Huawei admits uncertainty following new US chip curbs

Following the U.S. government’s announcement that would further thwart Huawei’s chip-making capability, the Chinese telecoms equipment giant condemned the new ruling for being “arbitrary and pernicious.”

“Huawei categorically opposes the amendments made by the U.S. Department of Commerce to its foreign direct product rule that target Huawei specifically,” said Huawei Monday at its annual analyst summit in Shenzhen.

The new curbs, which dropped on Friday, would ban Huawei from using U.S. software and hardware in certain strategic semiconductor processes. This will affect all foundries using U.S. technologies, including those located abroad, some of which are Huawei’s key suppliers.

Earlier on Monday, the Nikkei Asian Review reported citing sources that Taiwanese Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., the world’s largest contract semiconductor that powers many of Huawei’s high-end phones, has stopped taking new orders from Huawei, one of its largest clients. Huawei declined to comment while TSMC said the report was “purely market rumor”.

Decisions from TSMC point to its attempt to strengthen bonds with the U.S. though, as it’s planning a new $12 billion advanced chip factory in Arizona with support from the state and the U.S. federal government.

At the Monday conference, Huawei’s rotating chairman Guo Ping admitted that while the firm is able to design some semiconductor parts such as integrated circuits (IC), it remains “incapable of doing a lot of other things.”

“Survival is the keyword for us at present,” he said.

Huawei stated the latest U.S. ban would not only affect its own business in over 170 countries, where it has spent “hundreds of billions of dollars,” but also the wider ecosystem around the world.

“In the long run, [the U.S. ban] will damage the trust and collaboration within the global semiconductor industry which many industries depend on, increasing conflict and loss within these industries.”

Huawei has announced a raft of contingency measures ever since the Trump administration began slapping technology sanctions on it, including one that had cut it off certain Android services from Google.

Huawei said at the summit that it had doubled down on investment in overseas developers in an effort to lure them to its operating system. Some 1.4 million developers have joined Huawei Mobile Services or HMS, a 150% jump from 2019. For comparison, iOS in 2018 counted 20 million registered developers, who collectively made about $100 billion in revenues. The question for Huawei is how much money app makers can generate from its ecosystem.

In its search to identify alternatives to Google’s app suite in Europe, it has partnered up with navigation services TomTom and Here, search engine Qwant and news app News UK. 

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Apple begins reopening some stores with temperature checks and other safeguards in place

In mid-March, Apple closed all of its stores outside of China “until further notice.” It was a sweeping — but necessary — move for a world facing down a growing pandemic. In a statement issued today until the title, “To our Customers,” Retail SVP Deirdre O’Brien offered insight into the company’s plans to reopen locations.

Nearly 100 stores have already resumed services, according to O’Brien — though the famously open retail spaces are taking on a new look in the face of the highly contagious novel coronavirus. “In every store, we’re focused on limiting occupancy and giving everybody lots of room, and renewing our focus on one‑on‑one, personalized service at the Genius Bar and throughout the store,” she writes.

A spokesperson for the company adds, “Next week we’ll continue our very gradual and thoughtful reopening of US stores, adding more than 25 locations in seven states. While we know many customers are eager for their local store to reopen, our commitment is to reopen our stores when we are confident the environment is safe. We miss our customers and look forward to seeing them again soon.”

Apple now says its retail stores are closed ‘until further notice’

As seen in the above image, face covers will be required for both employees and customers alike — already a legal requirement in many locales. More unusual for many retail establishments is the addition of temperature checks now conducted at the store’s entrance, coupled with posted health questions. Apple has also instituted deeper cleaning on all surfaces, including display products.

That last point is an important one, given how much of the company’s store layout revolves around hands-on products. Curb-side pick and drop off have been added, as well, for those who understandably would like to avoid the in-person experience.

As for when each location reopens, Apple says it’s monitoring health trends and local/national guidance to determine the timeframe. You can check your local store’s status here. And as the conversation of secondary waves begin to become a reality in many areas, O’Brien says the company will close stores down again, if necessary. “These are not decisions we rush into,” she writes, “and a store opening in no way means that we won’t take the preventative step of closing it again should local conditions warrant.”

