challenger bank HMBradley officially opens its virtual doors
The Los Angeles-based digital challenger bank, HMBradley, opened its virtual doors to the public today, allowing the thousands of waitlisted would-be users to set up direct deposits and collect their sign-up bonuses.
The company is offering banking customers an up to 3% return on their savings based on the percentage they save of their quarterly deposits.
HMBradley also set up a new feature which allows users to save towards specific goals.
Backed by PayPal founder Max Levchin’s HVF Labs, along with Walkabout Ventures, Mucker Capital, Index Ventures, and Accomplice, to the tune of $3.5 million, HMBradley was designed to benefit savers, the company said.
Account holders with balances up to $100,000 can receive up to 3% annual percentage yields on their accounts. These account holders qualify by receiving one direct deposit and saving at least 5% of the total amount deposited in an account monthly.
HMBradley accounts are held through Hatch Bank, which is FDIC insured.
To qualify for the 3 percent rate, customers need to save over 20 percent of their income, account holders who save between 15 percent and 20 percent receive 2 percent of their cash per year, and those saving less than 15 percent but more than ten percent receive a 1 percent APY.
“We want to empower and protect every consumer financially to show them that a bank can be on their side, regardless of how much money they make,” said Zach Bruhnke, co-founder and CEO of HMBradley, in a statement.
Account holders have access to 55,000 fee-free ATMs around the country, mobile check deposit and around-the-clock support, the company said.
The company’s MasterCard comes with all of the standard features including zero liability protection and an ability to set up travel, fraud alerts, and cancel cards all through an online portal, the company said.
New York's AG sent a letter to Zoom expressing concern over security vulnerabilities and privacy practices as more users conduct sensitive tasks on the service (New York Times)
New York's AG sent a letter to Zoom expressing concern over security vulnerabilities and privacy practices as more users conduct sensitive tasks on the service — As the videoconferencing platform's popularity has surged, Zoom has scrambled to address a series of data privacy and security problems.
Facebook deletes Brazil President’s coronavirus misinfo post
Facebook has diverted from its policy of not fact-checking politicians in order to prevent the spread of potentially harmful coronavirus misinformation from Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro. Facebook made the decisive choice to remove a video shared by Bolsonaro on Sunday where he claimed that “hydroxychloroquine is working in all places.” That’s despite the drug still undergoing testing to determine its effectiveness for treating COVID-19, which researchers and health authorities have not confirmed.
“We remove content on Facebook and Instagram that violates our Community Standards, which do not allow misinformation that could lead to physical harm” a Facebook spokesperson told TechCrunch. Facebook specifically prohibits false claims regarding cure, treatments, the availability of essential services, and the location or intensity of contagion outbreaks.
BBC News Brazil first reported the takedown today in Portuguese. In the removed video, Bolsonaro had been speaking to a street vendor, and the President claimed “They want to work”, in contrast to the World Health Organization’s recommendation that people practice social distancing. He followed up that “That medicine there, hydroxychloroquine, is working in all places.”
If people wrongly believe there’s an widely-effective treatment for COVID-19, they may be more reckless about going out in public, attending work, or refusing to stay in isolation. That could cause the virus to spread more quickly, defeat efforts to flatten the curve, and overrun health care systems.
This why Twitter removed two of Bolsonaro’s tweets on Sunday, as well as one from Rudy Giuliani, in order to stop the distribution of misinformation. But to date, Facebook has generally avoided acting as an arbiter of truth regarding the veracity of claims by politicians. It notoriously refuses to send blatant misinformation in political ads, including those from Donald Trump, to fact-checkers.
Last week, though, Facebook laid out that COVID-19 misinformation “that could contribute to imminent physical harm” would be directly and immediately removed as it’s done about other outbreaks since 2018, while less urgent conspiracy theories that don’t lead straight to physical harm are sent to fact-checkers that can then have the Facebook reach of those posts demoted.
Now the question is whether Facebook would be willing to apply this enforcement to Trump, who’s been criticized for spreading misinformation about the severity of the outbreak, potential treatments, and the risk of sending people back to work. Facebook is known to fear backlash from conservative politicians and citizens who’ve developed a false narrative that it discriminates against or censors their posts.
Johnson & Johnson partners with BARDA to fund $1 billion in COVID-19 vaccine research
Pharmaceutical giant Johnson & Johnson is partnering with the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services to fund over $1 billion in COVID-19 vaccine and antiviral treatment research and development, the company said on Monday.
The partnership is an expansion of an existing agreement between BARDA and J&J’s Janssen Pharmaceutical Companies division.
With the agreement, the company is setting a goal of providing a global supply of more than one billion doses of the vaccine, which J&J expects to have in clinical trials by September 2020 at the latest. The first batches of the vaccine may be available for emergency use by early 2021, the company said.
BARDA’s partnership with J&J encompasses research and development of potential antiviral treatments in addition to the work that’s being done to develop a vaccine for the disease. Those efforts include development work J&J and BARDA are conducting with the Rega Institute for Medical Research in Belgium.
J&J said it had also committed to expanding its global manufacturing capacity, both in the U.S. and overseas. That additional production ability will help the company bring an affordable vaccine to the public on a not-for-profit basis for emergency pandemic use, the company said.
Working with teams at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, a part of the Harvard Medical School, Janssen Pharmaceuticals began its research into potential vaccine candidates back in January. Those candidates were tested at several academic institutions, the company said, which led to the identification of a lead COVID-19 vaccine candidate — and two potential back-ups.
Last week, Moderna Health, another pharmaceutical company working on a vaccine, said that it could have an experimental treatment available to healthcare workers as soon as the fall.
The Moderna vaccine uses messenger RNA, rather than doses of the COVID-19 virus itself, to inoculate against the disease. The use of mRNA means that the inoculation doesn’t expose recipients to the disease itself, so they’re not at risk of contracting the disease.
Last Monday, Moderna made the vaccine available to volunteer participants as part of the company’s Phase 1 clinical trials conducted in Washington state.
Around 100 Amazon workers staged a walkout at a Staten Island, NY fulfillment center to protest the impact of Amazon's COVID-19 response on warehouse workers (Josh Dzieza/The Verge)
Around 100 Amazon workers staged a walkout at a Staten Island, NY fulfillment center to protest the impact of Amazon's COVID-19 response on warehouse workers — As Amazon workers across the country test positive for the virus, employees believe collective action is the only way to get the company to meaningfully clean its facilities
Arizona's Maricopa County is set to have the second largest concentration of US data centers by 2028, as the state races to increase electricity production (Pranshu Verma/Washington Post)
Pranshu Verma / Washington Post : Arizona's Maricopa County is set to have the second largest concentration of US data centers by 202...
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Jake Offenhartz / Gothamist : Since October, the NYPD has deployed a quadruped robot called Spot to a handful of crime scenes and hostage...
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