The first fully hydrogen-powered passenger train service is now up and running. Coradia iLint trains built by Alstom are running on the line in Lower Saxony, Germany. The only emissions are steam and condensed water, and Alstom notes that the train operates with a low level of noise.

Five of the trains started running this week. Another nine will be added in the coming months to replace 15 diesel trains on the regional route. Alstom says the Coradia iLint has a range of 1,000 kilometers, meaning that it can run all day on the line using a single tank of hydrogen. A hydrogen filling station has been set up on the route between Cuxhaven, Bremerhaven, Bremervörde and Buxtehude.

Alstom, which started testing the trains in 2018, has agreements for Coradia iLint in other locales, including for 27 trains in the Frankfurt metropolitan area. The two other contracts are for regions in Italy and France.

The company notes that despite electrification efforts in some countries, much of Europe's rail network will rely on trains that are not electrified in the long term. It notes that there are more than 4,000 diesel-powered cars in Germany alone. In 2020, the country's national rail operator, Deutsche Bahn, said it was developing a hydrogen-powered train. While it will take some time to entirely switch the continent's rail network to green energy (assuming the full conversion happens at some point), bringing hydrogen-powered trains into service is a positive step forward.

Last year, DuckDuckGo announced a free service designed to fend off email trackers and help people protect their privacy. The Email Protection beta was initially available through a waitlist. Now, it's now in open beta, meaning everyone can try it without having to wait for access. 

Email Protection is a forwarding service that removes trackers from messages. DuckDuckGo will tell you which trackers it scrubs as well. During the waitlist beta, DuckDuckGo says it found trackers in 85 percent of testers' emails.

Anyone can now sign up for an @duck.com email address, which will work across desktop, iOS and Android. DuckDuckGo says you can create unlimited private email addresses, including a throwaway one for every website, if you prefer. You can also deactivate an address at any time.

The company has been beefing up Email Protection with more privacy-focused measures. It says Link Tracking Protection helps prevent tracking in email links, while Smarter Encryption upgrades unencrypted HTTP links in emails to secure HTTPS links whenever possible. On top of that, you can now reply to messages with an @duck.com address instead of your regular email account.

Email Protection is available on the DuckDuckGo Privacy Browser for iOS and Android. Go to the Email Protection section of the settings to try it. On desktop, you'll need the DuckDuckGo Privacy Essentials extension for Firefox, Chrome, Edge and Brave or DuckDuckGo's Mac browser. Simply visit the email section of the company's website.

SiriusXM is offering its Platinum plan members a little something extra. It's bundling Stitcher Premium into the service. Subscribers to both the $23 per month Platinum plan (which includes in-car and app listening) and the $11 per month app-only Streaming Platinum plan now can now use Stitcher Premium at no extra cost. The two-car, $35 per month Platinum VIP plan includes access as well. 

This is a decent perk for Platinum plan members, as Stitcher Premium costs $5 per month. It offers early access to certain podcasts as well as ad-free listening and more than 350 comedy albums. The Stitcher library now includes over 60,000 hours of podcast episodes, including some older ones that aren't available elsewhere. The platform is home to Office Ladies, Freakonomics Radio, LeVar Burton Reads, Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend and many other shows, including one from Quentin Tarantino.

It seems like this integration has been on the cards since SiriusXM bought Stitcher for $325 million in 2020, so if anything it's a little surprising that it took this long. If you're a SiriusXM Platinum plan member, you can download the Stitcher app and use your SXM streaming login credentials to access Stitcher Premium.

A bipartisan group of US senators and members of Congress have released a new version of a bill that aims to make it easier for news organizations to bring the likes of Google and Meta to the negotiating table. The lawmakers said in a statement that the Journalism Competition and Preservation Act would remove "legal obstacles to news organizations' ability to negotiate collectively and secure fair terms from gatekeeper platforms that regularly access news content without paying for its value." The legislation would, for instance, offer eligible digital publishers "limited safe harbor from federal and state antitrust laws."

Senate Judiciary Committee members Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) and John Kennedy (R-LA) and House Judiciary Committee members David Cicilline (D-RI) and Ken Buck (D-CO) are all backing the bill. Dick Durbin (D-IL) and Jerrold Nadler (D-NY), the chairs of the committees, have pledged their support too.

A previous version of the legislation was introduced last year, but it failed to gain enough traction. The latest attempt would allow publishers with fewer than 1,500 full-time employees and non-network news broadcasters to collectively negotiate with certain platforms over access to their news content. The proposed legislation states that publishers would be able to demand arbitration if they reach a stalemate in talks.

The rules would apply to very few companies, specifically ones with more than 50 million US users that have at least a billion monthly active users worldwide or are "owned or controlled by a person that has either net annual sales or market capitalization greater than $550 billion." While Google and Facebook meet those benchmarks, Twitter does not.