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Sony shows off first combination image sensor and AI chip

Sony has developed an interesting new hybrid technology: An image sensor with AI processing system built into the hardware, making it a single integrated system. The benefits and applications for this are potentially enormous as imagery and code continue to merge.

The idea is fairly simple in concept. You take a traditional CMOS image sensor like you’d find in any phone or camera today and stack it on top of a logic chip that’s built not just for pulling pixels off the sensor but for operating a machine learning model that extracts information from those pixels.

The result is a single electronic assembly that can do a great deal of interesting processing on a photo before that photo is ever sent elsewhere, like a main logic board, GPU or the cloud.

To be clear, image sensors already have companion processors that do the usual work of sorting pixels, compressing them into a JPEG, and so on. But they’re very focused on performing a handful of common tasks very quickly.

The Sony chip, as the company explains it, is capable of more sophisticated processes and outputs. For instance, if the exposure is of a dog in a field, the chip could immediately analyze it for objects, and instead of sending on the full image, simply report “dog,” “grass” and anything else it recognizes.

It also could also perform essentially improvisational edits, such as cropping out everything in the photo but parts it recognizes and has been told to report — only the flowers, but never the stems, say.

The benefit of such a system is that it can discard all kinds of unnecessary or unwanted data before that data ever goes into the main device’s storage or processing pipeline. That means less processor power is used, for one thing, but it may also be safer and more secure.

Cameras in public places could preemptively blur faces or license plates. Smart home devices could recognize individuals without ever saving or sending any image data. Multiple exposures could be merged to form heat or frequency maps of the camera’s field of view.

The future of photography is code

You might expect a higher power draw or latency from a chip with integrated AI processes, but companies like Xnor (recently acquired by Apple) have shown that such tasks can be performed very quickly and at extremely low cost.

While more complex processing would still be the purview of larger, more powerful chips, this kind of first pass is able to produce a huge variety of valuable data and, properly designed, could prove to be more robust against attacks or abuse.

Right now Sony’s “Intelligent Vision Sensor” is still only a prototype, available to order for testing but not production. But as Sony is one of the leading image sensor providers in the world, this is likely to find its way into quite a few devices in one form or another.

Xnor’s saltine-sized, solar-powered AI hardware redefines the edge

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How will Europe’s coronavirus contacts tracing apps work across borders?

A major question mark attached to national coronavirus contacts tracing apps is whether they will function when citizens of one country travel to another. Or will people be asked to download and use multiple apps if they’re traveling across borders?

Having to use multiple apps when travelling would further complicate an unproven technology which seeks to repurpose standard smartphone components for estimating viral exposure — a task for which our mobile devices were never intended.

In Europe, where a number of countries are working on smartphone apps that use Bluetooth radios to try to automate some contacts tracing by detecting device proximity, the interoperability challenge is particularly pressing, given the region is criss-crossed with borders. Although, in normal times, European Union citizens can all but forget they exist thanks to agreements intended to facilitate the free movement of EU people in the Schengen Area.

Currently, with many EU countries still in degrees of lockdown, there’s relatively little cross border travel going on. But the European Commission has been focusing attention on supporting the tourism sector during the coronavirus crisis — proposing a tourism & transport package this week which sets out recommendations for a gradual and phased lifting of restrictions.

Once Europeans start traveling again, the effectiveness of any national contacts tracing apps could be undermined if systems aren’t able to talk to each other. In the EU, this could mean, for example, a French citizen who travels to Germany for a business trip — where they spend time with a person who subsequently tests positive for COVID — may not be warned of the exposure risk. Or indeed, vice versa.

In the UK, which remains an EU member until the end of this year (during the Brexit transition period), the issue is even more pressing — given Ireland’s decision to opt for a decentralized app architecture for its national app. Over the land border in Northern Ireland, which is part of the UK, the national app would presumably be the centralized system that’s being devised by the UK’s NHSX. And the NHSX’s CEO has admitted this technical division presents a specific challenge for the NHS COVID-19 app.

