• Informant told FBI that Jeffrey Epstein had a ‘personal hacker’

    January 30, 2026

    A confidential informant told the FBI in 2017 that Jeffrey Epstein had a “personal hacker,” according to a document released by the Department of Justice on Friday. The document, which was released as part of the Justice Department’s legally required effort to publish documents related to its investigation into the late sex offender, does not identify who the alleged hacker was, but does include several details about them.  According to the informant, the hacker was an Italian born in the southern region of Calabria and specialized in finding vulnerabilities in iOS, BlackBerry devices, and the Firefox browser.  The hacker allegedly…

  • Kia EV2: Euro-built electric SUV ‘probably no’ for Australia

    January 30, 2026

    Kia Australia says the entry-level EV2 all-electric crossover is “probably leaning towards no” for a local introduction, citing production and freight costs as key challenges. Speaking with CarExpert at the launch of the new EV4 Sedan, general manager for product planning at Kia Australia, Roland Rivero, said the local arm will struggle to get the price of the Slovakian-built EV2 under the entry point of the Korean-sourced EV3. “[The EV2] is probably coming up not at the price point we would like it to be,” Mr Rivero told CarExpert. “It has to sit comfortably below EV3, and if we can’t…

  • NASA used Claude to plot a route for its Perseverance rover on Mars

    January 30, 2026

    Since 2021, NASA’s Perseverance rover has achieved a number of historic milestones, including sending back the first audio recordings from Mars. Now, nearly five years after landing on the Red Planet, it just achieved another feat. This past December, Perseverance successfully completed a route through a section of the Jezero crater plotted by Anthropic’s Claude chatbot, marking the first time NASA has used a large language model to pilot the car-sized robot. Between December 8 and 10, Perseverance drove approximately 400 meters (about 437 yards) through a field of rocks on the Martian surface mapped out by Claude. As you…

  • Instagram might soon let you remove yourself from someone’s Close Friends list

    January 30, 2026

    Instagram is developing a feature that will allow users to remove themselves from someone’s “Close Friends” list, Meta told TechCrunch on Friday. The company says the feature is still in the early stages and is not being tested publicly yet. The social network’s Close Friends feature lets users share Stories, Reels, and posts with a select group of people, rather than their entire follower base. Since the feature’s launch in 2018, users haven’t been able to remove themselves from someone else’s Close Friends list. The internal prototype was first spotted by reverse engineer Alessandro Paluzzi, who specializes in finding unreleased…

  • Australians neglecting car repairs due to spiralling living costs – study

    January 30, 2026

    The increasing cost of living in Australia is forcing a majority of car owners to push back or decrease vehicle maintenance – with some abandoning vital repairs entirely. A new study from Canstar reveals 57 per cent of Australian households delayed, reduced, or cancelled their car-related expenses in 2025. Almost half of the 2700 owners surveyed admitted to having either postponed or skipped a schedule car service, while 28 per cent put off buying a brand-new model – and 17 per cent scrapped plans to buy a new car entirely. Worryingly, a quarter said they were neglecting necessary repairs on…

  • Rivian made an electric ambulance for Grey’s Anatomy

    January 30, 2026

    America’s once-promising EV transition may have taken a U-turn, but at least some in Hollywood are trying to do their part. Rivian partnered with Grey’s Anatomy to make a custom electric ambulance for the long-running series. The ambulance is a modified version of Rivian’s Commercial Van. The custom “vanbulance” serves a dual purpose: preventing on-set exhaust fumes (which could harm the cast and crew) and integrating a green storyline. “As an added benefit, the elimination of engine noise brought a welcome quiet while cameras were rolling,” Rivan wrote in a blog post. Among other modifications, it has rear double doors…

  • SpaceX’s IPO could open the floodgates — and secondaries are booming in the meantime

    January 30, 2026

    SpaceX is reportedly lining up four major Wall Street banks for a potential 2026 IPO — a move that could signal the long-awaited reopening of the public markets after a years-long IPO drought. In the meantime, late-stage private companies like SpaceX are finding other ways to create liquidity for employees and early shareholders, largely through a fast-growing secondary market. To unpack what SpaceX’s IPO chatter means, how private liquidity works before a debut, and what investors are looking for in today’s pre-IPO giants, we spoke with Greg Martin, managing director at Rainmaker Securities, a broker-dealer specializing in secondary share transactions…

  • Sundance doc ‘Ghost in the Machine’ draws a damning line between AI and eugenics

    January 30, 2026

    The Sundance documentary Ghost in the Machine boldly declares that the pursuit of artificial intelligence, and Silicon Valley itself, is rooted in eugenics. Director Valerie Veatch makes the case that the rise of techno-fascism from the likes of Elon Musk and Peter Thiel is a feature, not a bug. That may sound hyperbolic, but Ghost in the Machine, which is built around interviews with philosophers, AI researchers, historians and computer scientists, leaves little room for doubt. If you’ve been following the meteoric rise of AI, or Silicon Valley in general, Veatch’s methodical deconstruction of the technology doesn’t really unearth anything…

  • Anthropic brings agentic plug-ins to Cowork

    January 30, 2026

    Earlier this month, Anthropic launched Cowork, a new agentic tool designed to take the benefits of its AI coding assistant Claude Code and transform it into a more general-use tool that non-coders could benefit from. Now Anthropic has launched a new feature within Cowork to make it even more powerful for enterprise users. Behold, the plug-in. The idea behind plug-ins is simple: They are designed to automate “specialized” tasks within a company’s various departments. Whether that function is drafting content for the marketing department, reviewing risks in documents for a firm’s legal team, or drafting responses for customer support, the plug-in…

  • Google’s Project Genie lets you create your own 3D interactive worlds

    January 30, 2026

    This past summer, Google DeepMind debuted Genie 3. It’s what’s known as a world world, an AI system capable of generating images and reacting as the user moves through the environment the software is simulating. At the time, DeepMind positioned Genie 3 as a tool for training AI agents. Now, it’s making the model available to people outside of Google to try with Project Genie. To start, you’ll need Google’s $250 per month AI Ultra plan to check out Project Genie. You’ll also need to live in the US and be 18 years or older. At launch, Project Genie offers…