Category: UNCATEGORIZED

Want to let your kids poke around Netflix without them wandering their way beyond the kids section? Got a roommate who keeps inexplicably forgetting to use their profile and is totally screwing up your “Continue Watching” list?

Good news! Netflix is now letting users set a PIN to keep individual profiles locked down.

The new feature comes as part of a wider update this morning focusing on improved parental controls.

Other new features include:

• Filtering titles based on their maturity rating in your country. Useful if you want someone to have access to more than just the kids section while still blocking off anything beyond, say, PG-13.
• Disabling auto-play on a kid profile to make Octonaut marathons a bit more… intentional.
• Blocking specific titles by name. Need a break from Boss Baby? Maybe add it to the list for a while.

It’s all pretty basic stuff… but with more people working from home with kids in tow right now, it’s a good time for all of it to land.

Looking for the new controls? Visit Netflix.com in a browser, make sure you’re toggled into a non-kid profile, tap the dropdown arrow in the upper right, hit “Account”, then look for the “Profile & Parental Controls” section — everything should be nested in there, with individual settings for each profile on your account.

Autonomous delivery startup Nuro has been granted a permit to begin driverless testing on California’s public roads, paving the way for the company to roll out commercial operations throughout the state.

Nuro, which raised $940 million from SoftBank Vision Fund last year, is allowed to put two of its low-speed electric R2 delivery vehicles on public roads in parts of Santa Clara and San Mateo counties, according to the California Department of Motor Vehicles, the agency that regulates autonomous vehicle testing in the state.

The driverless permit allows the vehicles to operate at a maximum speed of 25 mph and only in fair weather conditions on streets with a speed limit of no more than 35 mph, the DMV said Tuesday. The permit covers nine cities, including Atherton, East Palo Alto, Los Altos Hills, Los Altos, Menlo Park, Mountain View, Palo Alto, Sunnyvale and Woodside.

“The safety of the motoring public is the DMV’s top priority, and we do not give out these permits lightly,” DMV Director Steve Gordon said in statement. “Nuro has met the DMV’s requirements to receive this permit to test their driverless delivery vehicles on California’s public roads.”

Nuro won’t start its driverless testing right away due to stay-at-home orders issued by Gov. Gavin Newsom because of the spreading COVID-19 pandemic. The company will be actively engaging in logistical planning for the day public roads testing can begin, Nuro’s chief legal and policy officer David Estrada said in a blog post Tuesday. “Our hope is that residents of neighboring cities and counties will see R2 on the road soon,” he said.

A path to commercialization

While 65 companies have an active permit to test autonomous vehicles with a human safety driver, Waymo, and now Nuro, are the only companies allowed to operate driverless vehicles on California’s public roads.

Nuro might end up being the first company to actually use it. Waymo, the former Google self-driving project that spun out to become a business under Alphabet, received the first permit in October 2018. However, the company has never used it. Instead, Waymo has focused its efforts on Arizona, where it already operates a robotaxi service called Waymo One and it has a clear commercial path.

In California, the commercial path is muddled for most AV developers. Under state law, the DMV regulates autonomous vehicle testing. If a company wants to transport passengers — essentially operating a ride-hailing service — it must get an Autonomous Vehicle Passenger Service pilot permit from the California Public Utilities Commission.

The CPUC lets companies use their self-driving vehicles to transport people. However, they can’t charge for rides and the vehicles must have safety drivers behind the wheel.

Nuro’s R2 vehicle isn’t designed for people, only packages. While the company can’t charge a delivery fee, there is nothing stopping it from working with local retailers to launch a commercial delivery business using the autonomous vehicles.

Nuro will start with free deliveries to select customers in Mountain View and the surrounding area, Estrada said, adding that this will allow a formal delivery service in partnership with local brands and retailers.

The company already has its eyes on a statewide delivery service. Estrada said Nuro will apply for a full commercial deployment permit to bring its services to California residents throughout the state.

“Putting our driverless R2 delivery vehicles on the road will be an important first for our company and the self-driving industry. But it is just a glimmer of what is to come,” Estrada said. “We have always believed in the transformative power of autonomous vehicles, and in the climate of COVID-19 we understand their potential even more deeply.”

