Snap CEO helps launch LA wildfire recovery program

Snap CEO Evan Spiegel and Miguel Santana, the chief executive of the California Community Foundation, are launching a program focused on helping residents in Altadena and Pacific Palisades rebuild on their own terms after last month’s wildfires. The California Community Foundation, Snap, Spiegel, and Snap CTO Bobby Murphy are committing $10 million in funding to staff … Read more

Crypto’s Debanking Worries Hit Another Big Stage in U.S. House

The chief lawyer of U.S. crypto exchange Coinbase (COIN) testified about the abuse of authority from regulators who erected barriers between banks and crypto firms in a hearing of the House Financial Services Committee on Thursday, marking the latest advance in the digital assets industry’s reversal of policy resistance in Washington. Coinbase Chief Legal Officer … Read more

Today is your last chance to snag a preorder deal on Samsung’s latest Galaxy phones

It might take a magnifying glass to notice, but the Galaxy S25 family brings subtle differences. Thousands of retailers and carrier stores in the US will be stocked with the Samsung Galaxy S25 ($799.99), S25 Plus ($999.99), and S25 Ultra ($1,299.99) on Friday, February 7th. Hardware-wise, the S25 series is a marginal improvement over last … Read more

Another bill wants to ban kids from social media

Lawmakers’ efforts to limit the use of social media by kids are continuing into 2025 with the Kids Off Social Media Act (KOSMA). The bill, which would prevent kids under 13 from creating social media accounts, advanced through the Senate Commerce Committee on Wednesday, as reported earlier by Politico. Senators Brian Schatz (D-HI) and Ted … Read more

How To Fix Ethereum’s Fragmentation Problem

The Ethereum ecosystem stands at a pivotal moment. Over the past four years, scaling challenges have been addressed through Layer-2 (L2) solutions, rollups, and technological breakthroughs, expanding from processing 15 transactions per second to thousands, with costs dropping from $50 per swap to mere cents. The rollup-centric roadmap worked – it worked almost too well. … Read more

Sonos explored creating a MagSafe speaker for iPhones

Not long before last year’s software quagmire thrust the company into controversy, Sonos tinkered with an idea that some employees believed might resonate with Gen Z customers. Engineers at Sonos prototyped a miniature speaker that could magnetically connect to the back of Apple’s recent iPhones.  At least conceptually, the since-abandoned product sounds rather similar to … Read more

Deadline for government’s ‘Fork in the road’ mass resignation program delayed by court

A federal judge in Massachusetts temporarily blocked the Trump administration’s “deferred resignation” program, meant to push out career government workers as part of the Elon Musk-run Department of Government Efficiency’s alleged effort to cut federal spending, several outlets report. The program gave employees a deadline just before midnight on Thursday to accept the offer, which … Read more

Trump has California’s high-speed rail in his crosshairs again

President Donald Trump has set his sights on California’s high-speed rail plan, calling it “the worst-managed project” with massive cost overruns that deserve to be investigated. “They have hundreds of billions of dollars of cost overruns,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office on Tuesday, according to the Los Angeles Times. “It’s impossible that something … Read more