There are much broader questions over how useful (or useless) digital contacts tracing will prove to be in the fight against the coronavirus. But it’s clear that if such apps don’t interoperate smoothly in a multi-country region such as Europe there will be additional, unhelpful gaps opening up in the data.

Any lack of cross-border interoperability will, inexorably, undermine functionality — unless people given up travelling outside their own countries for good.

EU interoperability as agreed goal

EU Member States recognize this, and this week agreed to a set of interoperability guidelines for national apps — writing that: “Users should be able to rely on a single app independently of the region or Member State they are in at a certain moment.”

The full technical detail of interoperability is yet to be figured out — “to ensure the operationalisation of interoperability as soon as possible”, as they put it.

But the intent is to work together so that different apps can share a minimum of data to enable exposure notifications to keep flowing as Europeans travel around the region, as (or once) restrictions are lifted. 

“Whatever the approach taken with approved apps, all Member States and the Commission consider that interoperability between these apps and between backend systems is essential for these tools to enable the tracing of cross-border infection chains,” they write. “This is particularly important for cross-border workers and neighbouring countries. Ultimately, this effort will support the gradual lifting of border controls within the EU and the restoration of freedom of movement. These tools should be integrated with other tools contemplated in the COVID-19 contact tracing strategy of each Member State.”

European users should be able to expect interoperability. But whether smooth cross-border working will happen in practice remains a major question mark. Getting multiple different health systems and apps that might be calculating risk exposure in slightly different ways to interface and share the relevant bits of data in a secure way is itself a major operational and technical challenge.

However this is made even more of a headache given ongoing differences between countries over the core choice of app architecture for their national coronavirus contacts tracing.

This boils down to a choice of either a decentralized or centralized approach — with decentralized protocols storing and processing data locally on smartphones (i.e. the matching is done on device); and centralized protocols that upload exposure data and perform matching on a central server which is controlled by a national authority, such as a health service.

While there looks to be clear paths for interoperability between different decentralized protocols — here, for example, is a detailed discussion document written by backers of different decentralized protocols on how proximity tracing systems might interoperate across regions — interoperability between decentralized and centralized protocols, which are really polar opposite approaches, looks difficult and messy to say the least.

And that’s a big problem if we want digital contacts tracing to smoothly take place across borders.

(Additionally, some might say that if Europe can’t agree on a common way forward vis-a-vis a threat that affects all the region’s citizens it does not reflect well on the wider ‘European project’; aka the Union to which many of the region’s countries belong. But health is a Member State competence, meaning the Commission has limited powers in this area.)

In the eHealth Network ‘Interoperability guidelines’ document Member States agree that interoperability should happen regardless of which app architecture a European country has chosen.

But a section on cross-border transmission chains can’t see a way forward on how exactly to do that yet [emphasis ours] — i.e. beyond general talk of the need for “trusted and secure” mechanisms:

Solutions should allow Member States’ servers to communicate and receive relevant keys between themselves using a trusted and secure mechanism.

Roaming users should upload their relevant proximity encounter information to the home country backend. The other Member State(s) should be informed about possible infected or exposed users*.

*For roaming users, the question of to which servers the relevant proximity contacts details should be sent will be further explored during technical discussions. Interoperability questions will also be explored in relation to how a users’ app should behave after confirmed as COVID-19 positive and the possible need for a confirmation of infection free.

Conversely, the 19 academics behind the proposal for interoperability of different decentralized contacts tracing protocols, do include a section at the end of the document discussing how, in theory, such systems could plug into ‘alternatives’: aka centralized systems.

But it’s thick with privacy caveats.

Privacy risks of crossing system streams

The academics warn that while interoperability between decentralized and centralized systems “is possible in principle, it introduces substantial privacy concerns” — writing that, on the one hand, decentralized systems have been designed specifically to avoid the ability of an central authority being able to recover the identity of users; and “consequently, centralized risk calculation cannot be used without severely weakening the privacy of users of the decentralized system”.

