In their recent announcement, NASA has made official what pretty much anyone following the Artemis lunar program could have told you years ago — humans won’t be landing on the Moon in 2028.

It was always an ambitious timeline, especially given the scope of the mission. It wouldn’t be enough to revisit the Moon in a spidery lander that could only hold two crew members and a few hundred kilograms of gear like in the 60s. This time, NASA wants to return to the lunar surface with hardware capable of setting up a sustained human presence. That means a new breed of lander that dwarfs anything the agency, or humanity for that matter, has ever tried to place on another celestial body.

Unsurprisingly, developing such vehicles and making sure they’re safe for crewed missions takes time and requires extensive testing. The simple fact is that the landers, being built by SpaceX and Blue Origin, won’t be ready in time to support the original Artemis III landing in 2028. Additionally, development of the new lunar extravehicular activity (EVA) suits by Axiom Space has fallen behind schedule. So even if one of the landers would have been ready to fly in 2028, the crew wouldn’t have the suits they need to actually leave the vehicle and work on the surface.

But while the Artemis spacecraft and EVA suits might be state of the art, NASA’s revised timeline for the program is taking a clear step back in time, hewing closer to the phased approach used during Apollo. This not only provides their various commercial partners with more time to work on their respective contributions, but critically, provides an opportunity to test them in space before committing to a crewed landing.

Artemis II Remains Unchanged

Given its imminent launch, there are no changes planned for the upcoming Artemis II mission. In fact, had there not been delays in getting the Space Launch System (SLS) rocket ready for launch, the mission would have already flown by now. Given how slow the gears of government tend to turn, one wonders if the original plan was to announce these program revisions after the conclusion of the mission. The launch is currently slated for April, but could always slip again if more issues arise.

At any rate, the goals for Artemis II have always been fairly well-aligned with its Apollo counterpart, Apollo 8. Just like the 1968 mission, this flight is designed to test the crew capsule and collect real-world experience while in the vicinity of the Moon, but without the added complexity of attempting a landing. Although now, as it was then, the decision to test the crew capsule without its lander wasn’t made purely out of an abundance of caution.

As originally envisioned, Apollo 8 would have seen both the command and service module (CSM) and the lunar module (LM) tested in low Earth orbit. But due to delays in LM production, it was decided to fly the completed CSM without a lander on a modified mission that would put it into orbit around the Moon. This would give NASA an opportunity to demonstrate the critical translunar injection (TLI) maneuver and gain experience operating the CSM in lunar orbit — tasks which were originally scheduled to be part of the later Apollo 10 mission.

In comparison, Artemis II was always intended to be flown with only the Orion crew capsule. NASA’s goal has been to keep the program relatively agnostic when it came to landers, with the hope being that private industry would furnish an array of vehicles from which the agency could chose depending on the mission parameters. The Orion capsule would simply ferry crews to the vicinity of the Moon, where they would transfer over to the lander — either via directly docking, or by using the Lunar Gateway station as a rallying point.

There’s no lander waiting at the Moon for Artemis II, and the fate of Lunar Gateway is still uncertain. But for now, that’s not important. On this mission, NASA just wants to demonstrate that the Orion capsule can take a crew of four to the Moon and bring them back home safely.

Artemis III Kicks the Tires

For Artemis III, the previous plan was to have the Orion capsule mate up with a modified version of SpaceX’s Starship — known in NASA parlance as the Human Landing System (HLS) — which would then take the crew down to the lunar surface. While the HLS contract did stipulate that SpaceX was to perform an autonomous demonstration landing before Artemis III, the aggressive nature of the overall timeline made no provision for testing the lander with a crew onboard ahead of the actual landing attempt — a risky plan even in the best of circumstances.

The newly announced timeline resolves this issue by not only delaying the actual Moon landing until 2028, to take place during Artemis IV, but to change Artemis III into a test flight of the lander from the relative safety of low Earth orbit in 2027. The crew will liftoff from Kennedy Space Center and rendezvous with the lander in orbit. Once docked, the crews will practice maneuvering the mated vehicles and potentially perform an EVA to test Axiom’s space suits.

This new plan closely follows the example of Apollo 9, which saw the CSM and LM tested together in Earth orbit. At this point in the program, the CSM had already been thuroughly tested, but the LM had never flown in space or had a crew onboard. After the two craft docked, the crew performed several demonstrations, such as verifying that the mated craft could be maneuvered with both the CSM and LM propulsion systems.

