If you're a free Zoom user, and waiting for the company to roll out end-to-end encryption for better protection of your calls, you're out of luck. From a report: Free calls won't be encrypted, and law enforcement will be able to access your information in case of 'misuse' of the platform. Zoom CEO Eric Yuan today said that the video conferencing app's upcoming end-to-end encryption feature will be available to only paid users.

"Amazon is discontinuing its Echo Look camera, a standalone device that gave owners fashion advice using artificial intelligence and machine learning," reports The Verge. The gadget raised eyebrows when it was first announced as it included a virtual assistant with a microphone and a camera specifically designed to go somewhere in your bedroom, bathroom, or wherever the hell you get dressed. From the report: The Look's companion app and the device itself will stop functioning on July 24th. Between now and July 24th, 2021, Look users can back up their images and videos by making a free Amazon Photos account. (People with existing Photos accounts will have their media backed up automatically.) Anyone who wants to delete all their existing photos and videos will have to do so before the July 2020 deadline; otherwise, they'll have to call Amazon's customer service to have them deleted. They can currently delete them through the Look app.

Amazon points out that much of the Echo Look's functionality is now included in the Amazon Shopping app, including Style by Alexa, which involves the AI offering fashion pointers. The company says people should download the app to keep consulting with Amazon, and they should also recycle their Look through Amazon's program.

Mike Masnick, writing at TechDirt: Last year, when Spotify purchased a bunch of podcast companies, we worried that it foretold the end of the open world of podcasting. You can get a Spotify account for free, but unlike most podcast apps, you can't get any podcast you want via Spotify. Spotify has to agree to host it, and as a podcast you have to "apply" (indeed, Techdirt's own podcast was initially rejected by Spotify, though has since been let in). That's a "closed, but free" setup. Most podcasts are both open and free -- published as open MP3 files, using an open RSS feed that any regular podcast app can grab.

Spotify, so far, hadn't done much to close off the podcasts that it had purchased, but perhaps that's changing. Earlier this week it was announced that one of (if not) the most popular podcasts in the world, Joe Rogan's, would now be moving exclusively to Spotify. News reports have said that Spotify paid over $100 million to get Rogan's podcast on board, while some have put the number closer to $200 million. While it's totally understandable why Rogan would take that deal (who wouldn't?), it does remain a sad day for the concept of an open internet. When we lock up content into silos, we all lose out. The entire concept of podcasts came from the open nature of the internet -- combining MP3s and RSS to make it all work seamlessly and enabling anyone to just start broadcasting. The entire ecosystem came out of that, and putting it into silos and locking it up so that only one platform can control it is unfortunate.

I'm sure it will get many people to move to Spotify's podcasting platform, though, and that means those that do offer open podcasting apps (most others) will suffer, because most people aren't going to want to use two different podcast apps. Even if the initial economics make sense, it still should be seen as a sad day for the open internet that enabled podcasting to exist in the first place.

Technology company ScreenHits is launching ScreenHits TV, a streaming video aggregator app that lets consumers bundle different services together in a single interface. From a report: The service creates a one-stop electronic programming guide where users can search the libraries of both free and subscription streaming platforms, as well as live online TV without jumping from platform to platform and without having to repeatedly sign up for new services. Subscribers of SVOD platforms such as Netflix, Disney+, Amazon Prime, HBO Go, MUBI and other streaming services, including BBC iPlayer, can integrate their existing services within the app, which is set to go live across multiple territories, including the U.S. and the U.K., by the end of this month. Entry-level subscriptions to ScreenHits will start at $1.99 per month and will initially be available on Samsung Smart TVs, Amazon Fire Stick, Apple Store, Google Chrome, Android and for the desktop.

"The Joe Rogan Experience," one of podcasting's longest-running and most popular shows, will be launching on Spotify exclusively this year. From a report: The Rogan-hosted comedy talk-show series will debut on Spotify on Sept. 1, 2020, on a nonexclusive basis -- before becoming exclusive to the platform later later in 2020 under the multiyear licensing deal. With Rogan, Spotify has landed one of the podcasting biz's whales. It currently ranks as the No. 2 most popular show on Apple Podcasts (after Barstool Sports' "Call Her Daddy"), per Podcast Insights. A source familiar with the deal said Rogan became sold on Spotify's ability to build his audience worldwide, after initially resisting distributing the podcast on the platform because he saw it as primarily a music service. In addition to the podcast, JRE also produces corresponding video episodes, which will also be available on Spotify as in-app "vodcasts." Rogan announced the deal on social media Tuesday, touting Spotify as "the largest audio platform in the world." Marco Arment of Instapaper and Tumblr fame, who also built podcast app Overcast, which supports every podcast and is vocal supporter of open podcasting system, said in a tweet, "What Joe Rogan is going to find out -- after it's too late -- is that moving an existing, open, free show behind a proprietary wall results in massive audience loss. I hope he at least leaves his public feed up so he can return to it when his Spotify exclusivity fails."

