Lyft has officially introduced teen accounts for ages 13 to 17. This is a rideshare feature in which teenagers can request their own rides, which is similar to Uber’s pre-existing platform.

Teens request the rides on their own, but parents can keep an eye on things every step of the way. Lyft says that parents or guardians can see every ride in real time and manage the account. They also get updates at pickup and drop-off and the app allows communication with the driver when needed.

This is a rideshare service for teens, so there are several new safety features. The drivers must “meet the highest standards” on the platform. Lyft says they get annual background checks and must have “proven safe driving records, positive passenger interactions and experience behind the wheel.”

The teens have to enter a PIN to ensure the correct rider gets in the car, which is something Lyft has been experimenting with for adults. Audio recording of the ride is on by default, for an added layer of safety.

Lyft Teen is available right now, though not everywhere. The company has launched the platform in 200 markets, including New York City, Chicago, Atlanta and Miami, among others. It’s coming to more cities as the year winds on.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/apps/lyft-rolls-out-teen-accounts-with-enhanced-safety-protections-110002761.html?src=rss

YouTube Music has started putting lyrics — a previously free feature introduced in 2020 — behind a paywall, according to multiple users and 9to5Google. In the latest update, the “Lyrics” tab in the Now Playing screen displays a warning message: “You have [x] views remaining. Unlock lyrics with Premium.” Free users get lyrics for five songs, then after that, will only see a few lines before the rest of the song is blurred.

Google has been testing the feature since at least September with a limited number of users, according to previous reports. It’s been speculated that YouTube may have made the change to recuperate costs spent with lyric aggregators like Musixmatch. Spotify also put lyrics behind its Premium paywall in 2024, but a user backlash forced it to reinstate the feature for free users.

Google has yet to confirm the change, and while it appears to be a larger rollout, the feature change could still be in testing. YouTube Music’s Premium subscription costs $10.99 in the US with ad-free playback, offline downloads, AI features and more — the same as its main rivals Spotify, Apple Music and Amazon Music.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/entertainment/music/youtube-music-starts-limiting-lyrics-for-free-users-101258311.html?src=rss

“Elon Musk said on Sunday that SpaceX has shifted its focus to building a ‘self-growing city’ on the moon,” reports Reuters, “which could be achieved in less than 10 years.”

SpaceX still intends to start on Musk’s long-held ambition of a city on Mars within five to seven years, he wrote on his X social media platform, “but the overriding priority is securing the future of civilization and the Moon is faster.”

Musk’s comments echo a Wall Street Journal report on Friday, stating that SpaceX has told investors it would prioritize going to the moon and attempt a trip to Mars at a later time, targeting March 2027 for an uncrewed lunar landing. As recently as last year, Musk said that he aimed to send an uncrewed mission to Mars by the end of 2026.

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As Super Bowl Sunday comes to a close, America’s National Football League “is challenging innovators to improve the facemask on football helmets to reduce concussions in the game,” reports the Associated Press:

The league announced on Friday at an innovation summit for the Super Bowl the next round in the HealthTECH Challenge series, a crowdsourced competition designed to accelerate the development of cutting-edge football helmets and new standards for player safety. The challenge invites inventors, engineers, startups, academic teams and established companies to improve the impact protection and design of football helmets through improvements to how facemasks absorb and reduce the effects of contact on the field…

Most progress on helmet safety has come from improvements to the shell and padding, helping to reduce the overall rate of concussions. Working with the helmet industry, the league has brought in position-specific helmets, with those for quarterbacks, for example, having more padding in the back after data showed most concussions for QBs came when the back of the head slammed to the turf. But the facemask has mostly remained the same. This past season, 44% of in-game concussions resulted from impact to the player’s facemask, up from 29% in 2015, according to data gathered by the NFL. “What we haven’t seen over that period of time are any changes of any note to the facemask,” [said Jeff Miller, the NFL’s executive vice president overseeing player health and safety]… “Now we see, given the changes in our concussion numbers and injuries to players, that as changes are made to the helmet, fewer and fewer concussions are caused by hits to the shell, and more and more concussions as a percentage are by hits to the facemask…”

Selected winners will receive up to $100,000 in aggregate funding, as well as expert development support to help move their concepts from the lab to the playing field.
Winners will be announced in August, according to the article, “and Miller said he expected helmet manufacturers to start implementing any improvements into helmets soon after that.”

