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Uber and Lyft have agreed to pay a combined $328 million in settlements following a wage theft investigation by the New York attorney general’s office. According to New York AG Letitia James, the companies’ policies “systematically cheated their drivers out of hundreds of millions of dollars in pay and benefits.” They’ll both now have to pay settlement funds to more than 100,000 current and former drivers in New York, and offer both minimum hourly pay rates and paid sick leave.

In the two settlements, Uber has to pay $290 million, while Lyft must pay $38 million. The AG’s office found both Uber and Lyft shortchanged drivers by deducting sales taxes from drivers’ commissions that should have been paid by riders between 2014 and 2017. They also did not offer paid sick leave. As a result of the settlement, drivers outside of New York City will be guaranteed an earnings floor of $26 per hour (NYC drivers already have minimum rates under Taxi & Limousine Commission regulations), and will earn one hour of sick pay for every 30 hours worked. This will be capped at 56 hours per year.

NYC drivers will get $17 per hour for sick leave, while drivers outside of the city will get $26 per hour. Both rates will be adjusted annually for inflation. Drivers can put in a claim for their share of the settlement on the New York Attorney General’s website. The companies will also be required to update their apps to improve the process for putting in sick leave requests and provide support for pay-related questions, plus earnings statements for drivers which explain their compensation in detail.

New York has been cracking down on app-based service providers in recent years amid a push by the Biden administration to see gig workers classified as employees. A California court, however, slapped down one such bill in March, allowing companies to continue classifying their drivers as contractors. But NY has made progress recently in securing more protections. In September, Uber, GrubHub and DoorDash were told they must pay their delivery workers a minimum wage.

The Beatles are back, sort of. The fab four just released a new song, the group’s first since 1995. “Now and Then” is being advertised as the final Beatles track, which makes sense given that two of the members have passed and the other two are well over 80 years old.

The song was built using a demo track from John Lennon dating back to the 1970s and a guitar track from George Harrison from 1995. The surviving Beatles, Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr, finished off the tune with the help of modern machine learning technology.

The software, which was first used by director Peter Jackson when making the Get Back documentary for Apple, was able to split Lennon’s vocal from the piano without any bleed, giving the remaining Beatles free rein to add whatever they wanted. You can watch a documentary on the making of the song right here.

As for the song itself, it’s a relatively slow Lennon ballad, with his vocals being a highlight. McCartney lays down one of his effortless bass lines and Starr hits the drums. The guitar solo is in the style of Harrison, but not actually played by him, though he handles some of the rhythm guitar in the background. There’s also a full orchestral arrangement because, well, it’s the Beatles. This likely won’t go down as one of the group’s most beloved tracks, but that Lennon vocal is both haunting and beautiful.

“Now and Then” was supposed to come out back in 1995 as part of The Beatles Anthology, along with “Free as a Bird” and “Real Love”, two other tracks culled from 1970s Lennon demos. Back in the 1990s, however, the technology just wasn’t there to separate Lennon’s vocal from the piano without some serious degradation to the original take.

The Beatles may say this is their last song ever, but we’ll report back in 2053 and see if that ends up being true. See you then. In the meantime, check out the track.

NASA has announced a new streaming service called NASA+ that’s set to hit most major platforms next week. It’ll be completely free, with no subscription requirements, and you won’t be forced to sit through ads. NASA+ will be available starting November 8.

The space agency previously teased the release of its upcoming streaming service over the summer as it more broadly revamped its digital presence. At the time, it said NASA+ would be available on the NASA iOS and Android apps, and streaming players including Roku, Apple TV and Fire TV. You’ll also be able to watch it on the web. 

There aren’t too many details out just yet about the content itself, but NASA says its family friendly programming “embeds you into our missions” with live coverage and original video series. NASA already has its own broadcast network called NASA TV, and the new streaming service seems to be an expansion of that. But, we’ll know more when it officially launches next Wednesday.

External studies and internal reports alike have shown time and time again the negative impact social media can have on teens' mental health, leading to a range of safety precautions across platforms. Now, YouTube is expanding its well-being tools for young people, including recommendation limits on videos that could be harmful.

YouTube teamed up with its Youth and Families Advisory Committee to identify types of videos that could have a detrimental effect on a teens' mental health if repeatedly viewed. These categories included videos that idealized certain body weights, features and fitness levels or show social aggression. However, these videos are still searchable (and can be recommended at least once). To this end, YouTube has made its crisis resources — the information that appears if someone searches words like "self-harm" or "eating disorders" — into a full-page panel. The idea is that this will force viewers to take more of a break and more clearly state third-party crisis hotlines and suggestions for searches like "grounding exercises." 