UPDATE: The deal is a multiyear licensing agreement that will likely be worth more than $100 million, according to The Wall Street Journal, though the exact amount is not yet known. The length of the agreement is also unknown. Spotify "wont have any creative control over the show," Mr. Rogan said on Instagram. "They want me to just continue doing it the way I'm doing it right now. We will still have clips up on YouTube but full versions of the show will only be on Spotify after the end of the year."

Quibi, the streaming app veteran executive Jeffrey Katzenberg started with Meg Whitman a little more than a month ago -- and for which it raised $1.8 billion -- is off to a rough start. From a report: Downloads have been anemic, despite a lineup that includes producers and stars like Jennifer Lopez, LeBron James, Idris Elba, Steven Spielberg and Chrissy Teigen. The service, which offers entertainment and news programs in five- to 10-minute chunks, was designed to be watched on the go by people who are too busy to sit down and stream TV shows or movies. It came out when millions of people were not going anywhere because of stay-at-home orders across the country. "I attribute everything that has gone wrong to coronavirus," Mr. Katzenberg said in a video interview. "Everything. But we own it."

Quibi fell out of the list of the 50 most downloaded free iPhone apps in the United States a week after it went live on April 6. It is now ranked No. 125, behind the game app Knock'em All and the language-learning app Duolingo, according to the analytics firm Sensor Tower. Even with a free 90-day trial, the app has been installed by only 2.9 million customers, according to Sensor Tower. Quibi says the figure is more like 3.5 million. Of those who have installed the app, the company says 1.3 million are active users. Mr. Katzenberg expressed disappointment with those numbers. "Is it the avalanche of people that we wanted and were going for out of launch?" he said. "The answer is no. It's not up to what we wanted. It's not close to what we wanted." So nobody wants to use a short-form video app right now, except an increasingly growing number of people who are hooked to TikTok. Nobody wants to spend money on a service, but Quibi is free for first three months. Yeah, it's the coronavirus.

Google's move to put Javier Soltero, VP and GM of G Suite, in charge of Messages, Duo, and the phone app on Android, puts all of Google's major communication products under one umbrella: Soltero's team. Dieter Bohn reports via The Verge: Soltero tells me that there are no immediate plans to change or integrate any of Google's apps, so don't get your hopes up for that (yet). "We believe people make choices around the products that they use for specific purposes," Soltero says. Still, Google's communications apps are in dire need of a more coherent and opinionated production development, and Soltero could very well be the right person to provide that direction. Prior to joining Google, he had a long career that included creating the much-loved Acompli email app, which Microsoft acquired and essentially turned into the main Outlook app less than two months after signing the deal.

Soltero has also moved rapidly (at least by the standards of Google's communication apps) to clean up the Hangouts branding mess, converting Hangouts Video to Google Meet and Hangouts Chat to Google Chat -- at least on the enterprise side. Google Meet also became free for everybody far ahead of the original schedule because of the pandemic. Cleaning up the consumer side of all that is more complicated, but Soltero says, "The plan continues to be to modernize [Hangouts] towards Google Meet and Google Chat." "Soltero will remain on the cloud team but will join Hiroshi Lockheimer's leadership team," Dieter adds. While Lockheimer believes there are opportunities to better integrate Google's apps into its platforms, he says it doesn't make sense to force integration or interoperability too quickly.

"It's not necessarily a bad thing that there are multiple communications applications if they're for a different purpose," Lockheimer says. "Part of what might be confusing, what we've done to confuse everyone, is our history around some of our communications products that have gone from one place or another place. But we're looking forward now, in a way that has a much more coherent vision."

Facebook has a new connectivity app called Discover to help those who can't afford to get online access information on the web. From a report: The service, available through mobile web and Android app, allows users to visit any website in text format (no video, images, audio and other elements that eat up large amounts of data) and consume a few megabytes of internet data. For Discover, which is part of the company's Free Basics initiative, Facebook is working with mobile operators in Bitel, Claro, Entel, and Movistar. Discover is currently available in Peru, where it is in the initial testing phase. In Peru, Discover is offering 10MB of free data to users each day. A Facebook spokesperson told TechCrunch that the partner mobile operator determines the daily data allowance, and it anticipates operators in other countries where Discover would be tested to offer up to 20MB each day.

