Technology

Tomorrow night, a Super Worm Moon is set to appear, during which time our lunar satellite will look both bigger and brighter in the night sky

I want to talk about malignant incompetence on the part of our elected officials, and this isn&t even about the pandemic. Rather, itabout the spectacularly misguided, counterproductive, expensive, and overbearing approach to end-to-end encryption by the USA along with Australia, Canada, the UK, and New Zealand — the so-called &Five Eyes.&

Consider the TSA Lock program. (Bear with me; this is important.) Itan initiative to ensure all luggage locks can be opened by universal keys, held by the TSA and other aviation security agencies, so that any luggage can be searched at any time. The cited purpose is to prevent terrorism, which of course we all want. Unfortunately, the TSA master keys have been publicly leaked, such that anyone could make copies. Furthermore, TSA agents are numerous, fallible, and prone to misusing their authority.

Still, preventing terrorism is a good thing which we all want, right? Some people may feel that TSA Locks are an unacceptable intrusion into personal liberties, but a majority seem basically OK with them. They&re a trade-off between public security and personal privacy which we have collectively more-or-less agreed on.

Suppose, however, that the situation was tweaked slightly. Suppose that anyone who really wanted to could, at the cost of some slight inconvenience, instead use invulnerable luggage, proof against keys, scans, and external access of any kind, all for free … and airlines were required to convey that luggage anyhow. Call it the &TSA Locks Except For People Willing To Take An Extra Half Hour To Pack& program.

Suddenly that whole program sounds completely insane, doesn&t it? Suddenly this isn&t a trade-off at all. Clearly people with anything to hide, such as terrorists, drug smugglers, etc., would immediately switch to using the invulnerable luggage, and the rest of the TSA Lock mandate would become a gratuitous invasion of personal privacy.

Suddenly the programchief impact would be the imposition of significant and unnecessary risks, such as leaked master keys, rogue TSA agents, and misuse by tyrannical governments, on the entire flying public who don&t go to the inconvenience of using invulnerable luggage. Suddenly the program brings no benefit whatsoever. Suddenly it is a poster child for malevolent government overreach, negligence, and authoritarianism.

Well, &TSA Locks Except For People Willing To Take An Extra Half Hour To Pack& is, I am appalled to report, a perfect and exact metaphor for what the Five Eyes want to do with end-to-end encryption. They want a ‘golden key‘ back door — aka a TSA Lock — for all messages sent over messaging systems like WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, iMessage, etc., despite the inescapable fact that unbreakable encryption — aka invulnerable luggage — has long been widely available, open-source, and free to all.

Even if you wanted to put that genie back in the bottle (and you really shouldn&t, as it has granted us many wishes which protect us all) it is far too late now. Even if you wanted to prevent messages with strong encryption from being transferred (which you really really shouldn&t) you couldn&t; there are too many ways to disguise them as other messages, e.g. encode them in images. Invulnerable luggage is a fact of life, and has been for decades.

And yet governments keep trying to legislate it out of existence, with legislation that will only harm people who use the metaphorical TSA locks, courtesy of leaked keys, rogue government workers, and authoritarian governments everywhere. The latest attempt is the EARN IT act, introduced Thursday by a bipartisan coalition. Here is a summary of its most grievous flaws, by Riana Pfefferkorn, he Associate Director of Surveillance and Cybersecurity at the Stanford Center for Internet and Society, who previously described the bill as &how to ban end-to-end encryption without actually banning it.&

The cited intent of the bill is to fight &child sexual abuse material,& or CSAM. Which of course is a most laudable goal, which we all desire. Just like the goal of preventing terrorist attacks on airplanes. But as with the TSA Locks metaphor, this will simply drive awful people to use their own encryption — their own invulnerable luggage — while giving authoritarian governments, people with leaked keys, and rogue agents access to potentially trillions of previously secure private messages worldwide. It is a catastrophically dumb idea crafted by people who don&t understand what they&re doing. Lethope, just as with the pandemic, therestill time enough to convince them of the reality.

Telecom operators in India have started to warn users of Covid-19 spread after more than three dozen cases have been detected in the nation.

Subscribers of Reliance Jio, Airtel, and state-run BSNL were greeted with a warning in Hindi and English when they attempted to make a phone call on Sunday.

&Always protect your face with a handkerchief or tissue while coughing or sneezing. Regularly clean hands with soap. Avoid touching your face, eyes, or nose. If someone has cough, fever, or breathlessness maintain one metre distance. If needed, visit your nearest health centre immediately,& the pre-recorded message said.