The two craft then separated, and the LM was flown independently for several hours before once again docking with the CSM. The crew also performed a brief EVA to test the Portable Life Support System (PLSS) which would eventually be used on the lunar surface.

While the Artemis III and Apollo 9 missions have a lot in common, there’s at least one big difference. At this point, NASA isn’t committing to one particular lander. If Blue Origin gets their hardware flying before SpaceX, that’s what they’ll go with. There’s even a possibility, albeit remote, that they could test both landers during the mission.

Artemis IV Takes a Different Path

After the success of Apollo 9, there was consideration given to making the first landing attempt on the following mission. But key members of NASA such as Director of Flight Operations Christopher C. Kraft felt there was still more to learn about operating the spacecraft in lunar orbit, and it was ultimately decided to make Apollo 10 a dress rehearsal for the actual landing.

The CSM and LM would head to the Moon, separate, and go through the motions of preparing to land. The LM would begin its descent to the lunar surface, but stop at an altitude of 14.4 kilometers (9 miles). After taking pictures of the intended landing site, it would return to the CSM and the crew would prepare for the return trip to Earth. With these maneuvers demonstrated, NASA felt confident enough to schedule the history-making landing for the next mission, Apollo 11.

But this time around, NASA will take that first option. Rather than do a test run out to the Moon with the Orion capsule and attached lander, the plan is to make the first landing attempt on Artemis IV. This is partially because we now have a more complete understanding of orbital rendezvous and related maneuvers in lunar orbit. But also because by this point, SpaceX and Blue Origin should have already completed their autonomous demonstration missions to prove the capabilities of their respective landers.

Entering Uncharted Territory

At this point, the plans for anything beyond Artemis IV are at best speculative. NASA says they will work to increase mission cadence, which includes streamlining SLS operations so the megarocket can be launched at least once per year, and work towards establishing a permanent presence on the Moon. But of course none of that can happen until these early Artemis missions have been successfully executed. Until then it’s all just hypothetical.

While Apollo was an incredible success, one can only follow its example so far. Despite some grand plans, the program petered out once it was clear the Soviet Union was no longer in the game. It cemented NASA’s position as the preeminent space agency, but the dream of exploring the lunar surface and establishing an outpost remained unfulfilled. With China providing a modern space rival, and commercial partners rapidly innovating, perhaps Artemis may be able to succeed where Apollo fell short.

TikTok will not introduce end-to-end encryption for direct messages (DMs) on its platform, according to a new report from the BBC. The social media giant says end-to-end encryption would make users less safe, as it believes the technology would prevent police and safety teams from accessing messages when necessary.

TikTok told the outlet that this is a deliberate decision to distinguish itself from rivals and protect users, particularly younger ones, from harm.

With end-to-end encryption, only the sender and recipient of a direct message can view its contents.

The company said direct messages are still protected with standard encryption, similar to services like Gmail. Only authorized employees can access direct messages, and only under specific circumstances, such as in response to a valid law enforcement request or a user report of harmful behavior.

End-to-end encryption is the default technology used in popular apps like Signal, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger (for 1:1 personal chats and calls), Apple’s Messages, and Google Messages.

The federal directive ordering all U.S. government agencies to cease using Anthropic technology comes with a six-month phaseout window. That timeline assumes agencies already know where Anthropic’s models sit inside their workflows. Most don’t today.

Most enterprises wouldn’t, either. The gap between what enterprises think they’ve approved and what’s actually running in production is wider than most security leaders realize.

AI vendor dependencies don’t stop at the contract you signed; they cascade through your vendors, your vendors’ vendors, and the SaaS platforms your teams adopted without a procurement review. Most enterprises have never mapped that chain.

The inventory nobody has run

A January 2026 Panorays survey of 200 U.S. CISOs put a number on the problem: Only 15% said they have full visibility into their software supply chains, up from just 3% a year ago. And 49% had adopted AI tools without employer approval, according to a BlackFog survey of 2,000 workers at companies with more than 500 employees; 69% of C-suite members said they were fine with it.

That’s where undocumented AI vendor dependencies accumulate, invisible to the security team until a forced migration makes them everyone’s problem.