While, on the other, if decentralized risk calculation is used as the ‘bridge’ to achieve interoperability between the two philosophically opposed approaches — by having centralized systems “publish a list of all decentralized ephemeral identifiers it believes to be at risk of infection due to close proximity with positive-tested users of the centralized system” — then it would make it easier for attackers to target centralized systems with reidentification attacks of any positive-tested users. So, again, you get additional privacy risks.

“In particular, each user of the decentralized system would be able to recover the exact time and place they were exposed to the positive-tested individual by comparing their list of recorded ephemeral identifiers which they emitted with the list of ephemeral identifiers published by the server,” they write, specifying that the attack would reveal in which “15 minute” an app user was exposed to a COVID-positive person.

And while they concede there’s a similar risk of reidentification attacks against all forms of decentralized systems, they contend this is more limited — given that decentralized protocol design is being used to mitigate this risk “by only recording coarse timing information”, such as six-hour intervals.

So, basically, the argument is there’s a greater chance that you might only encounter one other person in a 15 minute interval (and therefore could easily guess who might have given you COVID) vs a six-hour window. Albeit, with populations likely to continue to be encouraged to stay at home as much as possible for the foreseeable future, there is still a chance a user of a decentralized system might only pass one other person over a larger time interval too.

As trade offs go, the argument made by backers of decentralized systems is they’re inherently focused on the risks of reidentification — and actively working on ways to mitigate and limit those risks by system design — whereas centralized systems gloss over that risk entirely by assuming trust in a central authority to properly handle and process device-linked personal data. Which is of course a very big assumption.

While such fine-grained details may seem incredibly technical for the average user to need to digest, the core associated concern for coronavirus apps generally — and interoperability specifically — is that users need to be able to trust apps to use them.

So even if a person trusts their own government to handle their sensitive health data, they may be less inclined to trust another country’s government. Which means there could be some risk that centralized systems operating within a mutli-country region such as Europe might end up polluting the ‘trust well’ for these apps more generally — depending on exactly how they’re made to interoperate with decentralized systems.

The latter are designed so users don’t have to trust an authority to oversee their personal data. The former are absolutely not. So it’s really chalk and cheese.

Ce n’est pas un problème?

At this point, momentum among EU nations has largely shifted behind decentralized protocols for coronavirus contacts tracing apps. As previously reported, there has been a major battle between different EU groups supporting opposing approaches. And — in a key shift — privacy concerns over centralized systems being associated with governmental ‘mission creep’ and/or a lack of citizen trust appear to have encouraged Germany to flip to a decentralized model.

Apple and Google’s decision to support decentralized systems for the contacts tracing API they’re jointly developing, and due to release later this month (sample code is out already), has also undoubtedly weighted the debate in favor of decentralized protocols. 

Not all EU countries are aligned at this stage, though. Most notably France remains determined to pursue a centralized system for coronavirus contacts tracing.

As noted above, the UK has also been building an app that’s designed to upload data to a central server. Although it’s reportedly investigating switching to a decentralized model in order to be able to plug into the Apple and Google API — given technical challenges on iOS associated with background Bluetooth access.

Another outlier is Norway — which has already launched a centralized app (which also collects GPS data — against Commission and Member States’ own recommendations that tracing apps should not harvest location data).

High level pressure is clearly being applied, behind the scenes and in public, for EU Member States to agree on a common approach for coronavirus contacts tracing apps. The Commission has been urging this for weeks. Even as French government ministers have preferred to talk in public about the issue as a matter of technological sovereignty — arguing national governments should not have their health policy decisions dictated to them by U.S. tech giants.

“It is for States to chose their architecture and requests were made to Apple to enable both [centralized and decentralized systems],” a French government spokesperson told us late last month.

While there may well be considerable sympathy with that point of view in Europe, there’s also plenty of pragmatism on display. And, sure, some irony — given the region markets itself regionally and globally as a champion of privacy standards. (No shortage of op-eds have been penned in recent weeks on the strange sight of tech giants seemingly schooling EU governments over privacy; while veteran EU privacy advocates have laughed nervously to find themselves fighting in the same camp as data-mining giant Google.)