The company is also increasing the frequency of its Bedtime and Take a Break reminders, with the latter automatically set to appear across videos every hour for viewers under 18. The frequency can then be adjusted in settings by the user or a parent. Breaks could be beneficial, given an August 2022 report from Pew Research found that 95 percent of US teens use YouTube, and nearly one-fifth of them are on it "almost constantly." TikTok, meanwhile, was the second most popular platform, with 67 percent of respondents using it — nearly one-third less than YouTube. 

According to legend, the King of Siam would give a white elephant to courtiers who had upset them. It was a far more devious punishment than simply having them executed. The recipient had no choice but to simply thank the king for such an opulent gift, knowing that they likely could not afford the upkeep for such an animal. It would inevitably lead them to financial ruin. This story is almost certainly untrue, but it has led to a modern holiday staple: the White Elephant gift exchange.

Getting a White Elephant gift right requires walking a very fine line. The goal isn’t to just buy something terrible and force someone to take it home with them. It should be useful or amusing enough that it won’t immediately end up in the trash. It also shouldn’t be easily tossed in a junk drawer and forgotten about. So here are a few suggestions that will not only get you a few chuckles, but will also make the recipient feel (slightly) burdened.

Clocky Alarm Clock on Wheels

KFC Fire Starter Log by Enviro-Log

LDKCOK USB 2.0 Active Repeater Extension Cable

Galaxy Projector

Msraynsford Useless Machine 2.0

Lightsaber Chopsticks

MMX Marshmallow Crossbow

Banana Phone

Friendship Lamp

FAQs

What is white elephant?

A white elephant gift exchange is a party game typically played around the holidays in which people exchange funny, impractical gifts.

How does white elephant work?

A group of people each bring one wrapped gift to the white elephant gift exchange, and each gift is typically of a similar value. All gifts are then placed together and the group decides the order in which they will each claim a gift. The first person picks a white elephant gift from the pile, unwraps it and their turn ends. The following players can either decide to unwrap another gift and claim it as their own, or steal a gift from someone who has already taken a turn. The rules can vary from there, including the guidelines around how often a single item can be stolen — some say twice, max. The game ends when every person has a white elephant gift.

Why is it called white elephant?

The term “white elephant” is said to come from the legend of the King of Siam gifting white elephants to courtiers who upset him. While it seems like a lavish gift on its face, the belief is that the courtiers would be ruined by the animal’s upkeep costs.

The following article contains spoilers for Lower Decks, Season Four, Episode Ten.

Four seasons in, and you more or less know what you’ll get from a Star Trek: Lower Decks season finale. A hefty dose of in-jokes and references that conclude the season arc by pulling the Cerritos crew together. There’s a focus on teamwork over individual valor, and a belief that Starfleet’s mission is the right one. Add in a gag or two about how Star Trek is better when it’s slow and cerebral, add in a cliffhanger that threatens the show’s status quo, and you’re done.

Just because “Old Friends, New Planets” sticks to this formula, it doesn’t mean it isn’t good, and you’ll laugh plenty of times in the half hour. The show’s ability to wheel out a staggeringly left field comic premise like Twaining is one of its biggest strengths. But the episode is full of solid gags that work on a second or third re-watch, including the lampshading about who Locarno (Robert Duncan McNeill) does or does not look like.

Judged on its merits as an episode of Star Trek, and you’ll find it similarly-winning with great writing and direction. I can’t help but single out Chris Westlake’s score, whose work this season has been just as great as the last. It was wonderful, too, to see Shannon Fill and Wil Wheaton recruited for their cameos in Mariner’s flashback. Who else but a true devotee would make such an effort, and the show’s creative team led by Mike McMahan has an infectious love for Trek’s golden era.

It’s just that there’s also a sense of diminishing returns, or that the show needs to find a higher gear to operate in. The limits of a sitcom’s premise means you can’t do too much to up-end the status quo, but you can feel this desire for evolution. It’s the old trap: You can’t joke that the USS Cerritos isn’t important, and keep putting them in these high-stakes scenarios. Can you go back to fixing a warp manifold if your lead character just toppled a planet-threatening tyrant?

And now, an intervention.

Sadly, one thing bothered me about “Old Friends, New Planets,” which requires me to bring up Star Trek: Picard’s dreadful third season. I’m not relitigating matters here, but I am asking why two Trek series opted to do The Wrath of Khan homages in the same year. Isn’t spotting duplication like this and preventing it at the pre-production stage part of Franchise Overseer Alex Kurtzman’s job? Sure, he can’t be in every meeting, but surely this is why he’s credited as an executive producer on every Trek series currently running, right?

