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Lyft and May Mobility have teamed up to launch a fleet of autonomous vehicles in Atlanta. It’s a pilot program, so it’s currently only available to Lyft riders in the area of midtown Atlanta. The companies promise a “measured, safety-first approach” with this rollout.

The fleet consists of hybrid-electric Toyota Sienna Autono-MaaS vehicles equipped with May Mobility’s self-driving technology. Lyft and May Mobility announced this partnership last year, but Atlanta is the first city to get a fleet of self-driving vehicles.

The rides will be fully autonomous, but each vehicle will feature a human just in case something goes wrong. These standby operators are trained to take the wheel if needed. The companies haven’t announced a timeframe for when these standby operators will no longer be required.

Customers will have access to temperature controls, which is nice. However, hailing one of these cars is something of a crap shoot. You have to be in the service area, use the app and hope for the best. Lyft and May Mobility say they will increase the number of available vehicles and expand service hours in the “months ahead.”

This is May Mobility’s second launch in Georgia, as it operates a fleet of driverless vehicles in the Atlanta suburb of Peachtree Corners. Lyft’s primary rival Uber has also been making serious moves in this space. The company has entered into a partnership with Lucid to create a massive fleet of 20,000 autonomous vehicles. It also has plans to launch self-driving pilot programs throughout the globe.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/transportation/lyft-launches-autonomous-fleet-with-may-mobility-in-atlanta-184942285.html?src=rss 

With web publishers in crisis, a new open standard lets them set the ground rules for AI scrapers. (Or, at least it will try.) The new Really Simple Licensing (RSL) standard creates terms that participants expect AI companies to abide by. Although enforcement is an open question, it can’t hurt that some heavy hitters back it. Among others, the list includes Reddit, Yahoo (Engadget’s parent company), Medium and People Inc.

RSL adds licensing terms to the robots.txt protocol, the simple file that provides instructions for web crawlers. Supported licensing options include free, attribution, subscription, pay-per-crawl and pay-per-inference. (The latter means AI companies only pay publishers when the content is used to generate a response.)

Launching alongside the standard is a new managing nonprofit, the RSL Collective. It views itself as an equivalent of nonprofits like ASCAP and BMI, which manage music industry royalties. The new group says its standard can “establish fair market prices and strengthen negotiation leverage for all publishers.”

Participating brands include plenty of internet old-schoolers. Reddit, People Inc., Yahoo, Internet Brands, Ziff Davis, wikiHow, O’Reilly Media, Medium, The Daily Beast, Miso.AI, Raptive, Ranker and Evolve Media are all on board. Former Ask.com CEO Doug Leeds and RSS co-creator Eckart Walther lead the group.

“The RSL Standard gives publishers and platforms a clear, scalable way to set licensing terms in the AI era,” Reddit CEO Steve Huffman wrote in a press release. “The RSL Collective offers a path to do it together. Reddit supports both as important steps toward protecting the open web and the communities that make it thrive.” (It’s worth noting that Reddit has licensing deals with OpenAI and Google.)

It’s unclear whether AI companies will honor the standard. After all, they’ve been known to simply ignore robots.txt instructions. But the group believes its terms will be legally enforceable.

In an interview with Ars Technica, Leeds pointed to Anthropic’s recent $1.5 billion settlement, suggesting “there’s real money at stake” for AI companies that don’t train “legitimately.” (However, that settlement is up in the air after a judge rejected it.) Leeds told The Verge that the standard’s collective nature could also help spread legal costs, making challenges to violations more feasible.

As for technical enforcement, the RSL standard can’t block bots on its own. For that, the group is partnering with the cloud company Fastly, which can act as a sort of gatekeeper. (Perhaps Cloudflare, which recently launched a pay-per-crawl system, could eventually play a part, too.) Leeds said Fastly could serve as “the bouncer at the door to the club.”

Leeds suggested to Ars that there are incentives for AI companies, too. Financially, it could be simpler for them than inking individual licensing deals. It could prevent a problem in AI content: using multiple sources for an answer to avoid using too much from any one. If content is legally licensed, the AI app can simply use the best source, which provides the user with a higher-quality answer and minimizes the risk of hallucinations.

He also referenced complaints from AI companies that there’s no effective means of licensing web-wide content. “We have listened to them, and what we’ve heard them say is… we need a new protocol,” Leeds told Ars Technica. “With the RSL standard, AI firms get a “scalable way to get all the content” they want, while setting an incentive that they’ll only have to pay for the best content that their models actually reference. If they’re using it, they pay for it, and if they’re not using it, they don’t pay for it.”

