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Want to get this show ad free? Head to DailyTechNews Show.com subscribe to find out how. These are the daily tech headlines for Thursday, April 2, 2026 I'm Rob Dunwood. The nine day Artemis II lunar flyby launched Monday carrying four astronauts, three American, one Canadian on the Space Launch System rocket from Florida is a vital test for NASA's return to the moon. Objectives include manual pilot life support checkouts and a record loop past the moon's far side. After initial checks, the Orion spacecraft is set for a translunar injection burn on Thursday evening, sending the crew farther than any human has traveled before a planned Pacific Ocean Splashdown. On April 10, Beehive is launching native podcast hosting, distribution and monetization integrating tools to compete with Substack and Patreon. Driven by user demand and synergy between newsletters and sponsored content, the feature includes distribution to major apps, IAB Analytics, SEO optimized pages, transcripts and the option to bundle with paid subscriptions. Creators keep 100% of their revenue appealing to current Beyhive users, with podcasts and podcasters seeking to start a newsletter for audience growth. In March, US technology companies led all industries with 18,720 announced job cuts, a 24% increase from the prior year, bringing the sector's year to date total to over 52,000. This trend was driven by companies redirecting budgets towards artificial intelligence and adopting leaner staffing models, with AI being cited as the reason for a quarter of all U.S. layoffs across all industries. While overall U.S. job cuts reach $60,620, the overall labor market is characterized as low to hire, low to fire, with total layoff announcements down 78% from March of the previous year. Despite soft hiring plans for the year, France has launched a major tender for 10 offshore wind projects totaling 10 gigawatts across seven zones, combining fixed and floating turbines with winters expected in late 2026 or early 20. Initiative aims to build the domestic industry lead in floating wind technology and reduce reliance on China by requiring European manufacturing despite high sector costs, the government is targeting a guaranteed price below €100 per megawatt hour. This push supports France's goals of achieving carbon neutrality, targeting 15 gigawatts offshore wind by 2035 and 45 gigawatts by 2050. Cash App owned by Jack Dorsey's Block, has introduced a new pay over time feature for transfers of $25 or allowing eligible users to extend repayment over up to six weeks for a 7.5% fee. The service is positioned as a cash flow management tool for users with variable income, such as gig workers. Repayments can be made in weekly increments or as a single payment by the due date, with dynamic loan limits based on customer assessment. Block's global head of business Owen Jennings emphasized the feature's non revolving nature to prevent debt spirals, adding the cash app's existing financial flexibility services. Amidst ongoing scrutiny of the buy now, pay later industry, Amazon is reportedly negotiating to acquire globalstar, a satellite telecom group to enhance its low earth orbit satellite business. Leo, formerly Project Kuiper and compete with SpaceX's dominant Starlink network. The potential deal, which spiked Globalstar's shares by 24% and requires negotiations with 20% shareholder Apple, underscores intense LEO competition. Starlink currently boasts over 9,500 satellites and millions of users, contributing to SpaceX's estimated $1.75 trillion potential valuation. Leo has 180 satellites and targets similar customers. The news coincides with SpaceX's confidential filing for a potentially record breaking stock market listing. WhatsApp notified around 200 users, mostly in Italy, that they were tricked into installing a malicious unofficial iPhone app containing spyware from Italian firm Sio. WhatsApp logged out the affected users, warned them of the risk and urged them to download the official app. This Incident follows a 2025 revelation that SIO, which develops government surveillance technology via a signet subsidiary, was behind various malicious Android apps with its Spartacus spyware and had previously targeted journalists and activists. WhatsApp plans to issue a formal legal demand to SIO. Google has upgraded its $19.99 per month AI Pro subscription, increasing the included storage from 2 TB to 5 TB at no extra cost. This additional 3 TB of storage can be used across Gmail, Google Drive and Google Photos, significantly boasting the company's value of the AI Pro tier, which now offers more storage than 799 AI plan with 200 GB. The change is not yet reflected on Google storage management pages or mobile app. And finally, researchers at Loughborough University developed a novel energy efficient AI computer chip utilizing nanoporous oxide MEM resistors for in hardware reservoir computing. The specialized hardware processes time dependent data using material physics, which forms electrical pathways functioning as a neural network's hidden layer. This method is up to 2,000 times more energy efficient than conventional software, offering a scalable and practical solution to address the high energy consumption associated with tasks like image recognition and predicting chaotic systems. For more analysis of the tech news of the day, subscribe to dailytechnewssshow.com and if you enjoy the show, remember to tell a friend to check us out. Thanks for listening. We'll talk to you next time.