• Washington is the latest state pursuing an age verification law for porn sites

    January 19, 2026

    Washington state residents may soon be forced to produce IDs before getting onto websites with pornographic content. Within the state’s House of Representatives, Rep. Mari Leavitt introduced House Bill 2112, which is informally known as the Keep Our Children Safe Act. Similar to the initiatives seen in other states, the bill proposes to restrict access to “online sexual material harmful” to anyone under 18. In practical terms, those living in Washington state could see websites asking for digital identification or demanding the user go through an age verification system that requests a government-issued ID. If a website that has more…

  • This UGreen 3-in-1 wireless charger is 32 percent off right now

    January 18, 2026

    You can easily spruce up your nightstand or desk by decluttering a bit, replacing some of those annoying charging cables with a good wireless charging setup. One of our favorites that can handle three devices at once is the UGREEN MagFlow Qi2 3-in-1 Charger Station 25W. Normally $140, it’s on sale right now for $95; that’s 32 percent off and only about $5 more than its record-low price. UGREEN This is our top pick for a 3-in-1 charging pad thanks to its versatility. The UGREEN can work equally well as a permanent fixture in your home or act as a…

  • Sequoia to invest in Anthropic, breaking VC taboo on backing rivals: FT

    January 18, 2026

    Sequoia Capital is reportedly joining a blockbuster funding round for Anthropic, the AI startup behind Claude, according to the Financial Times. It’s a move sure to turn heads in Silicon Valley. Why? Because venture capital firms have historically avoided backing competing companies in the same sector, preferring to place their bets on a single winner. Yet here’s Sequoia, already invested in both OpenAI and Elon Musk’s xAI, now throwing its weight behind Anthropic, too. The timing is particularly surprising given what OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said under oath last year. As part of OpenAI’s defense against Musk’s lawsuit, Altman addressed…

  • A Coding Guide to Understanding How Retries Trigger Failure Cascades in RPC and Event-Driven Architectures

    January 18, 2026

    In this tutorial, we build a hands-on comparison between a synchronous RPC-based system and an asynchronous event-driven architecture to understand how real distributed systems behave under load and failure. We simulate downstream services with variable latency, overload conditions, and transient errors, and then drive both architectures using bursty traffic patterns. By observing metrics such as tail latency, retries, failures, and dead-letter queues, we examine how tight RPC coupling amplifies failures and how asynchronous event-driven designs trade immediate consistency for resilience. Throughout the tutorial, we focus on practical mechanisms, retries, exponential backoff, circuit breakers, bulkheads, and queues that engineers use to…

  • ExpressVPN two-year plans are up to 78 percent off

    January 18, 2026

    ExpressVPN is back on sale again, and its two-year plans are up to 78 percent off right now. You can get the Advanced tier for $101 for 28 months. This is marked down from the $392 that this time frame normally costs. On a per-month basis, it works out to roughly $3.59 for the promo 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 biggest drawbacks has always been its high cost, and this deal temporarily…

  • How YC-backed Bucket Robotics survived its first CES

    January 18, 2026

    The weather in Las Vegas wasn’t looking good. The plan had been that each employee of YC-backed Bucket Robotics would carry parts of their booth in their luggage to the 2026 Consumer Electronics Show. But CEO and founder Matt Puchalski didn’t want to take the chance that one (or all) of their flights would be delayed. So he rented a Hyundai Santa Fe and packed it up.  “It was… it was tight,” he said with a laugh on the show floor.   It took 12 hours driving in the rain, but the gear – and Puchalski – made it safely to Las Vegas, and so began the young company’s first-ever CES. San Francisco-based Bucket Robotics was just one of thousands of companies exhibiting at the annual tech conference, a speck of sand on a beach…

  • Leapmotor range-extender tech could end up in Peugeot, Fiat cars

    January 18, 2026

    Leapmotor, which exclusively sells electrified vehicles, may share its range-extender EV tech with partner Stellantis, which owns a bewildering array of stretching from Peugeot and Fiat all the way through to Maserati. Tianshu Xin, head of Leapmotor International and chief operating officer of Stellantis China, told Autocar Leapmotor and Stellantis are investigating which technologies can be shared between the two automakers. In 2023, Stellantis purchased a 21 per cent stake in Leapmotor for US$1.5 billion (A$2.2 billion). As part of the deal, a new Leapmotor International division, majority owned by Stellantis, was formed to export vehicles to Europe, Australia and…

  • Major Australian EV charging provider rolls out solution to vandalism, theft

    January 18, 2026

    Sick of getting to an electric vehicle (EV) charging station, only to find the cables have been cut off by thieves looking to steal copper inside? Evie Networks, one of Australia’s largest EV charging providers, is rolling out a solution: CableGuard protectors from a UK company called Formula Space. CarExpert first spotted the cable protectors at Evie’s Chelsea location in Melbourne, and Evie has confirmed it has also introduced CableGuard at five other locations including Toowoomba, Queensland and Bayside, Victoria, with the other locations being in the Dandenong region. CarExpert can save you thousands on a new car. Click here…

  • Microsoft issues emergency fix after a security update left some Windows 11 devices unable to shut down

    January 18, 2026

    If you weren’t able to shut down your Windows 11 device recently, Microsoft has rolled out an emergency fix addressing a couple of critical bugs that popped up with its latest January 2026 Windows security update. The latest “out-of-band” update repairs an issue for some Windows 11 devices that would only restart when users tried to shut down or hibernate. The same update restores the ability for Windows 10 and Windows 11 users to log into their devices via remote connection apps. Microsoft said the inability to shut down or hibernate affected Windows 11 devices using Secure Launch, a security…

  • Threads edges out X in daily mobile users, new data shows

    January 18, 2026

    A report from market intelligence firm Similarweb suggests that Meta’s Threads is now seeing more daily usage than Elon Musk’s X on mobile devices. While X still dominates Threads on the web, the Threads mobile app for iOS and Android has continued to see an increase in daily active users over the past several months. Similarweb’s data shows that Threads had 141.5 million daily active users on iOS and Android as of January 7, 2026, after months of growth, while X has 125 million daily active users on mobile devices. This appears to be the result of longer-term trends, rather…