Commission EVP Margrethe Vestager could also be heard on BBC radio this week suggesting she wouldn’t personally use a coronavirus contacts tracing app that wasn’t built atop a decentralized app architecture. Though the Brexit-focused UK government is unlikely to have an open ear for the views of Commission officials, even piped through establishment radio news channels.

The UK may be forced to listen to technological reality though, if it’s workaround for iOS Bluetooth background access proves as flakey as analysis suggests. And it’s telling that the NHSX is funding parallel work on an app that could plug into the Apple-Google API, per reports in the FT, which would mean abandoning the centralized architecture.

Which leaves France as the highest profile hold-out.

In recent weeks a team at Inria, the government research agency that’s been working on its centralized ROBERT coronavirus contacts tracing protocol, proposed a third way for exposure notifications — called DESIRE — which was billed as an evolution of the approach “leveraging the best of centralized and decentralized systems”.

The new idea is to add a new secret cryptographically generated key to the protocol, called Private Encounter Tokens (PETs), which would encode encounters between users — as a way to provide users with more control over which identifiers they disclose to a central server, and thereby avoid the system harvesting social graph data.

“The role of the server is merely to match PETs generated by diagnosed users with the PETs provided by requesting users. It stores minimal pseudonymous data. Finally, all data that are stored on the server are encrypted using keys that are stored on the mobile devices, protecting against data breach on the server. All these modifications improve the privacy of the scheme against malicious users and authority. However, as in the first version of ROBERT, risk scores and notifications are still managed and controlled by the server of the health authority, which provides high robustness, flexibility, and efficacy,” the Inria team wrote in the proposal. 

The DP-3T consortium, backers of an eponymous decentralized protocol that’s gained widespread backing from governments in Europe — including Germany’s, followed up with a “practical assessment” of Inria’s proposal — in which they suggest the concept makes for “a very interesting academic proposal, but not a practical solution”; given limitations in current mobile phone Bluetooth radios and, more generally, questions around scalability and feasibility. (tl;dr this sort of idea could take years to properly implement and the coronavirus crisis hardly involves the luxury of time.)

The DP-3T analysis is also heavily skeptical that DESIRE could be made to interoperate with either existing centralized or decentralized proposals — suggesting a sort of ‘worst of both words’ scenario on the cross-border functionality front. So, er…

One person familiar with EU Member States’ discussions about coronavirus tracing apps and interoperability, who briefed TechCrunch on condition of anonymity, also suggested the DESIRE proposal would not fly given its relative complexity (vs the pressing need to get apps launched soon if they are to be of any use in the current pandemic). This person also pointed to question marks over required bandwidth and impact on device battery life. For DESIRE to work they suggested it would need universal uptake by all Europe’s governments — and every EU nation agreeing to adopt a French proposal would hardly carry the torch for nation state sovereignty.

What France does with its tracing app remains a key unanswered question. (An earlier planned debate on the issue in its parliament was shelved.) It is a major EU economy and, where interoperability is concerned, simple geography makes it a vital piece of the Western European digital puzzle, given it has land borders (and train links into) a large number of other countries.

We reached out to the French government with questions about how it proposes to make its national coronavirus contacts tracing app interoperable with decentralized apps that are being developed elsewhere across the EU — but at the time of writing it had not responded to our email.

This week in a video interview with BFM Business, the president of Inria, Bruno Sportisse, was reported to have expressed hope that the app will be able to interoperate by June — but also said in an interview that if the project is unsuccessful “we will stop it”.

“We’re working on making those protocols interoperable. So it’s not something that is going to be done in a week or two,” Sportisse also told BFM (translated from French by TechCrunch’s Romain Dillet). “First, every country has to develop its own application. That’s what every country is doing with its own set of challenges to solve. But at the same time we’re working on it, and in particular as part of an initiative coordinated by the European Commission to make those protocols interoperable or to define new ones.”

One thing looks clear: Adding more complexity further raises the bar for interoperability. And development timeframes are necessarily tight.