Apple's virtual WWDC event will start on June 22, Apple said today. It will be hosted in the Apple Developer app and the Apple Developer website and it will be free for all developers. Apple does plan to hold a keynote event, presumably on June 22 when WWDC begins.

HBO Max, WarnerMedia's new streaming service combining HBO with Warner Bros. movies and Turner TV shows, will launch on May 27th, the company announced today. From a report: HBO Max's big selling point is being able to combine all of HBO's offerings on top of a slate of original titles that are exclusive to the app, classic Warner Bros. movies, and more. HBO Max will also be the exclusive home of Friends, which hasn't been streaming anywhere in the United States since it left Netflix on January 1st. (Although some of the service's exclusives, like the Friends reunion special, are facing delays following production issues caused by the novel coronavirus pandemic.) The streaming service offers more to watch than HBO Now and HBO Go, and WarnerMedia and AT&T are hoping people who use both services will switch over to Max, the company's new crown jewel. Existing HBO subscribers on AT&T (approximately 10 million) and HBO Now direct billing subscribers will get HBO Max for free, the company previously announced. Customers who subscribe to AT&T's premium video, mobile, and broadband packages will be offered bundles with HBO Max at no additional cost. At a cost of $14.99 a month, HBO Max is the priciest of the entries in the so-called streaming wars.

A newly instituted Google Play policy bans apps that use deceptive language or imagery to trick you into subscriptions. Engadget reports: Apps now have to be clear about a plan's cost, frequency and terms, including whether or not there will be an automatic renewal. They should also outline the features you can use without a subscription, and explain how you cancel service before your free period is over. The company has improved the Play Store's approach to subscriptions to match. You'll now get a email reminder before your trial or intro offer is over, as well as for any plans that last 3, 6 or 12 months. The checkout is now more transparent, and you'll be alerted if you delete an app with an active subscription.

Signal is warning that an anti-encryption bill circulating in Congress could force the private messaging app to pull out of the U.S. market. PC Magazine reports: Since the start of the coronavirus pandemic, the free app, which offers end-to-end encryption, has seen a surge in traffic. But on Wednesday, the nonprofit behind the app published a blog post, raising the alarm around the EARN IT Act. "At a time when more people than ever are benefiting from these (encryption) protections, the EARN IT bill proposed by the Senate Judiciary Committee threatens to put them at risk," Signal developer Joshua Lund wrote in the post. Although the goal of the legislation, which has bipartisan support, is to stamp out online child exploitation, it does so by letting the U..S government regulate how internet companies should combat the problem -- even if it means undermining the end-to-end encryption protecting your messages from snoops.

If the companies fail to do so, they risk losing legal immunity under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which can shield them from lawsuits concerning objectionable or illegal content posted on their websites or apps. "Some large tech behemoths could hypothetically shoulder the enormous financial burden of handling hundreds of new lawsuits if they suddenly became responsible for the random things their users say, but it would not be possible for a small nonprofit like Signal to continue to operate within the United States," Lund wrote in the blog post.

Deep learning algorithms can diagnose, triage, and monitor coronavirus cases from lung images. Next, can they predict who will need a ventilator? From a report: AI-powered analysis of chest scans has the potential to alleviate the growing burden on radiologists, who must review and prioritize a rising number of patient chest scans each day, experts say. And in the future, the technology might help predict which patients are most likely to need a ventilator or medication, and which can be sent home. "That's the brass ring," says Matthew Lungren, a pediatric radiologist at Stanford University Medical Center and co-director of the Stanford Center for Artificial Intelligence in Medicine and Imaging. "That would be the killer app for this." Some companies are selling their tools, others have released free online versions, and various groups are organizing large crowdsourced repositories of medical images to generate new algorithms. "The system we designed can process huge amounts of CT scans per day," says Hayit Greenspan, a professor at Tel-Aviv University and chief scientist of RADLogics, a healthcare software company that recently announced one such AI-based system. "The capability for quickly covering a huge population is there."

Taiwan's cabinet has told government agencies to stop using the Zoom conferencing app due to privacy and security woes. Reuters reports: Zoom's daily users ballooned to more than 200 million in March, as coronavirus-induced shutdowns forced employees to work from home and schools switched to the company's free app for conducting and coordinating online classes. However, the company is facing a backlash from users worried about the lack of end-to-end encryption of meeting sessions and "zoombombing," where uninvited guests crash into meetings. If government agencies must hold video conferencing, they "should not use products with security concerns, like Zoom," Taiwan's cabinet said in a statement on Tuesday. It did not elaborate on what the security concerns were. The island's education ministry later said it was banning the use of Zoom in schools.