Nuro’s R2 unit

Nuro was founded in June 2016 by Google alums Dave Ferguson and Jiajun Zhu. The company was issued an AV testing permit — with a human safety operator — in 2017. Initially, the company used modified Toyota Prius sedans for testing as well as for pilot grocery deliveries in Arizona and Texas.

The company transitioned in December 2018 to the R1, the first step towards a vehicle designed exclusively for packages.

The R2, which was designed and assembled in the U.S. in partnership with Michigan-based Roush Enterprises, was introduced in February 2020. Nuro received a driverless exemption from the federal government for its R2 vehicle, a milestone for the company. 

The exemption granted by the the U.S. Department of Transportation’s National Highway Traffic Safety Administration allows the vehicle to operate without three features that are normally required: side-view mirrors, windshield and a rear-view camera that shuts off when driving forward. This exemption is different from the one that GM is currently pursuing for its self-driving unit Cruise. That vehicle, which is not considered a low-speed vehicle, has a much longer list of exemptions.

On Friday, April 3, 2020, NASA and SpaceX completed an end-to-end demonstration of the teams’ ability to safely evacuate crew members from the Fixed Service Structure during an emergency situation at Launch Complex 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

SpaceX and NASA are in the process of final preparations prior to launching their first crewed spaceflight mission – Demo-2, which is technically still a demonstration mission needed to validate SpaceX’s Crew Dragon for transporting humans during regular flight. But actual astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley will be on board the historic flight, which will see SpaceX’s vehicle fly them to the Space Station for the very first time.

One preparatory step for that launch happened on April 3, with a full run-through of the emergency egress system that will be in place during Demo-2 launch day to ensure that astronauts and ground crew can all quickly and safely get clear of the launchpad in case anything goes wrong. It’s highly unlikely that the system will actually be used, but safety is the name of the game in human spaceflight, and so NASA and SpaceX conducted a full demonstration with crew and support staff at Kennedy Space Center in Florida to prove that everything works as intended.

As you can see in the video above, the system includes essentially loading crew from the launch tower into what amounts to a biplane system, with baskets that they ride in to reach armoured vehicles at ground level. They’re loaded into those, which are technically called Mine Resistant Ambush Protected vehicles (explosion-resistant, naturally), and then those take them to a safe distance.

Part of the demonstration exercise included simulating crew injuries among the support staff, with other team members having to locate them and carry them to the baskets for evacuation. Everything seems to have gone to plan, and this means that May window for this groundbreaking SpaceX mission is looking more solid than ever.

Here’s another edition of “Dear Sophie,” the advice column that answers immigration-related questions about working at technology companies.

“Your questions are vital to the spread of knowledge that allows people all over the world to rise above borders and pursue their dreams,” says Sophie Alcorn, a Silicon Valley immigration attorney. “Whether you’re in people ops, a founder or seeking a job in Silicon Valley, I would love to answer your questions in my next column.”

“Dear Sophie” columns are accessible for Extra Crunch subscribers; use promo code ALCORN to purchase a one or two-year subscription for 50% off.

Dear Sophie: I have an H-4 visa and work authorization. I currently have a job that’s considered nonessential during the coronavirus emergency. If I get laid off, I would need unemployment assistance while I look for another job.

Would getting unemployment benefits hurt my or my spouse’s green card petition under the new public charge rule?

— Nonessential in NorCal

Dear Nonessential:

Thanks for your timely question. The short answer is no, getting unemployment benefits alone right now won’t jeopardize your or your spouse’s green card. This is because receiving unemployment benefits, getting tested for coronavirus and seeking emergency medical treatment (even if it’s covered by Medicaid) are all exempt from consideration as government benefits under the new public charge rule.

Immigration officials have long had the authority to deny individuals a visa or green card if they are likely to be dependent on public benefits. The new public charge rule, which went into effect on February 24, expands the factors immigration officials will consider. An additional form seeking health and financial information must now be submitted with most visa and green card applications. Immigration officials will use that information to determine whether applicants are or are likely to become dependent on government benefits.

If you have received a public benefit in the past, your application won’t necessarily be denied, but given what’s at stake, it’s important to consult an experienced immigration attorney.