The pressing imperatives of a pandemic crisis also makes talk of technological sovereignty sound a bit of, well, a bourgeois indulgence. So France’s ambition to single-handedly define a whole new protocol for every nation in Europe comes across as simultaneously tone-deaf and flat-footed — perhaps especially in light if Germany’s swift U-turn the other way.

In a pinch and a poke, European governments agreeing to coalesce around a common approach — and accepting a quick, universal API fix which is being made available at the smartphone platform level — would also offer a far clearer message to citizens. Which would likely help engender citizen trust in and adoption of national apps — that would, in turn, given the apps a greater chance of utility. A pan-EU common approach might also feed tracing apps’ utility by yielding fewer gaps in the data. The benefits could be big.

However, for now, Europe’s digital response to the coronavirus crisis looks messier than that — with ongoing wrinkles and questions over how smoothly different nationals apps will be able to work together as countries opt to go their own way.

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Foxconn’s profits plunged nearly 90%, due to COVID-19 shutdown

As earnings season winds down, we’re getting a solid picture on just how profoundly the COVID-19 pandemic has impacted corporations’ bottomline. Taiwan-based manufacturing giant Foxconn is among those companies that were utterly walloped over the previous quarter. Plant shutdowns — particularly in China — lead to a 90% year-over-year drop in profits for the quarter.

Foxconn had already attempted to brace investors for bad news back in March. At the time, the company failed to give a clear indication of how its profits would look for the rest of the year, owing to the unprecedented uncertainty of the virus. “Prevention of outbreak, resumption of work and production are our top priority,” Chairman Liu Young-Way said at the time.

Two months later, uncertainty remains.  “The visibility of our outlook for the whole year is limited,” Liu added on this week’s call. “Right now, there is no way I can offer the outlook for the latter half of this year.” The executive added, however, that company expect revenue declines to be far less pronounced over the next quarter.

iPhone sales are down, ahead of uncertain times for the industry

That’s due, in part, to the fact that it’s resumed normal production at most of its China plants following the late-January shutdown. The country comprises around three-quarters of Foxconn’s production capacity. There will, however, continue to be less than optimal numbers, as smartphone sales are expected to continue to decline or stagnate for many companies — driving down demand for Foxconn’s services.

Apple, one of Foxconn’s key clients, is believed to be delaying the release of its next flagship, over issues of consumer demand and supply chain shortages.

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Why did Apple buy NextVR?

After plenty of talk about AR as the next computing platform, Apple may have more interest in virtual reality than they’ve previously forecasted.

Following an April report from 9to5mac, today Apple confirmed the acquisition of VR broadcasting startup NextVR to Bloomberg. A note on NextVR’s website now highlights that the company is “moving in a new direction.”

At face value, this acquisition seems a little strange for Apple. Apple has been pushing full throttle on mobile AR, largely eschewing public activity or interest in the VR world, leaving that domain wholly in Facebook’s hands. Late last year, The Information reported that Apple had informed employees that it may be shipping a device in 2022 that combined AR and VR capabilities in a form factor similar to the Oculus Quest. That teamed with this acquisition suggests that Apple may have deeper plans for VR than they’ve previously indicated.

Over a few years of iOS presence, it’s not clear whether Apple has really come to many grand realizations around what good AR content looks like. Therefore, releasing a “mixed reality” headset in a couple years and continuing to push developer innovation on AR content while relying on a broader base of VR content satisfying users makes practical sense for a gen-one AR device.

9to5mac pinned the NextVR deal price around $100 million, a price that’s far from a thrilling end for NextVR’s investors who collectively pumped $115 million into the company, but at the same time would be a surprisingly robust exit for the company given the broader shape of the VR content market at the moment. If that’s truly where the deal ended up, that would be a lot of money for Apple to pay for something that they don’t have meaningful plans for. One of NextVR’s biggest strengths was in the partnerships they had built out over the years with sports leagues, I’m guessing Apple doesn’t care too much about keeping those partnerships active when they don’t sell devices optimized for them, but NextVR’s tech stack for broadcasting VR content broadly could paint a picture of future Apple content maneuvering.

As Apple has built out organizational heft in the content space around efforts like Apple TV+, it’s more feasible that they’d want to use an acquisition like this to get a head start in extending their content network to new devices in their pipeline.