Taiwan would be the first government formally advising against use of Zoom, although some U.S. schools districts are looking at putting limits on its use after an FBI warning last month. Taiwan's cabinet said domestically-made conferencing apps were preferred, but if needed products from Google and Microsoft could also be considered.

Devindra Hardawar of Engadget, writing about Quibi, a new streaming service that launched today: Nobody asked for Quibi. Nobody, that is, except for Jeffrey Katzenberg, the founder of Dreamworks Pictures and famed Hollywood producer. Where other mobile video startups failed, like Samsung's long-forgotten Milk Video and Verizon's own Go90 (RIP), Katzenberg figured he could succeed by pouring money (somehow he's raised $1.75 billion so far!) into top talent and well produced shows. At CES in January, Quibi also revealed its core innovation, Turnstyle, which allows you to seamlessly switch between portrait and vertical video playback modes. I was intrigued by that technology at the time. The company's chief product officer, Tom Conrad, the former CTO of Pandora and Snapchat product VP, also seemed excited about its potential. Still, it was hard to truly judge Quibi until I got a look at some of its shows. And after spending a few days with the app, which launches today, I can't say I'm impressed. Sure, Katzenberg and crew managed to bring some professional-looking "quick bites" of entertainment to phones, but the shows I've seen aren't nearly as compelling as anything on Netflix or Hulu. And their slick production values makes it harder to connect with Quibi shows than your favorite YouTube personality.

Why, exactly, would anyone want to pay $5 a month (it's also launching with a 90-day free trial) for this stuff -- especially when you still have to deal with ads and can't even watch it on other screens? Quibi CEO Meg Whitman had an answer for me at CES, though it's not entirely convincing: "We think we're a third category of this on-the-go viewing opportunity that people will make room for in their entertainment budget, because it's going to be great content for a mobile use-case." But that logic is difficult to follow after watching several episodes of Dishmantled, a cooking show hosted by Titus Burgess that's part hyper-accelerated Chopped, part voyeuristically punishing Japanese gameshow. In every 5 minute episode, chefs are blindfolded and assaulted by an exploding mystery dish. Their goal: To eat the disgusting remnants from the floor and walls to figure out what that dish actually is, and cook it within 30 minutes. It feels more like a parody cooking show from 30 Rock, than something on a legitimate network.

gavron writes: While most politicians are pro copyright maximalism and patent exclusivity, Elizabeth Warren's campaign just open-sourced a bunch of software and are proud of having used open source to save money, and build upon the shoulders of other giants. Way to go! "Our tech team worked hard to make getting involved with @ewarren's campaign as easy as possible," reads a tweet from @TeamWarren. "We leaned heavily on open source technology, and we want to contribute back. So we're open-sourcing some of our most important projects for anyone to use." The Warren for President Tech Team is open-sourcing the following projects:

-Spoke: Spoke is a peer-to-peer texting platform originally developed by MoveOn, with several forks under active development.
-Pollaris, our polling location lookup tool: While the DNC provides a polling locator interface with IWillVote.org, we wanted a polling place locator that integrated with our website and tools, so we built our own interface and API, using polling location data provided by the DNC and state democratic parties.
-Caucus App: Going into the Iowa caucuses, we wanted to give our supporters and precinct captains a way to quickly calculate delegates and report results from each precinct.
-Switchboard (FE and BE): [W]e built a piece of software that took new potential volunteers, or "hot leads," from our online channels and assigned them to state-based volunteer leads for personal follow up calls offering ways to get involved with the campaign. As it turned out, this also ended up being a great tool for event recruitment.
-Automated organizing email: Our Mobilization and Tech teams worked together to scale email outreach to the widest possible audience and free our incredible organizers from tedious manual tasks.
-Redhook: Campaigns run on data, and redhook is a tool that makes data happen. As a system, Redhook ingests web hook data and delivers it to Redshift/Civis in near real time.
-I90: This tool was not deployed during the campaign, but there was a need to make short links out of long complicated links moving forward. I90 does that.

You can read more about the projects and the team's efforts via this Medium post.