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“How Chinese is your car?” asks the Wall Street Journal. “Automakers are racing to work it out.”

Modern cars are packed with internet-connected widgets, many of them containing Chinese technology. Now, the car industry is scrambling to root out that tech ahead of a looming deadline, a test case for America’s ability to decouple from Chinese supply chains. New U.S. rules will soon ban Chinese software in vehicle systems that connect to the cloud, part of an effort to prevent cameras, microphones and GPS tracking in cars from being exploited by foreign adversaries.
The move is “one of the most consequential and complex auto regulations in decades,” according to Hilary Cain, head of policy at trade group the Alliance for Automotive Innovation. “It requires a deep examination of supply chains and aggressive compliance timelines.”

Carmakers will need to attest to the U.S. government that, as of March 17, core elements of their products don’t contain code that was written in China or by a Chinese company. The rule also covers software for advanced autonomous driving and will be extended to connectivity hardware starting in 2029. Connected cars made by Chinese or China-controlled companies are also banned, wherever their software comes from…

The Commerce Department’s Bureau of Industry and Security, which introduced the connected-vehicle rule, is also allowing the use of Chinese code that is transferred to a non-Chinese entity before March 17. That carve-out has sparked a rush of corporate restructuring, according to Matt Wyckhouse, chief executive of cybersecurity firm Finite State. Global suppliers are relocating China-based software teams, while Chinese companies are seeking new owners for operations in the West.

Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 for sharing the article.

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“You can hear the hum of the drone,” says a local newscaster, “but then the propellors come into contact with the building, chunks of the drone later seen falling down. The next video shows the drone on the ground, surrounded by smoke…
“Amazon tells us there was minimal damage to the apartment building, adding they are working with the appropriate people to handle any repairs.” But there were people standing outside, notes the woman who filmed the crash, and the falling drone “could’ve hit them, and they would’ve hurt.”

More from USA Today:

Cesarina Johnson, who captured the collision from her window, told USA TODAY that the collision seemed to happen “almost immediately” after she began to record the drone in action… “The propellers on the thing were still moving, and you could smell it was starting to burn,” Johnson told Fox 4 News. “And you see a few sparks in one of my videos. Luckily, nothing really caught on fire where it got, it escalated really crazy.” According to the outlet, firefighters were called out of an abundance of caution, but the “drone never caught fire….”

Amazon employees can be seen surveying the scene in the clip. Johnson told the outlet that firefighters and Amazon workers worked together to clean up before the drone was loaded into a truck.

Another local news report points out Amazon only began drone delivery in the area late last year.

The San Antonio Express News points out that America’s Federal Aviation Administration “opened an investigation into Amazon’s drone delivery program in November after one of its drone struck an Internet cable line in Waco.”

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Sure, most Americans are glued to their TVs for the today’s Super Bowl and/or the Winter Olympics. But for the non-sports minded, Amazon MGM Studios has released one last trailer for its forthcoming space odyssey Project Hail Mary, based on Andy Weir’s (The Martian) bestselling 2021 novel about an amnesiac biologist-turned-schoolteacher in space.

As previously reported, Amazon MGM Studios acquired the rights for Weir’s novel before it was even published and brought on Drew Goddard to write the screenplay. (Goddard also wrote the adapted screenplay for The Martian, so he’s an excellent choice.) The studio tapped Phil Lord and Christopher Miller (Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, The LEGO Movie) to direct and signed on Ryan Gosling to star. Per the official premise:

Science teacher Ryland Grace (Ryan Gosling) wakes up on a spaceship light years from home with no recollection of who he is or how he got there. As his memory returns, he begins to uncover his mission: solve the riddle of the mysterious substance causing the sun to die out. He must call on his scientific knowledge and unorthodox ideas to save everything on Earth from extinction… but an unexpected friendship means he may not have to do it alone.