Individuals who will be subjected to the increased scrutiny of the expanded public charge rule are:

Today, Facebook quietly released a new app for couples called Tuned. The new release is a multimedia messaging app designed to help significant others communicate.

The app is available for download in the U.S. and Canada, app analytics firm Sensor Tower tells us. Tuned was developed and released by Facebook’s New Product Experimentation (NPE) team. The division is — as the name suggests– very experimental and thus a bit quicker to pull the plug on projects if they don’t show traction.

The Tuned app arrives during a very interesting time for couples. Couples that live together are spending every waking moment in each others presence in the midst of quarantine and could probably never have less of a need for an app like this. For couples that don’t live together, there’s more of an appeal as people are emboldened to build out digital toolsets to stay close with their partners during an unprecedented time.

The app is by all means just a messaging app that’s more focused on pushing updates and stickers to one person. Users can also integrate the app with Spotify to share songs, or used dedicated widgets to share how they’re feeling or what they’re up to. The company refers to the app’s feed as “scrapbook-style.”

It’s not integrated with the company’s dating platform, Facebook Dating, in fact the most interesting quality of the app is the sheer lack of Facebook tie-ins. Some

For years, Messenger was the testing bed for Facebook’s social curiosities, but Messenger became too important and users weren’t responding positively to constantly seeing nominal changes in an app they frequently used. The issue is Facebook doesn’t have a default experimentation app anymore, and so these NPE team releases kind of force Facebook to get by with less user data and make judgment calls on how fast functionality can develop when starting from a standstill. It’s unclear successfully this strategy is progressing. NPE Team’s only other release that’s still available, a Pinterest competitor named Hobbi, was released two months ago and has only received one review on the App Store– a one-star review.

SpaceX has been resupplying the International Space Station (ISS) since it began flying cargo missions on behalf of NASA in 2012. Now, the version of the Dragon capsule that SpaceX first employed to fly those missions is retiring, after one of the spacecraft based on that design splashed down in the Atlantic Ocean on Tuesday afternoon, having returned from the ISS.

This marks the completion of CRS-20, the 20th Commercial Resupply Services mission that SpaceX has flown for NASA. The Dragon had been docked at the ISS since March 9, after taking off from Cape Canaveral on March 7. It was the last use of this model of Dragon, which also means it was the last time a SpaceX Dragon will need the assistance of the robotic Canadarm appendage used by the Space Station crew to facilitate docking – the newer iterations of Dragon, including Crew Dragon, use an automated docking process to attach to the orbiting science facility.

Prior to its return, the Dragon used on this flight was loaded up for cargo for the return trip, including experimental materials and results that will be studied by researchers on the ground. This capsule also already made the flight previously to the ISS on two separate occasions, including for CRS-10 and CRS-16, making its retirement flight a hat-trick for the spacecraft.

Next up for SpaceX is Demo-2, the first ever crewed flight of a Dragon to the ISS, which is currently planned for mid-to-late May. Cargo missions will also continue, with the next tentatively set for October 2020.

With large majorities of all children (70% in the U.S. and U.K.) staying home from school during the COVID-19 crisis, use of digital media properties popular with kids has soared. Screen time among kids in the U.S. is up 50% according to research by SuperAwesome .

This adds momentum to a space that has already been rapidly evolving amid greater protections on children’s data privacy, increasing popularity of gaming, the rise of subscription bundles, and the influence of independent content creators.

TechCrunch will host a live webinar panel tomorrow (April 8) at 11:15am PDT / 2:15pm EDT about the current state of children’s media with three leaders in the industry:

• Craig Donato, Chief Business Officer of Roblox, the $4 billion gaming platform that counts the majority of US kids age 9-12 among its active users.
• Nancy MacIntyre, Co-Founder & CEO of Fingerprint, a leading subscription video and gaming service for children.
• Dylan Collins, Co-Founder & CEO of SuperAwesome, the London-based creator of “kid-safe” adtech and privacy tools.

Extra Crunch members will be able to submit questions to the panelists using the Zoom dial-in information posted below. For other TechCrunch readers, we will have a YouTube live stream ready to go to join, which we will post on TechCrunch’s Twitter page.