Video-game fans suddenly have their pick of a huge menu of titles thanks to a raft of new mobile subscription services from Apple, Microsoft, Alphabet's Google and Nvidia. But for the more than 1 billion users of Apple's iPhone and iPad, the only real option is Arcade, the subscription service launched by the company in September. From a report: That's because Apple imposes strict limits on the kinds of apps users can access on its devices. For example, App Store guidelines ban services that rely on streaming from the cloud. Arcade adheres to the requirements, in part, because it's included as a feature within the App Store itself. This is the latest example of what critics say are arbitrary rules favoring Apple's own apps at the expense of similar software from outside developers. "There's a fraught relationship between developers and Apple precisely because of rules like this," said David Barnard, a longtime independent developer and advocate at RevenueCat. "In some ways, I am incredibly grateful to their marketplace for helping me make millions of dollars I wouldn't have made without it. On the flip side, them being so heavy handed at times does kill apps and does cause developers to miss out on other potential revenue." If software developers want to reach as many consumers as possible, they have to be on Apple's iOS. The operating system powers more than 1 billion smartphones and tablets and it's the only way to access the iOS App Store, which accounted for 65% of app spending globally last year, according to Sensor Tower. The Cupertino, California-based company can also make or break mobile gaming businesses: More than half of the $62 billion spent on smartphone gaming last year happened on Apple products.

Forbes reports that in a world filled with school closings and social isolation, gaming has surged: - Steam, the most popular digital PC gaming marketplace, reached new heights Sunday, drawing a record 20,313,451 concurrent users to the 16-year-old service, according to third-party database SteamDB

- Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, released by Steam-owner Valve in 2012, seems to be the top beneficiary of the increased engagement, breaking it's all-time peak on Sunday with 1,023,2290 concurrent players, topping its previous peak last month by a million, which itself beat the record set in April 2016...

- Activision Blizzard's new free-to-play battle royale spinoff Call of Duty: Warzone, launched March 10 on PC, Xbox One and PlayStation 4, is also likely benefiting, drawing in a staggering 15 million in three days, besting the record 10 million in three days by last year's battle royale sensation Apex Legends.
Polygon adds: Gaming saw a 75% increase, week over week, in data usage this March, Verizon said. Video games are proving to be a popular way to pass the time during lockdown -- though we're also starting to see the strain this is placing on various networks and services... Recently, Nintendo experienced a nine-hour network outage. Over the weekend, Xbox Live also went down, preventing users from online play.

Gaming adjacent tools and services are also seeing a surge. As our sibling site The Verge reports, live streaming platform Twitch had a 10% jump in viewership. The popular communication app Discord, meanwhile, recently saw server outages that coincided days after it expanded its screen sharing limit for users.

The games that people are playing themselves are changing in the wake of the coronavirus outbreak, too. Pokemon Go, for instance, has tweaked its mechanics to make it easier for people to play from home, while also changing its events to make it easier for people to play solo. And in an effort to entice its players to stay home, Rockstar vowed to add fun bonuses to the MMO for players who are "spending a little extra time at home." Elsewhere, game developers are starting to give out their games for free in an effort to help people stay indoors. It's no wonder we're seeing changes in usage, playtime, and outages across the board.

"If you act quickly, both the gritty Tomb Raider origin story and 2014's Lara Croft and the Temple of Osiris are free for the taking on Steam," reports CNET: We've already told you about a slew of free stuff you can get while you're stuck at home. I don't know if this particular deal has anything to do with the coronavirus, but right now you can not one, but two Tomb Raider games for free. You'll need to download them right now though, because these return to their regular price tomorrow.
The free games are 2013's Tomb Raider ("Lara Croft's intense, gritty origin story...there's no question it's worth downloading for zero dollars") and the follow-up game Lara Croft and the Temple of Osiris ("the first-ever four-player co-op experience.")

"[W]e're missing out on the everyday exchanges that make us human..." argues a press release from Tinder. "And while we all know we need to stay home, the Tinder community has shown us that this doesn't mean we have to be alone with our thoughts and a tower of Top Ramen..."

"Many of our current subscribers are even reaching out across the world, using the Passport feature, to find solidarity with matches 1000s of miles away. And that's why starting next week we will make our Passport feature, which allows you to connect with anyone, anywhere in the world, available for free to all members through April 30th."

Newsweek reports: While traditionally the feature is reserved Tinder Plus and Gold members, the app acknowledges that having someone to chat with can make self-quarantining all the more bareable [sic]... In another press release, the app divulged that as areas become more isolated, new conversations spring up and tend to last longer. Tinder users are also swapping empathy for coolness, updating their bios to check ins like "how is everyone" instead of a silly catchphrase or their height.
"Our hope is that our members can use the Passport feature to transport themselves out of self-quarantine to anywhere in the world," Tinder writes in its press release.

In other news, Tinder has also cancelled the release of its apocalyptic-themed, in-app video series, "Swipe Night."