Vodafone, the top telecom operator in India, is in the process of implementing the warning message, while Airtel is looking to broaden the reach of its alert, people familiar with the matter told TechCrunch. The initiative is being overseen by the nationministries of health and telecommunications.

The coronavirus outbreak, which has made severe impact in many industries worldwide, is beginning to disrupt several businesses and livelihoods in India as well. Solar companies, and manufacturing and pharmaceutical firms, all of which source materials from China, are looking at the government for help.

To date, 43 cases of Covid-19 have been detected in the nation, three of whom have recovered fully.

A handful of firms have also advised their employees to work from home, in line with recent actions of several American giants. Financial services startup Paytm urged its employees in Noida and Gurgaon last week to not come to the office after one of the employees was tested positive with the new virus.

Chennai-headquartered cloud services firm Zoho told all its employees to work from home out of abundance of caution. IT conglomerate Tech Mahindra has made a similar push.

Hello and welcome back toTechCrunchChina Roundup, a digest of recent events shaping the Chinese tech landscape and what they mean to people in the rest of the world. This week, a post from Sequoia Capital sounding the alarm of the coronavirusimpact on businesses is reaching far corners of tech communities around the world, including China.

Many echo Sequoiaobservation that the companies that are the &most adaptable& are the likeliest to survive. Others cling to the hope of &[turning] a challenging situation into an opportunity to set yourself up for enduring success.&

Two weeks ago I wrote about how the private sector and the government in China are working together to contain the epidemic, bringing a temporary boost to the technology industry. This week I asked a number of investors and founders which of these changes will stand to last, and why.

B2B on the rise

The business-to-business (B2B) space was rarely a hot topic in China until online consumer businesses became relatively saturated in recent times. And now, the COVID-19 epidemic has unexpectedly breathed life into the once-boring field, which stretches from virtual meetings, online education, digital healthcare, cybersecurity, telecommunications, logistics to smart cities, analysis from investment firm Yunqi Partners shows.

For one, there is an obvious opportunity for remote collaboration tools as people work from home. Downloads of indigenous work apps like Dingtalk, WeChat Work, TikToksister Lark as well as AmericaZoom jumped exponentially amid the health crisis. While some argue that the boom is overblown and will dissipate as soon as businesses are back to normal, others suggest that the shift in behavior will endure.

&People are reluctant to change once they form a new habit,& suggests Joe Chan, partner at Hong Kong-based Mindworks Ventures. The virus outbreak, he believes, has educated the Chinese masses to work remotely.

&Meeting in person and through Zoom both have their own merits, depending on the social norm. Some people are used to thinking that relationships need to be established through face-to-face encounters, but those who don&t hold that view will have fewer meetings. [The epidemic] presents a chance for a paradigm shift.&

But changes are slow

Growth in enterprise businesses might be less visible than what China witnessed over the SARS epidemic that fueled internet consumer verticals such as ecommerce. Thatbecause software-as-a-services (SaaS), cloud computing, health tech, logistics and other enterprise-facing services are intangible for most consumers.

&Compared to changes in consumer behavior, the adoption of new technologies by enterprises happen at a slower pace, so the impact of coronavirus on new-generation innovations [B2B] won&t come as rapidly and thoroughly as what happened during SARS,& contended Jake Xie, vice president of investment at China Growth Capital.

Xie further suggested that the opportunities presented by the outbreak are reserved for companies that have been steadily investing in the field, in part because enterprise services have a longer life cycle and require more capital-intensive infrastructure. &Opportunists don&t stand a chance,& he concluded.

As for changing consumer behavior, such as the uptick in grocery delivery usage by seniors trapped indoors, the impact might be short-lived. &The only benefit that the epidemic brings to these apps is getting more people to try their services. But how many of them will stay? The argument that people will keep using these apps over concerns of getting sick in offline markets is unsubstantiated. The strength of a business lies in its ability to solve user problems in the long term, for example, providing affordability and convenience,& suggested Derek Shen, chairman of Danke Apartment, the Chinese co-living startup slated to list on NYSE.

Summoned by Beijing

The adjacent sector of enterprise services — at-scale technologies tailored to energizing government functions — has also seen traction over the course of the epidemic. Private firms in China have teamed up with regional authorities to better track peoplemovements, ramp up facial recognition capacities aimed at a mask-wearing public, develop contact-free consumer experience, among other measures.

Tech firms touting services to the government are no stranger to criticisms concerning the lack of transparency in how user data is used. But the appeal to private firms is huge, not only because state contracts tend to provide a steady stream of long-term revenue, but also that certain public-facing projects can be billed as a fulfillment of corporate social responsibilities. Following the virus outbreak, Chinese tech companies of all sizes hastened to offer contributions, with efforts ranging from making monetary donations to building tools that keep the public informed.

