Technology

• Scottish company Skyrora has received a space launch licence from the UK Civil Aviation Authority.
• This the first time a UK based rocket company has received a launch licence.
• The licence allows for up to 16 launches a year of from SaxaVord Spaceport.

The Trump administration has asked NASA employees to draw up plans to end at least two major satellite missions, according to current and former NASA staffers. If the plans are carried out, one of the missions would be permanently terminated, because the satellite would burn up in the atmosphere.

The data the two missions collect is widely used, including by scientists, oil and gas companies and farmers who need detailed information about carbon dioxide and crop health. They are the only two federal satellite missions that were designed and built specifically to monitor planet-warming greenhouse gases.

It is unclear why the Trump administration seeks to end the missions. The equipment in space is state-of-the-art and is expected to function for many more years, according to scientists who worked on the missions. An official review by NASA in 2023 found that "the data are of exceptionally high quality," and recommended continuing the mission for at least three years.

Both missions, known as the Orbiting Carbon Observatories, measure carbon dioxide and plant growth around the globe. They use identical measurement devices, but one device is attached to a stand-alone satellite while the other is attached to the International Space Station. The standalone satellite would burn up in the atmosphere, if NASA pursued plans to terminate the mission.

NASA employees who work on the two missions are making what the agency calls Phase F plans for both carbon-monitoring missions, according to David Crisp, a longtime NASA engineer who designed the instruments and managed the missions until he retired in 2022. Phase F plans lay out options for terminating NASA missions.

Crisp says NASA employees making those termination plans have reached out to him for his technical expertise. "What I have heard is direct communications from people who were making those plans, who weren't allowed to tell me that that's what they were told to do. But they were allowed to ask me questions," Crisp says. "They were asking me very sharp questions. The only thing that would have motivated those questions was [that] somebody told them to come up with a termination plan."

Three other academic scientists who use data from the missions confirmed that they, too, have been contacted with questions related to mission termination. All three asked for anonymity because they are concerned that speaking about the mission termination plans publicly could endanger the jobs of the NASA employees who contacted them.

Two current NASA employees also confirmed that NASA mission leaders were told to make termination plans for projects that would lose funding under President Trump's proposed budget for the next fiscal year, or FY 2026, which begins October 1. The employees asked to remain anonymous, because they were told they would be fired if they revealed the request.

Despite the extensive, highly detailed and good-faith engagements by rightsholder communities throughout this process, the final outcomes fail to address the core concerns which our sectors – and the millions of creators and companies active in Europe which we represent – have consistently raised. The result is not a balanced compromise; it is a missed opportunity to provide meaningful protection of intellectual property rights in the context of GenAI and does not deliver on the promise of the EU AI Act itself.

The feedback of the primary beneficiaries these provisions were meant to protect has been largely ignored in contravention of the objectives of the EU AI Act as determined by the co-legislators and to the sole benefit of the GenAI model providers that continuously infringe copyright and related rights to build their models. In 2024, the cultural and creative sectors across Europe welcomed the principles of responsible and trustworthy AI enshrined in the EU AI Act, intended to ensure mutually beneficial growth of innovation and creativity in Europe.

Today, with the EU AI Act implementing package as it stands, thriving cultural and creative sectors and copyright intensive industries in Europe which contribute nearly 7% of EU GDP, provide employment for nearly 17 million professionals and have an economic contribution larger than European pharmaceutical, automobile or high-tech industries, are being sold out in favour of those GenAI model providers. The deployment of GenAI models which also make extensive use of scraping is already underway. The damage to and unfair competition with the cultural and creative sectors can be seen each day. The cultural and creative sectors must be safeguarded, as they are the foundations of our cultures and the Single Market. We wish to make it clear that the outcome of these processes does not provide a meaningful implementation of the GPAI obligations under the AI Act.

We strongly reject any claim that the Code of Practice strikes a fair and workable balance or that the Template will deliver “sufficient” transparency about the majority of copyright works or other subject matter used to train GenAI models. This is simply untrue and is a betrayal of the EU AI Act’s objectives.