“If you asked a typical enterprise to produce a dependency graph that includes second- and third-order AI calls, they’d be building it from scratch under pressure,” said Merritt Baer, CSO at Enkrypt AI and former Deputy CISO at AWS, in an exclusive interview with VentureBeat. “Most security programs were built for static assets. AI is dynamic, compositional, and increasingly indirect.”

When a vendor relationship ends overnight

The directive creates a forced migration unlike anything the federal government has attempted with an AI provider. Any enterprise running critical workflows on a single AI vendor faces the same math if that vendor disappears.

Shadow AI incidents now account for 20% of all breaches, adding as much as $670,000 to average breach costs, IBM’s 2025 Cost of Data Breach Report found. You can’t execute a transition plan for infrastructure you haven’t inventoried.

Your contract with Anthropic may not exist, but your vendors’ contracts might. A CRM platform could have Claude embedded in its analytics engine. A customer service tool might call it on every ticket you process. You didn’t sign for that exposure, but you inherited it, and when a vendor cutoff hits upstream, it cascades downstream fast. The enterprise at the end of that chain doesn’t know the dependency exists until something breaks or the compliance letter shows up.

Anthropic has said eight of the 10 largest U.S. companies use Claude. Any organization in those companies’ supply chains has indirect Anthropic exposure, whether they contracted for it or not. AWS and Palantir, which hold billions in military contracts, may need to reassess their commercial relationships with Anthropic to maintain Pentagon business.

The supply chain risk designation means any company doing business with the Pentagon now has to prove its workflows don’t touch Anthropic.

“Models are not interchangeable,” Baer told VentureBeat. “Switching vendors changes output formats, latency characteristics, safety filters, and hallucination profiles. That means revalidating controls, not just functionality.”

She outlined a sequence that starts with triage and blast radius assessment, moves to behavioral drift analysis, and ends with credential and integration churn. “Rotating keys is the easy part,” Baer said. “Untangling hardcoded dependencies, vendor SDK assumptions, and agent workflows is where things break.”

The dependencies your logs don’t show

A senior defense official described disentangling from Claude as an “enormous pain in the ass,” according to Axios. If that’s the assessment inside the most well-resourced security apparatus on the planet, the question for enterprise CISOs is straightforward. How long would yours take?

The shadow IT wave that followed SaaS adoption taught security teams about unsanctioned technology risk. Most caught up. They deployed CASBs, tightened SSO, and ran spend analysis. The tools worked because the threat was visible. A new application meant a new login, a new data store, a new entry in the logs.

AI vendor dependencies don’t leave those traces.

“Shadow IT with SaaS was visible at the edges,” Baer said. “AI dependencies are embedded inside other vendors’ features, invoked dynamically rather than persistently installed, non-deterministic in behavior, and opaque. You often don’t know which model or provider is actually being used.”

Four moves for Monday morning

The federal directive didn’t create the AI supply chain visibility problem. It exposed it.

“Not ‘inventory your AI,’ because that’s too abstract and too slow,” Baer told VentureBeat. She recommended four concrete moves that a security leader can execute in 30 days.

1. Map execution paths, not vendors. Instrument at the gateway, proxy, or application layer to log which services are making model calls, to which endpoints, with what data classifications. You’re building a live map of usage, not a static vendor list.

2. Identify control points you actually own. If your only control is at the vendor boundary, you’ve already lost. You want enforcement at ingress (what data goes into models), egress (what outputs are allowed downstream), and orchestration layers where agents and pipelines operate.

3. Run a kill test on your top AI dependency. Pick your most critical AI vendor and simulate its removal in a staging environment. Kill the API key, monitor for 48 hours, and document what breaks, what silently degrades, and what throws errors your incident response playbook doesn’t cover. This exercise will surface dependencies you didn’t know existed.

4. Force vendor disclosure on sub-processors and models. Your AI vendors should be able to answer which models they rely on, where those models are hosted, and what fallback paths exist. If they can’t, that’s your fourth-party blind spot. Ask the questions now, while the relationship is stable. Once a cutoff hits, the leverage shifts, and the answers come too late.

The control illusion

“Enterprises believe they’ve ‘approved’ AI vendors, but what they’ve actually approved is an interface, not the underlying system,” Baer told VentureBeat. “The real dependencies are one or two layers deeper, and those are the ones that fail under stress.”