Dial-in information

Just like in almost every other industry, there’s been a rash of layoffs among newer space startups and companies amid the novel coronavirus crisis. But Relativity Space has managed to avoid layoffs – and is even hiring, despite the global pandemic. Relativity CEO and founder Tim Ellis cites the company’s focus on large-scale 3D printing, as well as its adoption of cloud-based tools and technologies as big reasons why his startup hasn’t felt the pinch.

Because Relativity’s forthcoming launch vehicle is almost entirely made up of 3D-printed parts, from the engines, to the fuselage and everything in between, the company has been able to continue producing its prototypes essentially uninterrupted. Relativity has been classified an essential business, as have most companies operating in anything related to aerospace or defense, but Ellis said that they took steps very early to address the potential thread of COVID-19 and ensure the health and safety of their staff. As early as March 9, when the disease was really first starting to show up in the U.S. and before any formal restrictions or shelter-in-place orders were in effect, Relativity was recommending that employees work from home where possible.

“We’re able to do that, partially because with our automated printing technology we were able to have very, very few people in the factory and still keep printers running,” Ellis said in an interview. “We actually even have just one person now running several printers that are still actually printing – it’s literally a single person operating, while a lot of company has been able to make progress working from home for the last couple of weeks.”

Being able to run an entire production factory floor with just one person on-site is a tremendous competitive advantage in the current situation, and way to ensure you’re also respecting employee health and safety. Ellis added that the company has already been operating between multiple locations, including teams at Cape Canaveral, Florida, as well as at Stennis Space Center in Mississippi and at its headquarters in LA. Relativity also had a further distributed workforce with a few employees working remotely from locations across the U.S, and it focused early on ensuring that its design and development processes could work without requiring everyone to be centrally-based.

“We’ve developed our own custom software tools to just streamline those workflows, that that really helped,” Ellis said. “Also, just being more of a cloud-enabled company, while still complying with ITAR and security protocols has been really, really advantageous as well.”

In addition to their focus on in-house software and cloud-based tools, Ellis credits the timing of their most recent round – a $140 million investment closed last October – as a reason they’re well-situated for enduring the COVID-19 crisis. He says that Relativity no only managed to avoid any layoffs, while sending out new offers, but they’re also still paying all employees, including hourly workers, their full regular wage. All of this stems from a business model that in retrospect, seems prescient, but that Ellis says actually just has significant advantages in today’s global business climate by virtue of chance. Still, he does believe that some of Relativity’s resilience thus far signals some of the biggest lasting changes that will result from the coronavirus pandemic.

“What it’s really going to change […] is the approach to global supply chain,” he said. “I think there’s going to be a big push to have more things made in America, and then less dependence on heavy globalization across supply chain. That’s one you thing we’ve always had with 3D printing – not only is an automated technology, where we can have very few operators still making progress even during times like like this and printing some of the first stage structures of our rocket – but on the supply chain side, just having simpler supply chains with fewer vendors and different types of manufacturing processes mean it’s much less likely that we’ll see very significant supplier and supply chain interruptions.”

Meanwhile, while Ellis says that ultimately they can’t predict how the coronavirus crisis will impact their overall schedule in terms of planned launch activities, which includes flying their first 3D-printed vehicle in 2021, they anticipate being able to make plenty of progress through remote work and a production line that can easily comply with social isolation guidelines. Partner facility shutdowns, including the rocket engine test stand at Stennis, will definitely have an impact, but Relativity’s resilience could prove a model for manufacturing businesses of all stripes to emulate once this moment has passed.

Last month, it was reported that digital locker service Movies Anywhere was working to launch a movie-sharing feature called “Screen Pass.” At the time, the feature was only available in limited, private beta testing with a plan to fully roll it out late summer or early fall. But as a result of increased demand from consumers stuck at home under government lockdowns and quarantines, Movies Anywhere has rushed to launch the sharing feature into an open, public beta.

The Movies Anywhere app today allows consumers to access their purchased movies from across a range of services, including iTunes, Vudu, Prime Video, YouTube, Xfinity, and many others. Today, the app is jointly operated by Disney, Universal, WB, Sony Pictures, and 20th Century Fox. An earlier 2014 version of the service was called Disney Movies Anywhere, but it later migrated to a new platform in 2017 and the app was rebuilt to serve the expanded group of operating partners. The two are related efforts, but much different businesses.

