Google makes Stadia free to use for anyone with a Gmail address and will give new users two months of Stadia Pro for free  —  Stadia Pro is also free for two months  —  Google's video game streaming platform, Stadia, is now free to anyone with a Gmail address, the company announced on Wednesday.

Tech giants like Apple, Facebook, and Google are scrambling to create digital internships for this summer, as offices remain shuttered during the pandemic  —  Go deeper  —  By Sara Fischer, Stef W. Kight  —  Campaigns turn to texting as coronavirus spreads

Investigation details facial recognition company Clearview AI's ties to the alt-right, including hiring employees with deep links to far-right extremists  —  Clearview AI, which has alarmed privacy experts, hired several far-right employees, a HuffPost investigation found.

Sources: Airbnb is paying 10%+ interest on the $1B funding it raised on Monday; investors were offered free stock warrants based on an $18B valuation  —  Airbnb's new investors get free warrants based on company valuation of $18 billion  —  Airbnb Inc. agreed to pay its new investors interest …

Zoom gives updates on its progress with privacy and security: appointing a CISO Council and Advisory Board and bringing on Alex Stamos as an outside advisor  —  As I mentioned in my message on April 1, Zoom has seen tremendous growth and new use cases emerge over the past few weeks …

Google says Meet, its teleconferencing tool, is adding 2M new users a day and logged 2B minutes of video calls in March with daily usage up 25x from January  —  As people around the world hunker down in their homes to slow the spread of COVID-19, one technology has emerged as a lifeline to the outside world: video chat.

Sources: White House team led by Jared Kushner has reached out to health tech companies about creating a real-time surveillance system for tracking COVID-19  —  White House senior adviser Jared Kushner's task force has reached out to a range of health technology companies about creating …

SimilarWeb and Apptopia: amid quarantines, Americans increasingly use online platforms on computers, not smartphones; Nextdoor.com traffic is up 73% from Jan.  —  Stuck at home during the coronavirus pandemic, with movie theaters closed and no restaurants to dine in, Americans have been spending more of their lives online.

Study of 225 pieces of COVID-19-related content rated false or misleading: 59% remain up with no warning label on Twitter, 27% on YouTube, and 24% on Facebook  —  Facebook and YouTube do better, but still leave some misinformation up  —  More than half of the misinformation …

UK's NCSC and US DHS publish a list of 2,500 COVID-19-related threats they are tracking, including malicious websites and email addresses linked to scams  —  If you weren't already taking the rise of coronavirus-based cybercrime seriously, take note.  A rare joint alert has gone out from U.S …

Dorsey says he's moving $1B of his Square equity, ~28% of his wealth, to Start Small LLC to fund COVID-19 relief, to later focus on girls' health and education  —  I'm moving $1B of my Square equity (~28% of my wealth) to #startsmall LLC to fund global COVID-19 relief. After we disarm this pandemic, the focus will shift to girl's health and education, and UBI. It will operate transparently, all flows tracked here: https://docs.google.com/...

Gig workers say unemployment benefits included in the $2T COVID-19 relief bill are hard to access, won't arrive for a while, and the system is overloaded  —  The $2 trillion coronavirus relief bill makes contractors eligible for unemployment insurance.  But states want pay stubs that ride-hail drivers don't have.

Microsoft says it will make all of its events digital until July 2021, due to the COVID-19 pandemic  —  Build 2021 will likely be a digital event  —  Microsoft is planning to make all of its internal and external events digital-only until July 2021 due to the ongoing coronavirus pandemic.

Google will require a Virtual A/B partition setup on new Android 11 devices, paving way for simpler and seamless background updates, similar to Chrome OS  —  With Android 7.0 Nougat, Google introduced a partition scheme designed to speed up software updates.

Valve releases data showing rise in games making $10K during first two weeks after release but analysis suggests ~80% of games earn under $5K during same period  —  Valve offers a peek behind the sales curtain, telling an incomplete and mixed story.  —  It has been roughly two years …

Sila, which is developing a payments and banking API on top of the Ethereum blockchain, raises $7.7M seed led by Madrona Venture Group and Oregon Venture Fund  —  Fintech is white hot these days, with major acquisitions and funding rounds galore.  It's also a relatively new space …

Mozilla says long-time chairwoman Mitchell Baker will become CEO, following Chris Beard's departure last year  —  Mozilla Corporation announced today that it has chosen long-time chairwoman Mitchell Baker to be CEO, replacing Chris Beard who announced he would be stepping down at the end of the year last August.

Microsoft says it is pausing new hires except in some “strategic areas”, citing uncertainty due to the pandemic; sources: the company is still hiring for Azure  —  - Microsoft is “temporarily pausing recruitment” for some roles amid uncertainty caused by the coronavirus crisis, the company confirmed Tuesday.

Analysis of GoDaddy data shows how small-scale digital entrepreneurs, part-time or full, generate significant economic spillover benefits across US communities  —  A new study examines the millions of small digital businesses.  They could help many communities weather the economic blow from the coronavirus outbreak.

How scientists are using AI and machine learning to analyze vast data on oceans, including tracking migrations and Google helping to identify whale song  —  Machine-learning applications are proving to be especially useful to the scientific community studying the planet's largest bodies of water.

Swedish logistics tech startup Instabox, which lets e-commerce retailers offer same-day delivery through its delivery lockers, raises €36M at a €100M valuation  —  Swedish logistics tech company Instabox has closed a €36 million financing round, boosting the business' valuation to €100 million.

Cisco's Talos security group finds fingerprint scanners from Apple, Microsoft, Samsung, and others can be bypassed by fake fingerprints made with 3D printing  —  Phone, computer fingerprint scanners can be defeated with 3-D printing — By Paul Rascagneres and Vitor Ventura.

FireEye details how zero-days were exploited worldwide from 2012 to 2019, says it was able to link the use of 55 zero-day exploits to state-sponsored operations  —  The collection of countries using those secret hacking techniques has expanded far beyond the usual suspects.