The federal directive against Anthropic is one organization’s weather event. Every enterprise will eventually face its own version, whether the trigger is regulatory, contractual, operational, or geopolitical. The organizations that mapped their AI supply chain before the storm will recover. The ones that didn’t will scramble.

Map your AI vendor dependencies to the sub-tier level. Run the kill test. Force the disclosure. Give yourself 30 days. The next forced migration won’t come with a six-month warning.

American data analytics company LexisNexis Legal & Professional has confirmed to BleepingComputer that hackers breached its servers and accessed some customer and business information.

The company’s data breach confirmation comes as a threat actor named FulcrumSec leaked 2GB of files on various underground forums and sites.

LexisNexis L&P is a global provider of legal, regulatory, and business information, research tools, and analytics used by lawyers, corporations, governments, and academic institutions in more than 150 countries worldwide.

Cloud breach via unpatched React app

The threat actor says that on February 24 they gained access to the company’s AWS infrastructure by exploiting the React2Shell vulnerability in an unpatched React frontend app.

LexisNexis L&P admitted that hackers breached its network, noting that the stolen information was old and consisted mostly of non-critical details.

“Our investigation has confirmed that an unauthorized party accessed a limited number of servers,” the company told BleepingComputer.

“These servers contained mostly legacy, deprecated data from prior to 2020, including information such as customer names, user IDs, business contact information, products used, customer surveys with respondent IP addresses, and support tickets,” a spokesperson said.

“The impacted information did not contain Social Security numbers, driver’s license numbers, or any other sensitive personally identifiable information; credit card, bank accounts, or any other financial information; active passwords; or customer search queries, customer client or matter information, or customer contracts.”

Based on its investigation, LexisNexis believes that the intrusion has been contained and found no evidence that products or services were impacted by the intrusion.

In a public post detailing the hack, FulcrumSec claims that they stole information related to more than 100 users with .gov email addresses, which included U.S. government employees, federal judges and law clerks, U.S. Department of Justice attorneys, and U.S. SEC staff.

The threat actor detailed the intrusion, saying that they “exfiltrated 2.04 GB of structured data from LexisNexis AWS infrastructure” via a vulnerable React container with access to:

• 536 Redshift tables
• 430+ VPC database tables
• 53 AWS Secrets Manager secrets in plaintext
• 3.9M database records
• 21,042 customer accounts
• 5,582 attorney survey respondents
• 45 employee password hashes
• Complete VPC infrastructure mapping

FulcrumSec said that they also had access to around 400,000 cloud user profiles that included real names, emails, phone numbers, and job functions. According to the hackers, 118 users had .gov addresses belonging to U.S. government employees, federal judges and law clerks, U.S. Department of Justice attorneys, and U.S. SEC staff.

FulcrumSec said that they contacted LexisNexis, but the company “decided not to work with us on this.” They also criticized the company’s security practices that permitted a single ECS task role “read access to every secret in the account, including the production Redshift master credential.”

LexisNexis has notified law enforcement and contracted an external cybersecurity expert to assist with the investigation and implementation of containment measures.

The company has taken responsibility for the breach and informed current and previous customers of the intrusion.

Last year, the company disclosed another breach after hackers compromised a corporate account and accessed sensitive information belonging to 364,000 customers.

Malware is getting smarter. The Red Report 2026 reveals how new threats use math to detect sandboxes and hide in plain sight.

Download our analysis of 1.1 million malicious samples to uncover the top 10 techniques and see if your security stack is blinded.

Download The Report

Google‘s March Pixel Drop is rolling out now, and it’s giving one of the Pixel‘s best quiet features its own home. The Now Playing tool, which automatically figures out songs playing around you, is now a standalone app. That means your history of discovered tracks finally has a place to live. You can actually revisit that song you heard at the coffee shop last week.

The update turns a background trick into something useful. Now Playing has long been a Pixel thing, silently catching music without needing to Shazam it. The new app adds a history tab that logs everything your phone has picked up. From there, you can play full tracks in Spotify, Apple Music, or whatever you use. The app is on the Google Play Store now as part of the March Pixel Drop. The rollout started March 3 and will continue over the next few weeks.