On the flip side, the government also needs private help in emergency management. As prominent Chinese historian Luo Xin poignantly pointed out in podcast SurplusValuerecent episode [1:00:00], some of the most efficient and effective responses to the public health crisis came not from the government but the private sector, whether it is online retailer JD.com or logistics firm SF Express delivering relief supplies to the epicenter of the outbreak.

That said, Luo argued there are signs that some local authorities& tendency to centralize control is getting in the way of private efforts. For example, some government offices have stumbled in their attempts to develop crisis management systems from scratch, overlooking a pool of readily available and proven infrastructure powered by the countrytech giants.

In interviews across major television networks on Sunday, U.S. officials all-but-admitted that efforts to contain the spread of the novel coronavirus, COVID-19, have failed and that the country now needs to move to mitigate the effects of the continuing spread of the disease on the nationhealth and economy.

&We now are seeing community spread and we&re trying to help people understand how to mitigate the impact of disease spread,& U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Jerome Adams said on CBS& Face the Nation on Sunday.

Dr. Adams& concerns were echoed by Dr. Anthony Fauci, head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases at the National Institutes of Health.

&There comes a time,& Fauci said in an interview on NBCMeet the Press, &when you have containment which [sic] you&re trying to find out whoinfected and put them in isolation. And if and when that happens — and I hope itif and not when — that you get so many people who are infected that the best thing you need to do is what we call mitigation in addition to containment.&

The admissions are supported by data from Johns Hopkins University, which indicates that despite government efforts to contain the novel coronavirus from spreading in the U.S. there are now at least 474 people infected with the virus across at least 31 states.

Exact information is difficult to ascertain since the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said earlier this week that it would no longer be able to provide an official tally of tests conducted or under investigation. The CDC made the decision because states and private institutions are now authorized to conduct their own tests — making it difficult for the agency to keep up with the latest information.

&We are no longer reporting the number of PUIs or patients under investigation nor those who have tested negative,& said Dr. Nancy Messonnier, the director of the Center for the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, at the CDC. &With more and more testing done at states, these numbers would not be representative of the testing being done nationally. States are reporting results quickly and even — states are reporting results quickly and in the event of a discrepancy between CDC and state case counts, the state case counts should always be considered more up to date.&

Mistakes were made

Faulty test kits and internal divisions over how to respond to the spread of the virus in the United States hamstrung early efforts to get an accurate picture of how rapidly the virus was moving through the population, according to multiple reports.

&They&ve simplylost time they can&t make up. You can&t get back six weeks of blindness,& Jeremy Konyndyk, a senior policy fellow at the Center for Global Development and an Obama-era administration staffer involved in the governmentresponse to the spread of the ebola virus, told The Washington Post. &To the extent that theresomeone to blame here, the blame is on poor, chaotic management from the White House and failure to acknowledge the big picture.&

There is a world in which a coordinated U.S. response to the outbreak of the coronavirus, which the Chinese government first reported to the World Health Organization in late December, would have been led by the global health security team within the National Security Council, but that group was dissolved in 2018 by the National Security Advisor at the time, John Bolton.

In that world, perhaps the U.S. could have ramped up the production and acquisition of testing kits, provisioned facilities in communities deemed to be more at-risk with the necessary equipment, and issued emergency authorizations to enable public institutions to administer tests without undergoing formal approval processes. In that world, the CDC would not have needed to impose severe restrictions on who could be tested for the virus, because they would not have needed to limit the number of tests they could conduct to only the most pressing — or obvious — cases.

Instead, as reporting in both The Washington Post and the New York Times indicates, a series of poor decisions, slow responses, and technological missteps limited the governmentability to respond effectively to the threat.

The problems seem to have been threefold — the Centers for Disease Control did not move quickly enough to manufacture test kits at scale (either because of lack of funding or political will) nor did it open up testing options to other institutions that could have worked to develop tests — and because of the limited availability of tests, the CDC rationed how many tests were performed. Those issues were compounded by the initial release of faulty tests by the CDC in early February.

As former U.S. Food and Drug Administration official Scott Gottlieb wrote on Twitter in early February, &Since CDC and FDA haven&t authorized public health or hospital labs to run the tests, right now #CDC is the only place that can. So, screening has to be rationed. Our ability to detect secondary spread among people not directly tied to China travel is greatly limited.&

&We have an epidemic underway here in the United States&

The Federal Government is now facing an epidemic, according to health experts, and the question now is how can it help states and local governments respond.