In addition to Gosling, the cast includes Sandra Huller as head of the Hail Mary project and Ryland’s superior; Milana Vayntrub as project astronaut Olesya Ilyukhina; Ken Leung as project astronaut Yao Li-Jie; Liz Kingsman as Shapiro; Orion Lee as Xi; and James Ortiz as a new life form Ryland names Rocky.

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It’s the first “AI” Super Bowl, argues the tech/business writer at Slate, with AI company advertisements taking center stage, even while consumers insist to surveyors that they’re “mostly negative” about AI-generated ads.

Last year AI companies spent over $1.7 billion on AI-related ads, notes the Washington Post, adding the blitz this year will be “inescapable” — even while surveys show Americans “doubt the technology is good for them or the world…”

Slate wonders if that means history will repeat itself…

The sheer saturation of new A.I. gambits, added to the mismatch with consumer priorities, gives this year’s NFL showcase the sector-specific recession-indicator vibes that have defined Super Bowls of the past. 2022 was a pride-cometh-before-the-fall event for the cryptocurrency bubble, which collapsed in such spectacular fashion later that year — thanks largely to Super Bowl ad client Sam Bankman-Fried — that none of its major brands have ever returned to the broadcast. (… the coins themselves are once again crashing, hard.) Mortgage lender Ameriquest was as conspicuous a presence in the mid-2000s Super Bowls as it was an absence in the later aughts, having folded in 2007 when the risky subprime loans it specialized in helped kick off the financial crisis. And then there were all those bowl-game commercials for websites like Pets.com and Computer.com in 2000, when the dot-com rush brought attention to a slew of digital startups that went bust with the bubble.

Does this Super Bowl’s record-breaking A.I. ad splurge also portend a coming pop? Look at the business environment: The biggest names in the industry are swapping unimaginable stacks of cash exclusively with one another. One firm’s stock price depends on another firm’s projections, which depend on another contractor’s successes. Necessary infrastructure is meeting resistance, and all-around investment in these projects is riskier than ever. And yet, the sector is still willing to break the bank for the Super Bowl — even though, time and again, we’ve already seen how this particular game plays out.

People are using AI apps. And Meta has aired an ad where a man in rural New Mexico “says he landed a good job in his hometown at a Meta data center,” notes the Washington Post. “It’s interspersed with scenes from a rodeo and other folksy tropes, in one of . The TV commercial (and a similar one set in Iowa), aired in Washington, D.C., and a handful of other communities, suggesting it’s aimed at convincing U.S. elected officials that AI brings job opportunities.

But the Post argues the AI industry “is selling a vision of the future that Americans don’t like.” And they offer cite Allen Adamson, a brand strategist and co-founder of marketing firm Metaforce, who says the perennial question about advertising is whether it can fix bad vibes about a product.

“The answer since the dawn of marketing and advertising is no.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Amazon MGM just released the final trailer for its upcoming film starring Ryan Gosling, Project Hail Mary, and it provides our first good look at his five-legged alien co-star, Rocky. The movie adapts a 2021 Andy Weir (The Martian) novel of the same name, and follows Dr. Ryland Grace, a scientist who wakes up on a spacecraft far from Earth with no recollection of how he got there or why, only to discover he’s on a seemingly impossible mission to stop an extinction event. 

If you’ve read the book, you already know we’re in for an emotional rollercoaster with this one, and the latest trailer aptly tugs at our heartstrings with a glimpse of the friendship that grows between Grace and an alien he meets after waking up — and the incredibly high stakes they’re facing. The movie will be released nationwide on March 20, but Amazon announced alongside this trailer that it’ll be offering tickets for early screenings in premium formats including IMAX, Dolby Cinema, 4DX and 70MM to Prime members. Those screenings will begin on March 16, and tickets go on sale February 20 through Fandango. 

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/entertainment/tv-movies/the-final-trailer-for-project-hail-mary-is-here-and-its-an-emotional-ride-213444765.html?src=rss