It was nice, however, that both series honored the late CGI artist Fabio Passaro.

It doesn’t help that back-to-back Wrath of Khan homages mere months apart look less like a show of admiration and more like a cry for help. When Star Trek’s creative well runs dry, it’s to Nicholas Meyer’s 1982 classic that they run to for inspiration. As I wrote back in February, the path to Khan is so well-worn I’m not sure there isn’t a single element that hasn’t been strip-mined to oblivion.

And while creatives pillage that film’s iconography, the person behind it has often been persona non grata in Trek circles. Meyer’s still around, and doing good work, but his Trek pitches haven’t had a look-in for a long while. I don’t know if it’s ageism, or if he’s awful in real life, but the fact his work is so popular yet he can’t get a look in feels unjust. And we still haven’t heard anything more about Ceti Alpha V, the Khan midquel podcast that was announced more than a year ago.

I think it’s time that we staged an intervention, and said that Star Trek is no longer allowed, even in jest, to pull anything from The Wrath of Khan. In fact, let’s make that broader, and say that we need to leave those toys in the box for a decade or more. And instead, let’s focus on telling new stories that people will be desperate to honor three or four decades in the future.

Whether it's for a tour of the International Space Station (ISS) or a battle with Darth Vader, most VR enthusiasts are looking to get off this planet and into the great beyond. HTC, however, is sending VR headsets to the ISS to give lonely astronauts something to do besides staring into the star-riddled abyss.

The company partnered up with XRHealth and engineering firm Nord Space to send HTC VIVE Focus 3 headsets to the ISS as part of an ongoing effort to improve the mental health of astronauts in the midst of long assignments on the station. These headsets are pre-loaded with unique software that has been specifically designed to meet the mental health needs of literal space cadets, so they aren’t just for playing Walkabout Mini Golf during the off hours (though that’s not a bad idea.)

The headsets feature new camera tracking tech that was specially developed and adapted to work in microgravity, including eye-tracking sensors to better assess the mental health status of astronauts. These sensors are coupled with software intended to “maintain mental health while in orbit.” The headsets have also been optimized to stabilize alignment and, as such, reduce the chances of motion sickness. Can you imagine free-floating vomit in space?

Danish astronaut Andreas Mogensen will be the first ISS crew member to use the VR headset for preventative mental health care during his six-month mission as commander of the space station. HTC notes that astronauts are often isolated for “months and years at a time” while stationed in space. 

This leads to the question of internet connectivity. After all, Mogensen and his fellow astronauts would likely want to connect with family and friends while wearing their brand-new VR headsets. Playing Population: One by yourself is not exactly satisfying.

The internet used to be really slow on the ISS, with speeds resembling a dial-up connection to AOL in 1995. However, recent upgrades have boosted Internet speeds to around 600 megabits-per-second (Mbps) on the station. As a comparison, the average download speed in the US is about 135 Mbps. So we’d actually be the bottleneck in this scenario, and not the astronauts. The ISS connection should allow for even the most data-hungry VR applications.

These souped-up Vive Focus 3 headsets are heading up to the space station shortly, though there’s no arrival date yet. It’s worth noting that it took some massive feats of engineering to even get these headsets to work in microgravity, as so many aspects of a VR headset depend on normal Earth gravity.

Normally, all you get from binge-watching shows on Netflix are dry eyes and a popup asking if you're still watching — has the answer ever been no? But, Netflix is celebrating one year of its ad-supported plan by giving all users on that tier every fourth episode of a consecutive binge ad-free. That's certainly not a bad way to entice you into staying on the streamer for just one more episode (cut to five episodes later without moving).

Netflix is also rolling out downloads on its ad-supported tier, claiming to be the first streamer to make the option available for users who have ads included. While the binge-watching perk wont roll out until early 2024, the ability to download shows and movies should be available by the end of the week. However, it's unclear if downloaded shows will enjoy the binge-watching perk once it rolls out.

For a company that claimed it would never include an ad-supported tier, Netflix has certainly embraced the format since its November 2022 launch. It introduced its first Title Sponsorship during the most recent season of Love Is Blind. Netflix will continue with partnerships for another reality series, Squid Game: The Challenge, and The Crown's final season. Early 2024 will also see advertisers given the option to include a QR code in any of their US-based content.