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/ai/reddit-yahoo-medium-and-more-are-adopting-a-new-licensing-standard-to-get-compensated-for-ai-scraping-180946671.html?src=rss 

Streamers, YouTubers and other content creators are eligible for the new “No Tax on Tips” policy in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act President Donald Trump signed into law on July 4, 2024. “Digital Content Creators” are included in a preliminary list of occupations that are eligible for the new tax deduction on tips the US Treasury Department released last week. That means a podcaster could receive the same tax relief as a waiter or bartender.

Under that guidance, the “Bits” received during a Twitch stream or the “Super Thanks” a YouTuber receives for a great upload could go untaxed when next year’s tax season rolls around. As The Hollywood Reporter notes, though, there are limits to how much of that tipped income will be deducted — up to $25,000 per year and it’s phased out for single filers who make more than $150,000 per year — and language that suggests not every tipping scenario content creators face might apply.

According to the Treasury, tips won’t qualify for the deduction “if they are received in the course of certain specified trades or businesses,” which includes “the fields of health, performing arts, and athletics.” Does that mean this is a much narrower carve out for content creators than it appears? Possibly, but these classifications will need to be finalized before anyone will be able to say for sure. Ultimately, content creators have multiple possible sources of income: direct subscriptions, ad revenue, paid partnerships, direct sales and digital tips. How much a new tax deduction changes their calculus will vary.

Making tips tax deductible was one of several campaign promises Trump made leading up to his reelection in November 2024. The idea was eventually folded into the One Big Beautiful Bill, which is perhaps better known for the catastrophic cuts it made to social welfare and clean energy spending. As it turns out, the bill might also reshape the creator economy, too.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/entertainment/youtube/no-tax-on-tips-apparently-also-applies-to-your-favorite-streamer-182932748.html?src=rss 

Bluesky is expanding its age verification features stateside. The service will require users in South Dakota and Wyoming to verify their ages in order to access direct messaging and adult content on the site.

The update comes after both states have enacted laws requiring online platforms that host “harmful” content to verify the ages of their users. Bluesky’s approach will mirror its actions in the UK, which also requires age checks following the passage of its Online Safety Act. The company has opted to use Epic Games’ Kids Web Services to conduct the checks and users can choose between several methods,including face scans, ID scans or using a credit card.

The service will still be available to people in the states that don’t verify their age, but specific features will be restricted. In an update, the company said “we believe this approach currently strikes the right balance.” Last month, the service opted to go dark in the state of Mississippi rather than comply with a more restrictive age verification law that would have required it to block anyone whose age hadn’t been confirmed.

“To implement this change, we would have had to invest substantial resources in a solution that we believe limits free speech and disproportionately harms smaller platforms,” Bluesky explains. “We chose not to offer our service there at this time while legal challenges continue.”

The update comes as age verification laws have been ramping up in the US. So far, 25 states have passed laws requiring some form of age verification to access adult content, and numerous others have similar legislation in the works. In its post, Bluesky notes that it expects more regulations in other states and countries in the near term.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/social-media/bluesky-is-rolling-out-age-verification-in-south-dakota-and-wyoming-165753460.html?src=rss 

NASA just announced that its Perseverance rover recently found some promising signs of ancient life on Mars. The rover obtained a sample of rock formed billions of years ago from sediment and there are biomarkers indicating the potential presence of microbes once upon a time.

Basically, the rocks contain minerals that typically form as a result of a chemical reaction between mud and organic matter. That doesn’t necessarily mean that Mars once had life, as the minerals can form due to nonbiological processors. However, it’s certainly one of the best pieces of evidence we have to point toward our neighbor planet once housing life of some kind.

“On Earth, reactions like these, which combine organic matter and chemical compounds in mud to form new minerals like vivianite and greigite, are often driven by the activity of microbes,” said Stony Brook University planetary scientist Joel Hurowitz, who led the study published in the journal Nature. “The microbes are consuming the organic matter in these settings and producing these new minerals as a byproduct of their metabolism.”

Hurowitz does caution that this is just a potential biosignature and not actual proof of ancient life. Many scientists believe, however, that Mars wasn’t always quite as inhospitable as it is today.

The planet likely held plenty of water in its distant past. Researchers suggest that the area in which Persevere found these samples was once a river valley that led to a lake, though this was more than 3.5 billion years ago.

The samples were collected last year, but researchers needed time for analysis. Perseverance has been roaming around the Martian surface since 2021. The six-wheeled rover has been collecting rock samples and regolith, using its onboard instruments for this analysis. This is also just the beginning of the research required here.

“Ultimately, follow-on research will provide us with a suite of testable hypotheses for how to determine whether biology is responsible for the generation of these features,” Hurowitz added.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/science/space/nasas-perseverance-rover-finds-potential-signs-of-ancient-life-on-mars-173457976.html?src=rss