The main problem with all of this is that VR-optimized content doesn’t translate very well to augmented reality. NextVR’s solution leverages the full field-of-view of existing VR headsets, putting users in a wholly 3D environment. There’s no technical reasons that AR headset users couldn’t eventually experience this content in the same way but there aren’t any AR headsets with the field-of-view to leverage this type of content, and advances here have been pretty slow. Existing AR devices might not be optimized for VR and vice versa, but Apple might already be organizing itself with the assumption that won’t be the case for long.

Facebook struggled for years to build out a meaningful network of virtual reality content to power its Oculus hardware. Solving the chicken-and-the-egg problem of not enough content for users but not enough users to court content developers ended up leading to Facebook unilaterally bankrolling VR development for several years. Apple could await a similar fate in AR.

With Magic Leap increasingly out of the picture, when Apple eventually debuts an augmented reality device, they may find themselves arriving onto a dead sector with little non-enterprise development organically in the works. Apple has long thrived on its developer relationships to gather early interest in a new platform, but with ARKit’s consumer interest largely failing to build thus far, it’s fair to expect that plenty of developers might have a wait-and-see approach to any ambitious AR release, leaving a heavy burden on Apple’s ability to scrounge together AR launch content.

Apple’s biggest failure with ARKit thus far has been their own inability to highlight the platform’s potential on mobile devices. Through several iterations of their AR development platform, the company has been more conservative than ever in showcasing first-party use cases. Their most high-profile reveal has been a downloadable 3D measurement app. All the while, few hits have emerged that uniquely leverage the spatial platform.

Virtual reality may be a safer place for Apple to invest in the meantime. Good virtual reality content is generally easier to make, it relies less on interacting with the real world and developers have more end-to-end control of experiences. Leveraging NextVR’s tech could give Apple access to a smooth pipeline towards a wider body of VR content that could be enjoyed on a “mixed reality” device and on more technologically advanced AR glasses down the road. Tim Cook and plenty of others in Apple’s leadership have been outspoken in their excitement for AR’s potential, but as developers continue to struggle in finding that potential, perhaps virtual reality’s appeal is growing more important to that long-term strategy.

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Decrypted: Contact-tracing privacy, Zoom buys Keybase, Microsoft eyes CyberX

As the world looks to reopen after weeks of lockdown, governments are turning to contact tracing to understand the spread of the deadly coronavirus.

Most nations are leaning toward privacy-focused apps that use Bluetooth signals to create an anonymous profile of where a person has been and when. Some, like Israel, are bucking the trend and are using location and cell phone data to track the spread, prompting privacy concerns.

Some of the biggest European economies — Germany, Italy, Switzerland and Ireland — are building apps that work with Apple and Google’s contact-tracing API. But the U.K., one of the worst-hit nations in Europe, is going it alone.

Unsurprisingly, critics have both security and privacy concerns, so much so that the U.K. may end up switching over to Apple and Google’s system anyway. Given that one of Israel’s contact-tracing systems was found on an passwordless server this week, and India denied a privacy issue in its contact-tracing app, there’s not much wiggle-room to get these things wrong.

Turns out that even during a pandemic, people still care about their privacy.

Here’s more from the week.

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THE BIG PICTURE

Zoom acquires Keybase, but questions remain

When Zoom announced it acquired online encryption key startup Keybase, for many, the reaction was closer to mild than wild. Even Keybase, a service that lets users store and manage their encryption keys, acknowledged its uncertain future. “Keybase’s future is in Zoom’s hands, and we’ll see where that takes us,” the company wrote in a blog post. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Zoom has faced security snafu after snafu. But after dancing around the problems, it promised to call in the cavalry and double down on fixing its encryption. So far, so good. But where does Keybase, largely a consumer product, fit into the fray? It doesn’t sound like even Zoom knows yet, per enterprise reporter Ron Miller. What’s clear is that Zoom needs encryption help, and few have the technical chops to pull that off.

Keybase’s team might — might — just help Zoom make good on its security promises.

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