A history tab that actually does something

The standalone app changes how you deal with songs your phone has ID’d. Before, Now Playing worked almost invisibly. A track name would flash on your lock screen and then vanish. Now the history tab collects every recognized song in one scrollable list. You can see what played at the gym, in that Uber, or during your walk yesterday.

Better yet, tap any track and your phone offers to open it in your streaming service. You go from “what was that song?” to adding it to a playlist in seconds. The app builds a personal soundtrack of your life, then hands it off so you can actually listen. It’s a small shift. But it turns passive recognition into active discovery.

Why a standalone app changes the game

This isn’t just Google painting an old feature. Making Now Playing its own app solves something Pixel owners actually deal with. You’ve had that moment. You hear a great song, see it on your lock screen, and then forget about it by lunch. The new history tab catches those missed moments. It turns ephemeral discoveries into something you keep.

The move also shows how Google thinks about Pixel perks. Now Playing has always been a low-key differentiator. iPhones and Samsung phones don’t really do this. By spinning it into its own app with music service hooks, Google gives you a reason to stick with Pixel. Small moments turn into a lasting library.

How to get the new Now Playing app

If you’ve got a compatible Pixel, the new app is ready now. Hit the Google Play Store and look for the standalone app. It started appearing after the March 3 announcement. The rollout happens in waves, so it might take a week or two to hit your phone. When it lands, your old song history should show up automatically.

This is one of those updates that makes you wonder why it took so long. The old Now Playing was great at identification but terrible at preservation. Now you’ve got a searchable, playable archive of every track your phone ever caught. That’s a subtle upgrade that adds up. Check the Play Store this week. If it’s not there, give it a few days. The March Pixel Drop is rolling out gradual, and this one’s worth waiting for.

The Manya Cynus chess robot comes in a small box that opens to reveal a complete chessboard and a single robotic arm that is eager to start a game. This device, which was created by Manya Space and distributed to backers who had committed to the 2025 Kickstarter, is basically a physical chess battle against a machine that makes all of its own moves. With eight difficulty settings ranging from extremely basic to expert-level strong, it runs completely off the grid and doesn’t require you to use your phone, computer, or internet connection.

The setup procedure is easy and quick. To get started, simply push a button to unfold the board, use a magnet to secure the arm, and insert the plastic chess pieces—which have metal cores for a firm grip. When you’re ready to begin, you make a motion, push a green-lit confirmation button, and the robot takes over. A small screen on the arm displays the difficulty levels and a few status lights. Its 3-megapixel camera, which is positioned beneath the “head,” continuously scans the entire board to monitor everything and ensure that its movements comply with the regulations. When it’s time to set down one of its own pieces, the arm reaches out, lifts over any of your captured pieces if needed, and sets down its own with a purposeful motion that precisely follows the direction it’s supposed to take—you know, like the huge sweeping motion of a queen or the L-shape of a knight.

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With each move, a few tiny animated eyes on the screen give the robot a some personality; a winning move gives it a joyful expression, while a checkmate loss gives it a disappointed face and a soft crying sound. It also uses its arm to make a few gestures, giving it a little more personality than you would expect from a computer. With its excellent battery life of over 10 hours on a single charge thanks to its USB-C connector, the entire device is portable because, after you’re done using it, you can simply throw it in a bag or whatever. When folded up, it is about the same size as two tablets stacked on top of one another.

The software is still a bit rough, though, and if you make a mistake, you’re simply rewarded with a brief, easily overlooked notice on the screen; otherwise, play proceeds without even pausing. Despite being heavily highlighted in all of the early promotional materials, the promised companion app is still missing, and there is no timed game mode.The Python-based environment and the open-source protocol that enables it to communicate with Bluetooth 5.1 simply urge users to enter and begin experimenting.

When it’s in operation, it’s a lot of fun to watch the arm calculate, reach, and commit to a move in real time, giving you a comprehensive understanding of your opponent. The only way to win is to be at the top of your game, and even if you lose, it’s quite obvious what went wrong and what you need to improve. Stockfish ensures that it plays solidly across all the different levels. The Manya Cynus is a strange and amazing combination that somehow manages to combine traditional strategic thinking with contemporary robotics for anyone who has a soft spot for chess but also wants to see some cool hardware.
[Source]

Here’s a list of its ports: 1 × USB 4.0 Type-C, 1 × USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-C, 3 × USB 3.2 Gen 1 Type-A, micro SD Card Reader, HDMI 2.0, 2 x Type-C w/ DisplayPort 1.4, and a headphone/Microphone Combo. The webcam is a 2MP 1080p, which gets the job done, but is looking a little long in the tooth at this point. Otherwise, though, this is a great option for AMD fans.

