• California AG sends Musk’s xAI a cease-and-desist order over sexual deepfakes

    January 17, 2026

    Earlier this week, the California attorney general’s office announced that it was investigating xAI over reports that the startup’s chatbot, Grok, was being used to create nonconsensual sexual imagery of women and minors. On Friday, the government followed up by sending a cease-and-desist letter to the company, demanding that it take immediate action to stop the production of nonconsensual intimate images and CSAM — child sexual abuse material. “Today, I sent xAI a cease-and-desist letter, demanding the company immediately stop the creation and distribution of deepfake, nonconsensual, intimate images and child sexual abuse material,” said California AG Rob Bonta in a…

  • X is fully online after going down for most of the morning

    January 17, 2026

    X seems to be working again after struggling with an outage that took the service offline and made it slow to load for much of the morning. According to X’s developer platform page, there is an ongoing incident related to streaming endpoints that’s caused increased errors. The incident started at 7:39AM PT, according to the page. That roughly coincides with a spike in reports at Down Detector. The issues seemed to be somewhat intermittent. At some points, X’s website loaded partially and only showed older posts. At other times, the app and website failed to load at all. As of…

  • AI cloud startup Runpod hits $120M in ARR — and it started with a Reddit post  

    January 17, 2026

    Runpod, an AI app hosting platform that launched four years ago, has hit a $120 million annual revenue run rate, founders Zhen Lu and Pardeep Singh tell TechCrunch.   Their startup journey is a wild example of how if you build it well and the timing is lucky, they will definitely come. The story includes bootstrapping their way to over $1 million in revenue; landing a $20 million seed round after VC Radhika Malik, a partner at Dell Technologies Capital, saw some Reddit posts; and gaining another key angel investor, Hugging Face co-founder Julien Chaumond, because he was using the product…

  • The Japanese and Korean auto brands leaning on China for help in Australia

    January 16, 2026

    Automakers from all over the world have been tapping China as a production source for years, but we’re now seeing a major shift. The first Chinese-built model from a non-Chinese brand in Australia was the 2004 Volkswagen Polo Classic, but it took a while for such vehicles to be common on our roads. Then, there was a rush of offerings – Tesla switched to Chinese sourcing for our market, and BMW started exporting the iX3 from China, as did Chinese-owned Volvo and Polestar with various models. CarExpert can save you thousands on a new car. Click here to get a…

  • The best VPN service for 2026

    January 16, 2026

    As frustrating as it is that governments and businesses are running roughshod over our online freedoms, at least we have plenty of good VPNs to choose from to keep us protected online. There are so many fast, intelligently designed, full-featured and affordable services on the market that the biggest problem is picking one. For any use case, you can bet at least two providers will be neck-and-neck for first place. On the other hand, the VPN world is still the Wild West in some ways. It’s easy enough to slap a cheap VPN together that the market is flooded with…

  • Snowflake, Databricks challenger ClickHouse hits $15B valuation

    January 16, 2026

    Database provider ClickHouse secured $400 million at a $15 billion valuation, Bloomberg reported, representing about a 2.5x increase from its $6.35 billion valuation last May. The round was led by Dragoneer Investment Group, the startup said, with participation from investors including Bessemer Venture Partners, GIC, Index Ventures, Khosla Ventures, and Lightspeed Venture Partners. ClickHouse, which spun out from Russian search giant Yandex in 2021, develops database software designed to process the massive datasets required by AI agents. The company competes with Snowflake and Databricks. The company also announced the acquisition of Langfuse, a startup that helps developers track and evaluate…

  • Hotter Volkswagen T-Roc R spied, Australian release on the cards

    January 16, 2026

    The Volkswagen T-Roc R has been spied testing ahead of its official unveiling later this year – and its potential Australian showroom arrival in 2028 – as the new performance hero of the second-generation T-Roc small SUV lineup. Regular versions of the new T-Roc – which will continue to rival the Nissan Qashqai, Toyota Corolla Cross and C-HR, and Hyundai Kona – were shown in August 2025, employing mild-hybrid and hybrid powertrains, and the same MQB Evo platform that underpinns the current Volkswagen Golf. While the global reveal included a warmer, sport-focused R-Line variant, the fully fledged T-Roc R performance…

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

    January 16, 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…

  • TikTok quietly launches a micro drama app called ‘PineDrama’

    January 16, 2026

    TikTok has quietly released a new standalone short drama app called PineDrama in the U.S. and Brazil. The app offers access to micro dramas, which are essentially bite-sized TV shows that can be watched in a series of one-minute episodes. Think TikTok, but every single video you come across is a short episode of a fictional story. PineDrama is available on iOS and Android. It’s free and currently ad-free, though that could change in the future. The news was first reported by Business Insider. You can find content through the app’s “Discover” tab, where you can sort through “All” or…

  • Black Forest Labs Releases FLUX.2 [klein]: Compact Flow Models for Interactive Visual Intelligence

    January 16, 2026

    Black Forest Labs releases FLUX.2 [klein], a compact image model family that targets interactive visual intelligence on consumer hardware. FLUX.2 [klein] extends the FLUX.2 line with sub second generation and editing, a unified architecture for text to image and image to image, and deployment options that range from local GPUs to cloud APIs, while keeping state of the art image quality. From FLUX.2 [dev] to interactive visual intelligence FLUX.2 [dev] is a 32 billion parameter rectified flow transformer for text conditioned image generation and editing, including composition with multiple reference images, and runs mainly on data center class accelerators. It…