Technology

A robotic private spacecraft designed to provide crucial data for returning humans to the moon toppled over as it landed on the lunar surface, bringing an immediate and premature end to the mission, its operators said on Friday.

Athena, a probe launched by the Texas-based company Intuitive Machines (IM) last month, touched down about 250 miles from its intended landing site near the moon’s south pole on Thursday. Initially at least, it was generating some power and sending information to Earth as engineers worked to make sense of data showing an “incorrect attitude”.

On Friday, however, IM declared Athena dead.

“With the direction of the sun, the orientation of the solar panels, and extreme cold temperatures in the crater, Intuitive Machines does not expect Athena to recharge,” it said in a statement confirming that the 15ft (4.6 meter) spacecraft was on its side.

The joint investigation with Israeli-Palestinian publication +972 Magazine and Hebrew-language outlet Local Call has found Unit 8200 trained the AI model to understand spoken Arabic using large volumes of telephone conversations and text messages, obtained through its extensive surveillance of the occupied territories.

According to sources familiar with the project, the unit began building the model to create a sophisticated chatbot-like tool capable of answering questions about people it is monitoring and providing insights into the massive volumes of surveillance data it collects.

“We tried to create the largest dataset possible [and] collect all the data the state of Israel has ever had in Arabic,” the former official, Chaked Roger Joseph Sayedoff, told an audience at a military AI conference in Tel Aviv last year. The model, he said, required “psychotic amounts” of data.

TikTok is to be investigated by the UK’s data protection watchdog, which is looking into whether social media algorithms are serving up inappropriate or harmful content to children.

Growing concerns over how social media platforms are using data generated by children’s online activity have prompted the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) to launch an investigation into the Chinese platform, along with the forum site Reddit and the image-sharing site Imgur.

It will look at how TikTok uses the personal information of 13- to 17-year-olds to deliver content recommendations to them, and also examine Reddit and Imgur’s use of age assurance measures, such as how they estimate or verify a child’s age, which can then be used to tailor their experience on the platform.

BEIJING/SHANGHAI, March 4 (Reuters) - China plans to issue guidance to encourage the use of open-source RISC-V chips nationwide for the first time, two sources briefed on the matter said, as Beijing accelerates efforts to curb the country's dependence on Western-owned technology. The policy guidance on boosting the use of RISC-V chips could be released as soon as this month, although the final date could change, the sources said.

In China, state entities and research institutes have eagerly embraced RISC-V in recent years, seeing it as geopolitically neutral. Chinese chip designers are attracted by its lower costs, but the government has yet to mention it in policy.

In 2023, Reuters reported that some U.S. lawmakers were putting pressure on the Biden administration to restrict American companies from working on the technology over concerns that Beijing was exploiting its open-source nature to advance its own semiconductor industry.

Tech content creators and news sites have recently dug into an Insider build of Skype's files, to find a string of text which reads as follows:

"Starting in May 2025, Skype will no longer be available. By logging into Microsoft Teams with your Skype account, your chats and contacts will appear in the app so you can pick up where you left off. Alternatively, you can export your Skype data"

This message comes as no surprise to those who saw the writing on the walls before this, especially since people had already jumped over to other platforms, such as Zoom, Discord, and even Microsoft's own-brand Microsoft Teams.

I myself have fond memories of contacting friends and family with Skype, especially during the pandemic before I got Zoom.

Farewell, Skype. You will always live on in the hearts and minds of those that used it.

2003 - 2025

Five Microsoft employees were removed during a company town hall meeting after staging a protest against the company’s contracts supplying Artificial Intelligence (AI) and cloud computing services to the Israeli occupation military.

The demonstration took place on Monday, following an Associated Press (AP) investigation that revealed Microsoft and OpenAI’s advanced AI models had been utilised by the Israeli occupation military to select bombing targets in recent attacks against Gaza and Lebanon.

Is it just me, or does the Oppo Find X5 Pro have the worst battery in existence, even when it launched and was brand new? At most (during normal usage) it lasted me about 2:30hrs on average, but this number was sometimes more or less depending on what my phone felt like doing.

As well as this, I have to travel long lengths to shopping, and in most scenarios I'd leave my house with 100% and make it back with about 30-45%. I've even lost the ability to scan my train tickets through the barriers at some stations thanks to this.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/25905220

And if so, does anyone know where could I get one?

My cat will attack anything that moves, including my laptop cord, and has already ruined one by chewing on it. I've seen plastic ones for sale, but I'm fairly certain he would just chew right through them. 😼

This week at the Munich Security Conference, Sen. Mark Warner, the top Democrat on the intelligence committee, played “I’ve got a secret.” It’s a game national security officialdom loves to play, slyly claiming authority ‘if they could only tell you what they know.’

It is in that vein that Warner spilled the beans on what he called the “real story” behind the law that could still ban TikTok.

“I want to see if you're going to tell the real story,” a grinning Warner said, addressing former congressman Mike Gallagher, and now a Palantir executive who, along with Warner, first introduced the bill that claimed that TikTok was a national security threat, a claim still relevant given the app’s uncertain future.

Gallagher described how the national security bill was dead until Hamas’ attack on Israel, which brought the legislation back to life. As Gallagher

“So we had a bipartisan consensus. We had the executive branch, but the bill was still dead until October 7th. And people started to see a bunch of anti-Semitic content on the platform and our bill had legs again.”