Google and Meta have siphoned away billions of dollars of ad revenue from news organizations. Both companies have voluntarily offered payments to publishers in some regions. However, Meta said last month it would no longer pay US publishers for news content after its revenue dropped for the first time.

Other countries have considered ways to make Google and Meta pay publishers for featuring their news. Early last year, the Parliament of Australia passed a law that forces Google and Meta to pay publishers for using their news. Canada's ruling Liberal Party has tabled similar legislation.

A New York state senator has proposed legislation that would require automakers to fit speed limiting tech to new cars. If the bill passes, any passenger vehicle built after January 1st, 2024 that's registered in the state will need to have "advanced safety technology."

"Studies have shown that Intelligent Speed Assistance (ISA) alone can reduce traffic fatalities by 20 percent," reads the legislation, which was submitted by State Sen. Brad Hoylman. "This, in addition to Advanced Emergency Braking (AEB), Emergency Lane Keeping Systems (ELKS), drowsiness and distraction recognition technology and rear-view cameras, would help prevent crashes from occurring in the first place."

The bill notes that there were 270 traffic-related deaths in New York City's streets in 2021, up from 243 the previous year. NYC is now testing an ISA system in 50 city fleet vehicles.

As Autoblog points out, ISA tech is widely used in Europe. Ford's version lets drivers set a maximum speed. It can also limit the speed to within five miles per hour of a posted limit. However, the tech is optional and drivers can disable it. All new cars in the European Union will need to have ISA tech by 2024.

The NY bill also seeks to bring in new rules for vehicles weighing over 3,000 pounds. It would "limit blind spots and establish standards regarding direct visibility of pedestrians, cyclists and other vulnerable road users from the driver's position, by reducing to the greatest possible extent the blind spots in front and to the side of the driver."

Should Hoylman's legislation pass, it could have a broader impact across the US. With automakers having to contend with regulations across 50 states, they often tend to abide by the strictest rule to avoid having to adjust their vehicles for different jurisdictions. We've seen that happen with emissions, with manufacturers opting to abide by California's strict standards across the US.

Samsung has unveiled its latest lineup of NVMe solid state drives, the 990 Pro series. The company claims the SSD will reach almost the highest speeds that are theoretically possible from the PCIe 4.0 interface (PCI 5.0 SSDs will be much faster). Samsung hopes to deliver better performance for PC and console games, 4K and 8K content and other heavy data use cases.

The 990 Pro boasts sequential read and write speeds of up to 7,450 MB/s and 6,900 MB/s. The 980 Pro offers up to 7,000 MB/s and 5,100 MB/s read and write speeds. The 990 Pro's random read and write speeds are up to 1,400K and 1,550K input/output operations per second, according to Samsung. The company says that marks up to a 55 percent improvement over the 980 Pro's performance.

Moreover, the company says the 990 Pro will be more power efficient than the previous lineup by up to 50 percent. The latest SSDs have a newly designed controller with a nickel coating, as well as a heat spreader label for reliable thermal management. The 990 Pro also employs Samsung’s Dynamic Thermal Guard tech to help keep the drive’s temperature in the optimal range. There's a version with a heatsink that offers extra thermal control, as well as RGB lights for some reason, which will be super necessary if you plan to plug the 990 Pro into a PlayStation 5.

The 980 Pro is one of our favorite SSDs (I've had zero complaints with the one in my PS5). So, here's hoping the 990 Pro is even better thanks to the zippier speeds and greater power efficiency. Samsung will start selling the 990 Pro series in October. The SSDs start at $179 for a 1TB model and $309 for a 2TB version. The company plans to offer a 4TB variant next year too.

We're starting to see Samsung's Gaming Hub pop up on more TVs and monitors after the company started rolling out the feature recently. Its new Odyssey gaming monitors are the latest models to include the feature, which allows for swift access to a host of cloud gaming services. In fact, the Odyssey G70B and G65B are the company's first monitors with both Gaming Hub and Smart Platform baked in.

Samsung says the displays offer a way to set up a home office environment without necessarily having a PC on hand. They're compatible with Samsung DeX and can access Microsoft 365 cloud services. You can also mirror a smartphone to the displays and stream shows and movies from the likes of Netflix and Amazon Prime. Both monitors have a far field voice microphone and voice assistant functions.

The G70B will be available in 28- and 32-inch formats. It has a 144Hz refresh rate and 1ms response time, with a Ultra HD resolution and flat IPS display. It's certified as NVIDIA G-Sync Compatible and it supports AMD FreeSync Premium Pro. The G65B also has FreeSync Premium Pro to go along with its QHD curved display. It will have 27- and 32-inch options, a 240Hz refresh rate and 1ms response time. Both monitors include Samsung's Game Bar, which offers features such as a zoom-in mode and easy access to YouTube walkthroughs for part of a game you may be struggling with.