&We have an epidemic underway here in the United States,& said former Food and Drug Administration commissioner, Scott Gottlieb, in an interview on Face the Nation.

Gottlieb, who recently returned to his position as a managing partner at the venture capital firm NEA, has been monitoring the governmentresponse from afar and was once rumored to be a candidate for the position of &Coronavirus Czar& overseeing the Administrationresponse to the outbreak.

&We have to implement broad mitigation strategies. The next two weeks are really going to change the complexion in this country. We&ll get through this, but itgoing to be a hard period. We&re looking at two months probably of difficulty,& said Gottlieb. &To give you a basis of comparison, two weeks ago, Italy had nine cases. Ninety-five percent of all their cases have been diagnosed in the last 10 days. For South Korea, 85 percent of all their cases have been diagnosed in the last 10 days. We&re entering that period right now of rapid acceleration. And the sooner we can implement tough mitigation steps in places we have outbreaks like Seattle, the- the lower the scope of the epidemic here.&

Part of mitigation involves continuing to track the spread of the disease, and Gottlieb has been encouraging the FDA to move quickly to get new tests approved for weeks. Already, the Gates Foundation and private companies are rushing to bring an at-home coronavirus test kit to market — and ways to share the results from testing with appropriate government agencies.

But testing alone isn&t enough, says Gottlieb. The U.S. needs to &[close] businesses, close large gatherings, close theaters, cancel events,& Gottlieb said.

Businesses have started to cancel large conferences and events, and universities like Stanford are turning to remote classes for the remainder of their winter term. No city or state has yet to take measures as drastic as Italy, which closed down the entire Northern region of the country over the weekend in an effort to contain the spread of the coronavirus.

&I think we need to think about how do we provide assistance to the people of these cities who are going to be hit by hardship, as well as the localities themselves to try to give them an incentive to do this.&

His recommendations align with policy suggestions issued recently by the International Monetary Fund, which are all steps that the U.S. government could take should it choose to proactively approach its response to the virus& spread.

Indeed, the over $8 billion coronavirus response package approved by Congress last week goes a long way to addressing the first suggestion from the IMF, which is to spend on the prevention, detection, control, treatment and containment of the virus.

Equally as important, according to the IMF, is to provide cash flow relief to the people and firms that are most affected — either in the form of wage subsidies, accelerated and expanded unemployment benefits, or tax benefits for companies affected by the virus outbreak.

&We&re going to end up with a very big federal bailout package here for stricken businesses, individuals, cities and states,& said Gottlieb. &We&re better off doing it upfront and giving assistance to get them to do the right things than do it on the back end after we&ve had a very big epidemic.&

Meanwhile, leadership in the U.S. at the highest level insists that therenothing to worry about.

A project funded by the Gates Foundation will soon begin issuing at-home testing kits for the novel coronavirus, COVID-19, according to a report in the Seattle Times.

The study, based on a nose-swab should be able to return results in up to two days and will be shared with health officials who can then notify people who test positive. Individuals who have been infected will then be encouraged to answer an online questionnaire to give health officials information about their movements so that those officials can identify and notify other people who may need to be tested or quarantined, according to the Seattle Times report.

&Although therea lot to be worked out, this has enormous potential to turn the tide of the epidemic,& Scott Dowell, who leads the coronavirus response effort from the Bill - Melinda Gates Foundation told the Seattle Times.

Thereno clear timeline for the projectlaunch as the Foundation looks to finalize the supporting software and draft a final questionnaire for people who request the tests. The Foundation estimates that it could run up to 400 tests per-day, according to Dowell.

The Gates Foundation isn&t the only entity moving quickly to develop at home test kits. In a Twitter thread on Saturday, serial healthcare entrepreneur Jonathan Rothenberg outlined a similar approach, and is apparently now in discussions with a manufacturer on how to bring it to market.

Seattle and the surrounding area has been the epicenter for the coronavirus outbreak in the U.S. The state has confirmed 71 cases and 15 deaths from the disease as of Saturday. At least one health expert estimates that Seattle could have as many as 600 cases, based on computational modeling.

&One of the most important things from our perspective, having watched and worked on this in other parts of the world, is the identification of people who are positive for the virus, so they can be safely isolated and cared for, and the identification of their contacts, who can then be quarantined,& Dowell told the Seattle Times.

The project to do develop at-home testing evolved from a two-year-old research project from the University of Washington that was intended to track the spread of diseases like influenza, according to the Times reporting.

All told, the Gates Foundation has poured about $20 million into the effort. The foundation has also committed $5 million to the local response efforts to combat the disease in the area — including the expansion of testing and analysis.