Movies Anywhere had been developing the movie-sharing feature with plans for a later launch. But the overwhelmingly positive response to its testing encouraged the company to move up the launch even further.

Screen Pass will allow Movies Anywhere users to loan out only 3 movies per month to family and friends. The movies can then be watched across the Movies Anywhere platform, except for Roku devices for the time being.

To share the title, you can view eligible titles from a new section under “My Movies” in the app, then click the Screen Pass icon on the title you want to share and provide the details. Movies can be sent out over text, email, or message and the recipient has a week to accept the share.

The shared movie will effectively work like a movie rental, as recipients will have a limited time to watch — in this case, up to 14 days. Once the movie is started, recipients have 72 hours to finish watching. But unlike a rental, it’s free to share a movie and free to watch.

Only some titles will be “Screen Pass-eligible” at launch and they aren’t able to be saved for offline viewing. Only purchased movies can be downloaded, the company says. To use the feature, the Movies Anywhere account will also need to belong to a U.S. resident.

Screen Pass is currently supported on a range of popular movies, including “The Fate of the Furious (F8),” “Tombstone,” “Logan,” “Wonder Woman,” “Trolls,” “The Lego Movie,” “Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs,” “Groundhog Day,” “Rushmore,” the “Harry Potter” movies, “Jason Bourne,” “Elf,” “Sing,” “Role Models,” “Bad Moms,” “Happy Feet,” “Ready Player One,” “Speed,” “The Karate Kid,” “Back to the Future,” and others.

Users who want to join the public beta test can sign up using this link. Users can also accept a Screen Pass from a current beta participant, which then opts them into the beta testing group, too.

The company does not have a planned commercial launch date yet for the feature.

A payments processor used by local governments to collect court fines and utility bill payments from residents across Arkansas and Oklahoma mistakenly left a cache of data, representing years of transactions, exposed on its website.

Security researcher Ashot Oganesyan found a cache of database files in a public and unprotected web directory on the website of payment processor nCourt, which runs the two payment sites courtpay.org and utilitypay.org. The directory contained backup database files storing at least three years worth of transactions up to and including November 2019.

The directory was left exposed for at least five months, according to data from BinaryEdge, which scans the internet for exposed systems and databases.

Oganesyan reported the exposure to the payments processor, and the open directory was closed on Monday.

But TechCrunch learned Tuesday that the database files have been posted to a widely known hacking forum. Although we did not download the data from the forum, the posting — which was published prior to this article — listed the correct number of records in each database, suggesting the posting is genuine.

TechCrunch reviewed the exposed databases and found 79,000 transaction records on courtpay.org, and 64,000 records for utilitypay.org. We verified the data by cross-referencing names and addresses against public records.

Both sets of databases contained a payee’s name, postal address, email address, and phone number. Each record also contained the payment card type, the first and last four-digits of the payee’s card number, and the card’s expiry date.

Some records also contained dates of birth, and partial bank account numbers when a checking account was used.

Although the payment data was partially masked, none of the data was encrypted, despite a claim on nCourt’s website that “all tracked data, including account number and expiration date, is obscured so that the data cannot be decrypted without the corresponding decryption keys.”

When reached, nCourt’s chief information officer Terry Chism said the company was “aggressively gathering facts” about the security lapse, which he said affected a “legacy” system called GovPSA.

“Upon learning the legacy GovPSA data may have been accessed, we moved the data offline,” he said. “We have also engaged a third-party forensic investigation firm which is currently conducting a forensic investigation to verify the scope and impact of this suspected data security incident on the legacy GovPSA data and how it occurred. If we confirm that a breach has occurred, we will evaluate the legal notification obligations to individuals whose personal information may be impacted and will notify all affected persons and regulators consistent with our legal obligations to do so.”

But that leaves its customers — largely local governments and municipalities — in the dark. One of nCourt’s customers, a city in Arkansas with a population of about 30,000, told TechCrunch that they have not yet been informed of a security lapse.

Chism declined to comment further, or answer our questions — including why the data was not encrypted.