• Trump administration admits DOGE may have misused Americans’ Social Security data

    January 20, 2026

    Two members of Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency may have accessed and shared Social Security numbers in an effort to help an advocacy group “overturn election results in certain States” last year, according to court documents.  The revelation, which was first reported by Politico, comes as part of a series of corrections to previous testimony by top Social Security Administration officials related to legal battles over DOGE’s access to Social Security data.  Neither the two DOGE members, nor the advocacy group, are named in the court documents. In March 2025, a political advocacy group contacted two members of the…

  • Zhipu AI Releases GLM-4.7-Flash: A 30B-A3B MoE Model for Efficient Local Coding and Agents

    January 20, 2026

    GLM-4.7-Flash is a new member of the GLM 4.7 family and targets developers who want strong coding and reasoning performance in a model that is practical to run locally. Zhipu AI (Z.ai) describes GLM-4.7-Flash as a 30B-A3B MoE model and presents it as the strongest model in the 30B class, designed for lightweight deployment where performance and efficiency both matter. Model class and position inside the GLM 4.7 family GLM-4.7-Flash is a text generation model with 31B params, BF16 and F32 tensor types, and the architecture tag glm4_moe_lite. It supports English and Chinese, and it is configured for conversational use.…

  • Ford open to re-entering sedan segment in the US

    January 20, 2026

    Ford might return with a sedan to the US market after dumping the traditional body style back in 2020. With the average transaction price on a new car in the US now north of US$50,000, and an on-going cost-of-living problem, Bill Ford, chairman of Ford, was asked at the recent Detroit motor show about affordability. In response, Mr Ford said, “Can you engineer vehicles that are fundamentally lower-cost so that you can pass that on to the consumer? And that’s what we’re working on.” CarExpert can save you thousands on a new car. Click here to get a great deal. Ford Taurus/Mondeo…

  • Earth is having some issues, so let’s enjoy the Webb telescope’s new nebula image

    January 20, 2026

    Sometimes, you just need to give your mind a little vacation. And these days, outer space sounds like as good a destination as any. Thankfully, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is here to give us a dazzling new image of the Helix Nebula. Discovered in the early 19th century, the Helix Nebula resides in the constellation Aquarius. (Cue The 5th Dimension.) At about 655 light-years away, it’s one of Earth’s closest planetary nebulae. When zoomed farther out, it’s easy to see why it’s been nicknamed the Eye of God or Eye of Sauron. This 2004 image from the Hubble…

  • Amazon CEO Andy Jassy says tariffs are starting to drive up product prices

    January 20, 2026

    Amazon CEO Andy Jassy says consumers are beginning to see higher prices as sellers look to absorb added costs from President Donald Trump’s tariffs. Jassy told CNBC that Amazon and many of its third-party sellers stocked up on inventory ahead of the tariffs to keep prices low, but most of that supply ran out last fall. “So you start to see some of the tariffs creep into some of the prices, some of the items, and you see some sellers are deciding that they’re passing on those higher costs to consumers in the form of higher prices, some are deciding…

  • Akai’s MPC XL groovebox is the most powerful device the company has ever made

    January 20, 2026

    Akai just revealed its most powerful standalone groovebox, . For the uninitiated, the MPC has been around since the 1980s and pretty much defined hip hop from that era. The line has continuously iterated to keep up with the times and the XL looks to be the baddest of them all. First of all, it offers four times the processing power of previous MPCs, which is enough to load up to 32 virtual instruments at the same time. This is assisted by a full 16GB of RAM, which is a whole lot in this . The XL can handle 16…

  • ICE becomes one of the most-blocked accounts on Bluesky after its verification

    January 20, 2026

    ICE (U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement) has now become the No. 3 most-blocked account on Bluesky, after receiving its official verification on Friday, according to third-party trackers. Bluesky users, unsurprisingly, are angry about the government account being hosted on the platform. Many are recommending that others block the account directly or subscribe to a block list that includes all of the U.S. government’s official accounts. The blocklist was introduced after the White House and other government agencies under the Trump administration signed up for Bluesky last October to post messages blaming Democrats for the government shutdown. The accounts that joined…

  • Two-year plans are up to 78 percent off right now

    January 20, 2026

    If you’re looking to up your privacy game on the internet in the new year, you can do so for a little less than usual thanks to ExpressVPN’s latest deal. Its two-year plans are up to 78 percent off right now: the Advanced tier is on sale for $101 for two years, plus four additional free months. That works out to $3.59 per month during the promotional period. We’ve consistently liked ExpressVPN because it’s fast, easy to use and widely available across a large global server network. In fact, it’s our current pick for best premium VPN. One of the…

  • Grubhub parent acquires restaurant rewards startup Claim

    January 20, 2026

    Grubhub parent company, Wonder, announced that it has acquired Claim, a restaurant rewards app. Founded in 2021, Claim offers cash-back rewards for local restaurants that users can redeem for dine-in or pickup orders. Restaurants partner with Claim to create promotions, boost foot traffic, and track performance insights through the Claim dashboard. The financial terms of the deal were not disclosed; however, Claim raised a total of $20 million, it said, when it raised its $12 million Series A in October, 2024. PitchBook estimated its valuation at $62 million. Grubhub says the acquisition will give restaurants on its platform access to…

  • Roland’s Go:Mixer Studio is an affordable but capable mixer for budding recording engineers

    January 20, 2026

    Roland just unveiled the , a powerful entry in the company’s line of audio interfaces. This one promises to be a portable and affordable way to create high-quality recordings with a smartphone or PC. The biggest news here are the 12 input channels and six output channels. This means that users can record multiple instruments at once and even run the signal through outboard gear if so desired. There are two XLR inputs on the back with phantom power, an instrument jack, stereo ¼-inch line-in jacks, an aux input, TRS MIDI ins and outs, two headphones jacks and stereo line…