Samsung notes that the giant Odyssey Ark monitor also includes Gaming Hub. You'll be able to stream games from the likes of Xbox Cloud Gaming, NVIDIA GeForce Now, Google Stadia, Utomik and Amazon Luna (the latter's only available in the US) without any additional hardware other than a compatible controller. The rotatable, 55-inch curved display allows you to view three different apps and inputs simultaneously, so you can stream a game while watching YouTube at the same time.

The Odyssey Ark, which starts at $3,500, is available to pre-order now. Samsung will start offering the G70B and G65B later this year. If you happen to be at Gamescom, you can check out the displays in person at Samsung's booth.

Starting today, Yelp will apply a label to business pages for crisis pregnancy centers (also known as anti-abortion centers) to clarify that these facilities usually have limited medical services. The label also notes that crisis pregnancy centers "may not have licensed medical professionals onsite." The consumer notice could help people avoid confusion with clinics that offer abortion services.

In a blog post, Yelp said it was making the change following the US Supreme Court's decision in June to overturn Roe v. Wade, a ruling that conferred a nationwide right to safe abortion access for nearly 50 years. "The trust and safety of our community is a top priority, which is why providing consumers with reliable and useful information to help inform their decisions is critical to our mission — this includes access to reliable information about reproductive health services," Yelp wrote.

Yelp

Many crisis pregnancy centers have religious affiliations, as the Associated Presspreviously reported. Some are said to provide misleading information about abortion and contraception.

Yelp has reviewed tens of thousands of business listings since 2018 with the aim of ensuring crisis pregnancy centers are differentiated from abortion clinics. It noted that moderators have reclassified almost 470 businesses as crisis pregnancy centers or faith-based crisis pregnancy centers this year alone in the US, after reviewing nearly 33,500 business pages. It plans to review more than 55,000 business pages across the US, Canada and Puerto Rico in the coming months.

This is an issue that other tech companies have been contending with. Last week, the Alphabet Workers Union demanded that Google address "misleading search results related to abortion services by removing results for fake abortion providers." Democratic lawmakers have asked Google to stop directing people seeking an abortion to anti-abortion facilities, while some Republican attorneys general warned the company not to limit such centers from appearing in search results. In early July, Google said it would delete abortion clinic visits from user location histories.

Gearbox Software announced several months ago that a new Tales from the Borderlands game was coming this year, and its title is exactly that: New Tales from the Borderlands. CEO Randy Pitchford made an appearance at Gamescom's Opening Night Live showcase to reveal more details about the game.

Pitchford said he was a big fan of the original game, a narrative-driven point-and-click title set in the Borderlands universe developed by Telltale Games. Pitchford said Gearbox brought in some of the writers who worked on the first game for New Tales from the Borderlands

The latest title has three new main characters (Anu, Octavio and Fran) and a fresh storyline. As you might expect from a Borderlands game, the trailer suggests it will have offbeat humor and lots of guns. It seems there'll be a minigame or two as well. While New Tales from the Borderlands retains the series' distinctive art style, it looks like the visuals have been given an upgrade after Gearbox switched to Unreal Engine.

Gearbox is making New Tales from the Borderlands in-house at its Quebec studio. It will release the game on PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S, Nintendo Switch, Steam and Epic Games Store on October 21st.

Apple has confirmed reports that it will shake up the typical rollouts for its major operating system updates this year. For the first time in years, the company will not release the public build of the new iPadOS at the same time as the next iOS. It's expected that iOS 16 will arrive soon after Apple's usual September iPhone event. However, the company says it will release the next iPadOS sometime this fall instead.

What's more, it won't offer iPadOS 16.0 to everyone — the company will go right to iPadOS 16.1 for the public build. It's unclear whether Apple plans to release iOS 16.1 and iPadOS 16.1 simultaneously to get them back on the same cadence.

“This is an especially big year for iPadOS. As its own platform with features specifically designed for iPad, we have the flexibility to deliver iPadOS on its own schedule," Apple told TechCrunch. "This fall, iPadOS will ship after iOS, as version 16.1 in a free software update.”

The company made the announcement just as it released the iPadOS 16.1 beta. The showpiece feature of iPadOS this year is Stage Manager, a multitasking tool for M1-powered iPads that allows users to have more control over windows. The idea is that you'll be able to resize and overlap them as you see fit.

In the first iPadOS 16 beta, Stage Manager was unpolished. In our preview, we deemed it to be a buggy experience that occasionally crashed an iPad that was plugged into an external display. As TechCrunch notes, the main changes in the iPadOS 16.1 beta are for Stage Manager. Here's hoping this build fixes some of the feature's teething problems.

Bloombergpreviously reported that Apple would delay iPadOS 16 to resolve the Stage Manager issues. The publication suggested the OS would arrive in October, which fits with Apple's fall timeframe. Meanwhile, it's believed that Apple will release macOS Venture in October. For what it's worth, we have found Stage Manager to be a far better experience on desktop than iPad this far.