Best for Performance

The Kubuntu Focus Zr 1 (8/10, WIRED Recommends) is a powerhouse, but at 15 inches by 12 inches, over an inch thick, and weighing in at 8 pounds, it’s not a laptop you casually cart around. But if your work requires serious computing power though, be it machine learning (running TensorFlow), local LLMs, big data crunching workflows, or high end video editing, the Zr Gen 1 delivers power in spades.

Inside, the Zr Gen 1 features an Intel Core Ultra 9 275HX with 24 cores, an RTX 5090 graphics card, 24 GB GDDR7 RAM (expandable up to 192 GB), two SSDs, one 1TB, one 2TB (you can have up to 4 drives, one of them being a PCIe GEN 5×4 NVMe). Along with the discrete GPU there’s an integrated one as well, which means you can turn off the discrete card to maximize battery life. I spent about 90 percent of the time with the discrete card off and just turned it on when editing photos and video.

The screen is a gloriously large 18-inch LCD display (2560 x 1600 pixels, 168 DPI density) with a max brightness of over 500 nits and matte finish that makes it easy to use even in bright light. It’s one of the better LCD panels I’ve used lately, and gamers will be happy to see the 240 Hz refresh rate. You can also plug in up to 4 external displays. Thanks to the size of the Zr, there’s plenty of room for a full size keyboard with a numeric pad. The keyboard is user-configurable and features a 65,536-color LED backlight system that you can tweak to your liking with the Focus tool.

Smartphones have evolved into a rather predictable shape over time, with flat slabs, fixed cameras, and batteries well sealed up tight inside. TECNO decided to defy those standards at MWC 2026 by showcasing a design that brings back some pretty old-school modularity in a way that no one expected: a base phone so thin that it barely counts as a complete device until you start adding components to it.

The novelty here is that the main device is only 4.9 millimeters thick, making it narrower than a regular pencil and far thinner than those super-slim flagships that everyone has been gushing about recently. Without any accessories, the phone is rather stripped-down, with a rudimentary camera on the back, a small battery, and a few low-profile pogo pin ports. The back glass panel features a matte surface to reduce glare, and all of the edges are polished for added visual contrast and robustness. It’s all quite basic, and the markings on the rear are just subtle enough to indicate where the various modules should snap into position.

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The attachment system is based on a rectangular array of magnets that function in tandem with the pogo pins. The magnets hold everything in place firmly, while the pogo pins give power with minimal trouble and heat. Data is transmitted wirelessly and can switch between Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, and even millimeter-wave communications depending on the module used and the situation. Pairing is simple: find the portion you want, bring it close, and it snaps into place.

Modules are what really make this device sparkle, without making it overly big. Right now, you have about ten possibilities in the present ecology. A power bank module adds capacity at only 4.5 millimeters thick, which is incredibly small, and it effectively doubles your useable battery life, not just for the phone itself, but also for any peripherals you connect to it. As for cameras, one module can transform the device into an action camera, allowing for fresh perspectives and innovative approaches. Another module has a telephoto lens, allowing you to use the phone display as a live viewfinder, resulting in low-latency previews and rapid pictures. Then there’s a larger zoom module with a genuine image sensor behind a true lens mount, along with some excellent physical controls on the side, essentially turning your phone into a compact camera body. Other alternatives include a gaming controller, a wireless mic that clips to your clothing, a wallet, and a speaker.

Two design possibilities demonstrate how this concept might look in real life. The ATOM version features a straightforward, sleek silver-aluminum design with some lovely red accents. The MODA edition, on the other hand, opts for a darker, more eye-catching appearance, with a strong emphasis on uniqueness. TECNO describes this as a platform rather than a single set product since it is supposed to be scalable, allowing future modules to offer all sorts of fascinating things such as AI, extra storage, off-grid communications, or accessories tailored to various lifestyles. The piece that holds it all together remains the same, so you can simply keep adding new stuff and using it all without any problems.