Netflix's ad-supported plan is by far the cheapest option after the streamer cut its Basic tier in mid-2023. It comes to $6.99 each month, while the Standard plan is $15.49 and the Premium is $22.49. The lowest-priced tier allows for two concurrent streams and has been upgraded to 1080p video quality versus 720p.

YouTube’s no longer just experimenting with ad-dodging viewers. The platform has gone all out in its fight against add-ons, extensions and programs that prevent it from serving ads to viewers worldwide, it confirmed to Engadget.

“The use of ad blockers violates YouTube’s Terms of Service,” a spokesperson said. YouTube started cracking down on the use of ad blockers earlier this year. By June, it took on a more aggressive approach and warned viewers they wouldn’t be able to play more than three videos unless they disable their ad blockers.

It may be an overly aggressive push: Some people apparently can’t play videos on Microsoft Edge and Firefox browsers even if they don’t have ad blockers, according to Android Police, but we could not replicate that behavior.

— Mat Smith

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This AI-powered security camera can describe what it sees in detail

Beyond just ‘dog spotted.’

Psync Labs

Psync Labs’ focus is to improve machine vision and pair this with generative AI to help it, and you, understand what it can see. Its debut security camera, the Genie S, will process what it sees and send you a written description of what (it thinks) is going on. The camera, which doesn’t have the best picture and sound quality, has 32GB built-in storage for $35, and some exciting stuff happening inside.

ViewSay is Psync’s transcription tool that uses GPT, a form of generative AI, to get the camera to describe in text what it’s seeing. ViewSay, which currently costs 99 cents a month (but will jump to $7 per month in the future) can apparently identify objects, sort events that triggered the recording and even let you search through the clips with text, all through your smartphone. It’s early days, but the system shows glimpses of insightful visual analysis .

Continue reading.

Apple Music’s Siri-only $5 voice plan gets silenced

It’s no longer listed on the streaming service’s website.

Apple appears to have killed off its lowest-cost Apple Music subscription. The Apple Music Voice Plan allowed folks to access the streaming service for $5 per month, as long as they were willing to use it only through voice commands to Siri. However, as of Wednesday, the plan is no longer listed on the Apple Music webpage. As it stands, the cheapest standalone Apple Music option is now the student plan, which costs $6 per month and includes Apple TV+ at no extra cost — if you’re a student.

Continue reading.

LinkedIn’s latest premium perk is an AI job coach

The platform is ramping up its AI-powered features as it hits 1 billion users.

LinkedIn is adding a new AI-powered job coach for its premium subscribers. The feature will tap into LinkedIn data to help job seekers find, research and apply for roles, and it arrives as the company announced its user base has grown to one billion members. For now, the most prominent feature for job seekers will be AI-generated insights alongside each job posting. The tool can summarize lengthy job descriptions and weigh in on whether the role is a good fit for a user, based on their LinkedIn profile. For example, it can highlight specific work experiences users’ may want to emphasize in their application.

Continue reading.

Disney will buy out Comcast and take full control of Hulu

It will pay $8.61 billion for the deal.

Disney is buying the rest of Hulu from Comcast. It will acquire the 33 percent of Hulu Comcast still controls and expects to pay NBCUniversal around $8.61 billion for the deal, though the final amount will be determined sometime next year. Disney CEO Bob Iger said when he announced the combined streaming app that it’s “a logical progression” of the company’s direct-to-consumer offerings. And hey: Comcast still has Peacock.

Continue reading.

It's been less than two months since Amazon launched the Fire TV soundbar at its annual fall event, but the device is already on sale as part of the website's early Black Friday offerings. You can get the brand new entry to the Fire TV line for $100, which is a full $20 less than its original list price. The device can enhance your TV audio with its dual speakers and give you access to a 3D virtual surround sound experience with its DTS Virtual:X and Dolby Audio support.

It can connect to your phone or tablet via Bluetooth, but it doesn't support Alexa voice commands. And if you want to adjust its volume, you'd have to use its remote. That said, if you have a Fire TV streaming device and a Fire TV-powered smart TV, you can use one remote for all of them — simply plug the soundbar's HDMI cable to your TV. 

Amazon's soundbar is just one of the Fire TV devices currently on sale at the website. You can get its streaming sticks for up to half off their usual prices, including the Fire TV Stick Lite that's on sale for $18 and the standard Fire TV Stick that's listed for $20. If you don't mind spending a bit more for higher-quality streaming, you can get the Fire TV Stick 4K for $30 instead or the even beefier Fire TV Stick Max for $45. Finally, the TV Cube will cost you over 20 percent less than usual and will set you back $110.

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