Despite QUIC handshake packets being encrypted, the Great Firewall of China (GFW) has begun blocking QUIC connections to specific domains since April 7, 2024. In this work, we measure and characterize the GFW’s censorship of QUIC to understand how and what it blocks. Our measurements reveal that the GFW decrypts QUIC Initial packets at scale, applies heuristic filtering rules, and uses a blocklist distinct from its other censorship mechanisms. We expose a critical flaw in this new system: the computational overhead of decryption reduces its effectiveness under moderate traffic loads. We also demonstrate that this censorship mechanism can be weaponized to block UDP traffic between arbitrary hosts in China and the rest of the world. We collaborate with various open-source communities to integrate circumvention strategies into Mozilla Firefox, the quic-go library, and all major QUIC-based circumvention tools.

As the global population ages, older adults face growing psychological challenges such as loneliness, cognitive decline, and loss of social roles. Meanwhile, artificial intelligence (AI) technologies, including chatbots and voice-based systems, offer new pathways to emotional support and mental stimulation. However, older adults often encounter significant barriers in accessing and effectively using AI tools. This review examines the current landscape of AI applications aimed at enhancing psychological well-being among older adults, identifies key challenges such as digital literacy and usability, and highlights design and training strategies to bridge the digital divide. Using socioemotional selectivity theory and technology acceptance models as guiding frameworks, we argue that AI—especially in the form of conversational agents—holds transformative potential in reducing isolation and promoting emotional resilience in aging populations. We conclude with recommendations for inclusive design, participatory development, and future interdisciplinary research.

Uber Canada says it has updated its safety protocols for emergency situations after an incident in March where company representatives refused to contact a driver after he drove off with a child.

Julia Viscomi said Uber customer support refused to help her or Toronto police contact the driver after he left with her 5-year-old daughter asleep in the backseat in North York, CBC Toronto reported in April.

Police ended up finding the child without receiving help from Uber, about an hour and a half after the driver left with her, Viscomi said.

Open Letter.

• Fears that content covering Palestine protests could be incorrectly removed as platforms are incentivised to censor content not protect freedom of expression
• Clarification needed over how platforms define ‘support’ for Palestine Action
• British public have no independent mechanism to challenge wrongful takedowns

When Jennifer Meissner’s small pipe welding business landed a multimillion-dollar contract to help build a sprawling new Texas headquarters for Tesla, she was convinced it was her company’s big break.

Instead, she says the deal led her into personal and professional bankruptcy – unable to pay dozens of her workers at Christmastime. Meissner said that was her last resort after Tesla, which is owned by the world’s richest man, stopped paying her company for work they’d already done.

Sada Social Center expresses its deep concern and strong condemnation regarding TikTok’s appointment of Erica Mindel—a former instructor in the Israeli army’s Armored Corps—as the platform’s new Manager of Hate Speech Policy.

According to reports reviewed by Sada Social, Mindel previously worked with the U.S. State Department under Ambassador Deborah Lipstadt, the Biden Administration’s Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Antisemitism. Prior to that, she served as an instructor in the Israeli army’s Spokesperson’s Unit. In her new role, Mindel will be tasked with formulating TikTok’s hate speech policies, shaping relevant legislative and regulatory frameworks, and monitoring trends—particularly those related to antisemitic content.

Sada Social views this appointment as a highly concerning indicator for the future of digital freedoms for Palestinians. The center warns of the serious implications that Mindel’s military background may have on TikTok’s moderation practices, especially regarding Palestinian reports of incitement, bias, and the silencing of their narrative. Assigning someone affiliated with an army currently under international investigation for genocide in Gaza to lead hate speech policy only entrenches existing biases and undermines the principles of fairness and digital justice.

Sada Social’s 2024 Digital Index revealed that 27% of all digital violations targeting Palestinian content occurred on TikTok. According to TikTok’s own transparency report for the second half of 2024, the platform complied with 94% of the Israeli government’s content removal requests, all while imposing strict censorship on Palestinian content. This included the deletion of videos with clear journalistic value, and the targeting of accounts belonging to journalists, media outlets, activists, and supporters of the Palestinian cause.

Sada Social also underscores that TikTok has failed to undertake any meaningful internal review of its policies, even after the South African government submitted video evidence to the International Court of Justice (ICJ)—footage that was published on TikTok and depicted Israeli soldiers celebrating the destruction of Palestinian homes, mocking victims, and writing messages on bombs before they were dropped on Gaza. Instead of responding to these disturbing violations, TikTok has continued its partnerships with a political and military regime currently under international investigation.